When schools have money…
When schools and school districts have more money and spend more money, what do they spend it on?
We are now told to believe that everything we thought about the virtues of small class size back in the 1990s was misguided. That improving teacher quality trumps reducing class size any day when it comes to efficiently improving student outcomes. We are told to believe that teacher quality can be improved at nominal cost, whereas achieving similar gains via class size reduction would be absurdly inefficient and very costly. Yet to date, we have little evidence that we can actually achieve the same measured outcome gains achieved by reducing class size in the 1990s by instead improving teacher quality… and that this can easily be done at lower cost. In fact, many go so far as to argue that we can take the same average teacher wage, and instead of paying older teachers more and younger teachers less, we just have to pay better teachers more and worse ones less
