Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, studies how teachers, programs and funding affect student achievement. A member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, he recently contributed a chapter to Our Schools and Our Future: Are We Still at Risk? (Hoover Institution Press, 2003), which looks at what has happened in American education in the 20 years since the publication of the ground-breaking study A Nation at Risk.
Stanford: What happened after California governor Pete Wilson announced his plan for reducing class size in 1997?
Within a couple of months, 23 governors announced their own class-size reduction programs, and the President of the United States announced a similar program. I think most education policy people had given up on the idea that class-size reduction was a good idea until it took off as a popular way to fund schools.
You have your doubts?
Class-size reduction is a very popular program and has this great public appeal—if you have small classes, your kid gets more individualized attention. Unfortunately, the reality, according to studies, is that it doesn’t lead to many gains, if any, in achievement. In general, the success of class-size reduction depends on whether you hire better teachers than you had in the past, or worse teachers.
How many studies have there been to date?
Hundreds. It’s probably the most studied aspect of schools you can think of.
What do they conclude?
What they really find is that there’s no systematic impact of lowering class size. Some studies find positive effects, and some actually find some negative effects of class-size reduction, but the average is about zero. The way to interpret this is that the impact of class-size reduction is very small, and what is much more important is the quality of the teacher.
How is teacher quality measured?
Good teachers don’t have a simple set of common characteristics. They aren’t the most experienced or the most educated, and they don’t necessarily have formal credentials. My preferred way to think of teacher quality is to think that a good teacher is one who gets a lot of learning out of kids.
California is currently spending $1.5 billion annually to reduce class sizes in kindergarten through third grade. You think there’s a better way to improve student achievement?
These budget deficits in California and other states might be an opportunity to get away from the rigid requirements of class-size reduction and let school districts decide what to do. If they figure that spending their money on class-size reduction is best, good for them, and they’ll either be able to show that it works, or not. But if they figure hiring better teachers makes more sense, which is the policy I believe in, they should be allowed to do that. We should get the most we can out of funding.
