Guest: Strong teacher or not, class size still matters
Gary Plano
The simulated study on the effect strong teachers can have on students,released last week by the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, makes an excellent point about the value of excellent educators. Certainly we all agree that great teachers make great schools.
What the simulation does not do is stack up against the volumes of research showing conclusively that smaller class sizes have a dramatic impact on student performance. Research on class size has been conducted in states across the country, and from California to Wisconsin the results are the same — smaller classes mean higher student achievement.
The famous STAR Study (done by researchers with whom I studied) conducted in Tennessee in the late 1980s tracked two groups of students — one placed in smaller classes in early grades and the second in larger classes. Not only did the students in smaller classes do better in those early grades, they continued to out-perform their peers all the way through high school — even after they returned to classrooms with more students.
A little more than a decade later, the U.S. Department of Education commissioned a study of 2,561