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110 sats \ 7 replies \ @SimpleStacker 28 May
Great article.
The history of class size reduction is a great lesson in why science cannot be the end-all-be-all of policymaking.
Why did America go all in on class-size reduction? Because of a famous study known as Project STAR that used genuine randomization to show that students in smaller class sizes did better than students in large class sizes. For its time, it was considered a gold standard in scientific evidence because there was a true randomized control group.
However:
- Just because class size reduction was demonstrated to help, that doesn't mean it's the best use of resources. Teacher quality wasn't really tested because we don't have good measures of teacher quality. Just because something is difficult to measure scientifically doesn't mean it isn't valuable. And that's the huge downside of data-driven policymaking, which is that it often ignores hard to measure factors that are potentially hugely important.
- Effective class size reduction wasn't scalable. Project STAR was done on a small scale and with a relatively homogenous student population. To try and scale it up would require hiring a lot more teachers, which means digging deeper into the pool of less qualified, less experienced potential teachers.
I basically agree with the author that teaching needs to become a prestigious profession again. It should be at least on par with doctors and lawyers in terms of desirability, if not pay.
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10 sats \ 6 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 28 May
I really think that the student ratio is just a scam. There are better ways to get better results.
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10 sats \ 5 replies \ @Bell_curve 28 May
When was teaching a prestigious profession?
I oppose everything the teachers unions support
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20 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 29 May
It's prestigious in some countries like South Korea and Singapore for example. And unsurprisingly, students there outperform the rest of the world
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 29 May
Yes, it does depend upon where in the world you are as a teacher. East and Southeast Asia are good places for teachers.
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @byzantine OP 29 May
when Socrates, walked the Earth
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 29 May
Yep, but when was that?
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 28 May
I was fairly prestigious a couple of hundred years ago. Then teachers took care of post-primary types of subjects that parents could not teach and the local primary teachers had no expertise in.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @_HUX13Y_ 28 May
Great read, thanks. I wonder what the reasonable limit is for a class size? I would like to try 60. Maybe I'll put a colleague out of a job so and the union will have to get involved.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 28 May
You know about the one-room school houses of yore, don’t you? They had a lot of students, one teacher and, in view of today’s education standards, stellar results. Just try taking the Eighth Grade final test from the 1890’s to see what the standards were. They used totally different methods in a very different environment to get those results. This was, of course, before huge administrations or teacher’s unions.
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