On Bill Gates, Class Size, and American Parents
In a Washington Post op-ed and speech yesterday to the National Governors' Association, Bill Gates floated the idea of dealing with state education budget cuts by increasing the class sizes of the most effective teachers:
What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students. Part of the savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise. (In a 2008 survey funded by the Gates Foundation, 83 percent of teachers said they would be happy to teach more students for more pay.) The rest of the savings could go toward improving teacher support and evaluation systems, to help more teachers become great.
This is not an unreasonable proposal, but it is certainly a politcally difficult one. As I've written before, the free market education reform movement has long struggled to attract grassroots support in neighborhoods and