The Teacher's Attention: Why Our Kids Must and Can Get Smaller Schools and Classes

7 The Counterarguments

O f the major arguments used against grouping size (and particularly class size) reduction, these are the two I have dealt with so far: 1. It doesn’t make any difference without retraining. 2. It doesn’t always raise test scores. I addressed the first in Chapter 1 and the second in Chapter 2. Here are the others: 3. Class sizes came down over the history of public schooling and it hasn’t helped. 4. It dilutes the overall quality of teachers (and/or the integrity of the profession). 5. Its effects can be reproduced by increased teacher effort, training , or quality. 6. It’s too expensive. These are mainly arguments against class size reduction in particular. In Chapter 5, I dealt with the arguments against smaller schools and teacher continuity, showing that class size reduction would solve all the legiti7 The Counterarguments The Counterarguments / 117 mate ones. As argued there, if people can be convinced to invest in class size reduction, then adding on school size and teacher continuity would be a minor additional commitment. As usual, that brings us to back to the issue of cost, which turns out to be no less overstated than the rest. Because of its importance , I’ll give the issue of money its own chapter, where I’ll show that large relationship load doesn’t lower costs, it simply hides them: Pay now or pay later. To complete the picture, let’s add the structural alternatives that recognize the consequences of relationship load but offer a more limited fix; I’ll classify them as cost arguments since they’re usually offered because they’re “cheaper” (in the short term only): • Reduce class size for early grades only, where it most matters to test scores. • Reserve smallness for the neediest kids (medicine rather than diet). • Reduce school size and/or increase teacher continuity without reducing class size. The last option has already been shown in Chapter 5 to be a good step but a small and problematic step toward solving the nurturance crisis. Counterargument 3 “Class Size Reduction over the Course of Time Has Made No Difference” When a critic tries to argue that the class size reduction in the twentieth century did not lead to either learning gains or a reduction in social problems, the response is that it might have if it had been less gradual and other nurturance effects of school had remained constant. I detailed earlier that during the twentieth century, the average class size has dropped about fifteen students . That’s about one seventh of a student per year. Any effects of this gradual drop in class sizes thus far would be hard to measure considering all the other intervening variables. In terms of the erosion of nurturance overall, four measurements of the extent to which kids were exposed to dehumanizing groupings—the number of students enrolling in school, the number of years they stayed in school, the length of the school year, and school size—all increased over the period in question, partially if not wholly nullifying the real-crisis effects of reducing class size at a snail’s pace. So school relationship load taken as a whole has almost certainly resulted in net losses in the realm of adult attention, though clearly those losses are smaller than they would have been had class sizes remained as they were. 118 / Chapter 7 Counterargument 4 “Class Size Reduction Dilutes the Overall Quality of Teachers (and/or the Integrity of the Profession)” The teacher-quality-over-smallness argument sets up a false dichotomy. Class size and teacher quality are far from mutually exclusive—they are in fact connected. I’m all for continuing to raise the prestige and academic effectiveness of teachers, but not at the expense of children here and now and our society ’s mental health later on. Again, the satisfaction to be gained from meeting students’ needs for attention will be of far greater value—to both teachers and students—than a nobility gained through suffering or hollow reverence. Professional pride in teaching can sometimes function as a defense mechanism that undermines the most important aspect of teaching, nurturance. Since society at large devalues the childrearing part of the job, teachers can sometimes overcompensate by focusing too heavily on the expertise/knowledge part (Fibkins 2003). This phenomenon is yet another Band-Aid (this time for the teacher’s self-worth) on the unacknowledged problem...