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Thursday, April 14, 2011

More expensive than what? A quick comment on CAP’s CSR report « School Finance 101

More expensive than what? A quick comment on CAP’s CSR report « School Finance 101

More expensive than what? A quick comment on CAP’s CSR report

The Center for American Progress today release a report on class size reduction authored by Matthew Chingos, who has conducted a handful of recent interesting studies on the topic.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/04/pdf/class_size.pdf

This report reads more or less like a manifesto against class size reduction as a strategy for improving school quality and student outcomes. I’ll admit that I’m also probably not the biggest advocate for class size reduction as a single, core strategy for education reform, and that I do favor some balanced emphasis on teacher quality issues. I’m also not the naysayer that I once was regarding class size reduction and its relative costs. There still exists too little decisive information regarding the cost-benefit tradeoffs between the two – teacher quantity