In fact, I was, for the Rolling Stones. Ventura and his staff spent about an hour at Tsukuba High, which is a very selective public institution run by a university. Despite the school's elite status, many of the Minnesotans on the visit remarked privately how shabby the facilities seemed compared to a Minnesota school, and how crowded the classrooms were. But it was a Japanese student who brought the matter up. Well, I think that certainly, economics always enters in, you know, money.
Money enters into education.
That philosophy is not necessarily shared by all education experts, or even all state legislators. Some have tried to argue that there's no proof of a direct connection between the student-teacher ratio and the quality of the education. Japanese students, for example, consistently out-perform their American counterparts on standardized tests, despite being crammed into larger classes. On the other hand, Japanese educators are also trying to shrink their classes. Tsukuba High has recently reduced them from 45 students per room to 40, and the vice-principal, Mr. Hiroi, says the school would like to reduce them even more.