A partial response to Bill Gates’ op-ed about teachers

Yet many of us already teach classes that are too big.  My three Advanced Placement classes currently have 36, 38 and 38 students.  I can in its current configuration only get 39 student desks into my room.  My department chair wants to go in a different direction -  she is trying to lower my class sizes in AP, so that they don’t go above 33.  Thus I may have 4 sections of AP next year, but since AP classes are larger than those for the regular students, my student load will not go down – my regular classes currently have 19, 25 and 31 students.  Next year I will have two such classes, probably both as 30.  Do the math.  I will have as many as 132 AP students (compared to my current 112) and as many as 60 regular students.  That will take me right back to what was my peak load before some students withdrew from our school of 192.

It is odd to see Gates dismissing class size as a means of more effective learning.  It is one of the few reforms which when done right has a solid peer-reviewed research base to support it.   It is especially important in teaching reading and writing – one problem with the size of my AP classes and my total number of AP students is how little time I can give to each student’s writing.  Remember those 112 AP students.  If I give one written assignment that they all turn in, and it takes me only 3 minutes per paper to read, correct and advise per paper, that is 336 minutes for one set of papers.  That is more than 5.5 hours of time outside of school to correct one set of papers.  Increasing class sizes in secondary schools means that teachers lose the ability to work as effectively in helping students to write better.

I have always noted two problems with mandating smaller class sizes.  The first is whether we actually had the physical plant to accomplish it -  smaller class sizes means more classrooms.  The other is one on which Gates is partially correct – to gain the full benefit of smaller classes requires more quality teachers, which in many cases we currently lack.

But what then should be our response?  Should it not be to work on training, inducting, mentoring and supervising our teacher corps so that we have MORE quality teachers?  If your solution is to increase the class sizes of those of us supposedly superior, it does not matter that you pay us more – each additional student in our rooms means that we become somewhat less effective for all of the students in that room. We get forced to move more in the direction of lecture, the classes may become more teacher centered rather than student centered.

Meanwhile, decreasing the class sizes of the “less effective” teachers does not in itself make them any more effective.  Meanwhile, by changing the compensation structure in order to accomplish this, you create an entirely different set of problems, including destroying what should be the cooperative nature of teaching among the teachers in a building and in a department.

In short, Gates is yet again not fully understanding the nature of an aspect of education, taken his partial understanding, getting a bee in his bonnet, and using his billions to try to force education to move in a direction he has decided it needs to go, even though he never taught, and in fact never even attended public schools.  I would not be surprised to find that his largest classes in the elite private high school he attended never even reached the size of my current smallest class.  I do not thing he understands how much the dynamics of a class can change by adding 4 or 5 students, how much it restricts the ability of a good teacher to know students as well as they otherwise would be known.  Perhaps he is thinking about an elementary teacher with one class.  I teach 6.  Increasing my classes by an average of 4 or 5 would mean increasing my total load by 24-30, or almost the equivalent of adding one additional class.

I will refrain from comments about the track record of the company from which Gates derives his billions, although as a Certified Data Processor and a one-time Certified Systems Professional with over 20 years in the field before I became a teacher I am more qualified to talk about his business than he is to talk about my profession.

Rather, let me close with these thoughts.  Wouldn’t it be nice if governors, school boards, and especially journalists and op ed writers, would given even 1/10 of the attention to professional educators as they do to the likes of Bill Gates?  Then, just maybe, we could have an honest and productive discussion of what we need to do to improve our schools.

There are plenty of teachers who could participate in such a discussion.  Some of us devote time to study, to know the data, to try to educate policy makers.  Some of us were in New York with the Education Writers Association.  That was a rare case where our voices were somewhat heard.

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