More on "The New Stupid"
by Frederick M. Hess • Dec 21, 2011 at 9:07 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
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Note: This week, I'm giving RHSU readers a look at my essay from Educational Leadership entitled "The New Stupid." For day one, see here.
The second element of the new stupid is Translating Research Simplistically. For two decades, advocates of class-size reduction have referenced the findings from the Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) project, a class-size experiment conducted in Tennessee in the late 1980s. Researchers found significant achievement gains for students in small kindergarten classes and additional gains in 1st grade, especially for black students. The results seemed to validate a crowd-pleasing reform and were famously embraced in California, where in 1996 legislators adopted a program to reduce class sizes that cost nearly $800 million in its first year and billions in its first decade. The dollars ultimately yielded disappointing results, however, with the