Duncan and the Virtue of Necessity

Data-driven Duncan, the presiding spirit of public education, has promised us larger classes for the near future. He has  justified increasing class size with research, based on test scores. In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute (November 17) he declared,

“Up through third grade, research shows a small class size of 13 to 17 students can boost achievement. Parents, like myself, understandably like smaller classes. We would like to have small classes for everyone–and it is good news that the size of classes in the U.S. has steadily shrunk for decades. But in secondary schools, districts may be able to save money without hurting students, while allowing modest but smartly targeted increases in class size.”

Class size may or may not alter performance on standardized tests, but it inevitably affects the quality of classroom interaction as it ascends from a class of twenty. I do not have hard data to justify this claim, only twenty years of high school classroom experience with class sizes varying from twelve to thirty-eight. No one but an experienced teacher can verify what happens when five students are added to a class of 25 or 30 or 35, but the climate is significantly changed. The number of students who do not participate in discussion increases, the number of students who can receive individual support decreases, and the community feeling that promotes collaboration in learning dwindles.  These factors affect learning profoundly, especially for the students in the expanding undifferentiated middle of the class.

Many of the undifferentiated middle are subject to absenteeism and dropping out. Urban schools often count on these students dropping out when they assign more students to a classroom than there are seats. They anticipate attrition like the meteorologist anticipates the hurricane season. Many of these students will never take the tests that measure whether class size affects performance, because they won’t be in school that day.

Many of the undifferentiated middle will be chronically weak performers on standardized tests, so their lack of achievement won’t jar the mean test performance in a school, a city or a state. Some of them will actually be superb test-takers, so the size of the class will not affect their performance, but neither will they have learned anything that year.  Some students will transfer from another school system, where the classes were small. They will bring acquired critical thinking habits to the test and keep the scores buoyant.

Teachers know these stories, the lives behind the numbers  that dance in the dreams of state school administrators. Teachers know that mean test scores reflect very little of the learning climate in their classes, but individual students affect them profoundly. The motivated student whose parents decided to move away to a district where peer pressure boosted learning.  The ESL student who worked harder when the class size expanded, but learned less, because the teacher could not attend to individuals as often.  The bright, but disillusioned student who had not been challenged for years in school, because no one noticed he had skills far beyond his classmates.  These are a few of the casualties of class size.

Secretary Duncan clearly does not remember, if he ever knew, how numbers affect classroom interaction, so he resorts to the last refuge of scoundrels: gross data.  Administrators have cited these studies forever to make a virtue of necessity, but they are obviously administrators who have forgotten the ecology of real classrooms. Whatever the data of test performance reveals, it does not reveal the quality or depth of learning in secondary classrooms. It does not reveal who has disappeared from the radar, because of the unwieldy class size.

Perhaps we must all face the hardships of a depressed economy, and schools may have to shoulder their share.  If so, we should not expect school reform to advance under an increasing burden of enrollment and smaller faculty. Our alleged leader, the Secretary of Education, should deplore the conditions brought on by declining resources, not justify them with superficial data.

If the devil can quote scripture to his purpose, then so can a bureaucrat cite data. It doesn’t mean he should stoop that low.

Experience Required

On Tuesday this week, the New York Times reported the failure to thrive of African-American boys in American public schools. Policy-makers quietly tore their hair out, trying to get to the bottom of this persistent anomaly in academic performance. On Wednesday the Times reported the appointment of Cathleen Black, a white female publishing executive, with no teaching experience, to the position of Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools.

Race and gender should not be primary qualifications in school administrative appointments, but teaching experience ought to be. Choosing an administrator from outside the field of education shows a fundamental distrust and disrespect for the calling of the teacher.  It sends the message, that began with the appointment of Joel Klein to the same position, that school reform is something done to teachers, not of the teachers, by the teachers and for the teachers.

The best school administrators began their careers in classrooms. This is not a matter of paying your dues, but of walking a mile, or a hundred miles, in the shoes of a teacher.  Classroom teachers understand things that the public critics of education often do not get: that students often bring enormous distractions from their family environment to school; that chronic absenteeism affects the whole school environment as much as the absent student; that the quality of writing, speaking, and listening in a class diminishes in proportion to class size; that test performance has very little to do with actual learning.

All of this can be learned from a few days of studying the research or sitting in a focus group of teachers, but the true impact can only be felt by teaching.  Only a teacher knows the full impact of adding three students to a class of 32 or of subtracting one angry student from a class of 35. Only a teacher knows how implementing a unit plan that extends over four weeks can be subverted by 20 per cent of a class that shows up only half of those days.  Only a teacher understands how disruptive test preparation is for a class that has been developing critical habits of mind over the previous ten weeks. You have to feel the difference. You have to see it in the eyes of the students.

Politicians will see this as romanticizing the teaching profession. To them teaching and learning is no more than production and distribution. School mandates and scripted lessons are the inputs, students and their test scores are the products and distribution is reporting the data. You enrich one side of the equation and the other side naturally increases.  I had to smile when I noticed that the Common Core Readiness Standards for writing described the writing process as “production and distribution.” No teacher would have written that as a curriculum goal.

Shelley Harwayne rose to the level of Area Superintendent in New York City without losing her connection to the classroom. Her books about teaching literacy and celebrating student achievement are required reading in teacher preparation classes. No matter how far her work took her from the classroom, she always had the feeling of teaching in her bones. If she had to make tough decisions, teachers could still console themselves she had made them in the context of classroom experience.

The same will not be said about the next Chancellor of the New York Public Schools. Regardless of her skills in negotiation and management, she will not bring the experience of teaching in the classrooms she supervises. She will bring the experience of an elite education and children who attend boarding school. None of this should be held against her, but it diminishes her qualifications to lead a public school system.

It also sends a message to teachers that they will not be heard or trusted for another administration of so-called “school reform.”