I'm not sure that this task force of which I'm the chair will ever come into being. Easley is scheduled to appoint the rest of the commission this week, Boyles said. That gives the commission one week, maybe more, to do whatever work it is supposed to do before Easley presents his budget to the General Assembly in March. On the Cutting Edge Improving student behavior, not reducing class sizes, is the key to boosting student achievement according to a new report by Stanford University business professor Edward Lazear . In an article to be published in the next Quarterly Journal of Economics , Lazear reports his findings that reducing class sizes has little impact on student achievement if the students remain disruptive.
Students perform better in orderly, large classes than in disruptive, smaller ones.
And class size reductions don't really help well-behaved students, though they do produce some gains for disruptive kids, but not if the class is full of only disruptive kids. In the traditional system, central power plants produce electricity and channel it to consumers through the power grid. Distributed power allows for companies and individuals to produce their own electricity and sell any surplus to the grid. Instead of a few large power plants, there would be a myriad of microplants. Production of electricity would be decentralized.