Last week, skoolboy wrote a series of posts about class size (see here, here, and here.)I'll be celebrating the new year on Monday and Tuesday, so we'll meet again in 2008.
On Wednesday, Leonie Haimson of NYC's Class Size Matters will respond to skoolboy's posts. On Thursday and Friday, I'll take a look at the recently released NYC class size data.
In the meantime, check out skoolboy's top 5 education stories of 2007 here. Happy New Year, everyone!
2 comments:
Don't miss this. I could be wrong, but I think it matters.
Jonathan
I don't know if any research has been done on this, but I'd be interested in exploring whether any connection exists between class size and teacher recruitment and retention. I taught 4th grade in California for five years, and I had 32 students in my class. If I had taught 3rd grade, my class size would have been limited to 20, and I think my job would have been easier - fewer papers to grade in each batch, fewer students to differentiate for, simply fewer students to think about. Plenty of peers in my credential program in CA wanted to teach in grades K-3 because they would only have 20 students. While I think class size reduction probably does have benefits for student learning, I think it also makes teachers' jobs somewhat more manageable and might have long-term effects of what grade teachers want to teach and how long they stick with teaching. (Obviously, when class size reduction is initially implemented it caused lots of teacher recruitment problems in CA, but now more than 10 years later, I'd think connections between class size and teacher recruitment/retention could be studied without the initial challenges interfering with the data.) I'd love to know if there's any research in this area.
Post a Comment