Indiana shrank its primary classes more than a decade ago. California's Pete Wilson was hailed when he said the state's surplus should be used for this purpose. Class size reduction was part of the successful campaign platform of Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, who has offered the Old Dominion four thousand new teachers over the course of his four-year term. As if to show that this is not just a suburban phenomenon, Philadelphia Superintendent David Hornbeck has also proposed spending millions to slash K-3 classrooms to 20 students in the City of Brotherly Love. Parents simply take for granted that smaller classes mean better education.
Teachers cheer any move to shrink their classroom populations.
Unions get more members. Administrators get more staff. On this central point, the conventional wisdom is simply wrong. The Asian lands that trounce us on international assessments have vastly larger classes, often forty or fifty youngsters per teacher. Yes, there are one or two studies indicating that fewer kindergarten children in a classroom is linked with modest test score gains.