Class size doesn't matter — or does it?
Everyone knows class size doesn’t matter. Or does it?
As the end of the school year approaches, parents with incoming kindergartners for the 2024-25 school year have been eager to ask me — the parent of a current kindergartner in a local school — how big are the classes? Are they really that big?
At the same time, some challenges that my child’s current school has faced have been attributed by many parents to be at least partly related to class size, such as behavioral issues, reliance on screens, and lack of individualized attention.
Yet when I talked with colleagues in the education field about this issue, I repeatedly received a dismissive response, along the lines of, “But class size doesn’t really matter.” That made me wonder: What happens when parent preferences and research don’t align? If “everyone knows” that class size doesn’t matter, what do we do when parents are still in favor of smaller classes?
Yet, when I dove into the research around class size, what I found was not that class size doesn’t matter, but that policies to reduce class size can have perverse incentives or cause issues. The classic example here is in Florida where class size reductions were mandated and a rigorous study concluded that there was no impact on test scores in grades 3 - 8, with speculation that having to find lots of new — and possibly inexperienced — teachers to meet the mandate caused issues that exceeded any benefit.12
But that same researcher, Matt Chingos (a great guy and excellent researcher, and I’m not picking on him!), concluded in a roundup on class size policies, “It appears that very large class-size reductions, on the order of magnitude of 7-10 fewer students per class, can have meaningful long-term effects on student achievement and perhaps on non-cognitive outcomes.”3
That is a more nuanced finding that may still lead policy makers not to mandate that every kindergarten class to be smaller — but certainly does not indicate that class size “doesn’t really matter.”
In the case of my child’s school, the school had previously had classes of 18 students in lower elementary school, and the school shifted to classes of 25 students. That is just about the “very large” class size reduction (or in this case, increase) that is referenced. The school was experiencing class increases in part as a result of a policy to focus class size reductions strategically on schools with more low-income students. And that may in fact be exactly the right policy for the district, to focus resources on students who may need more intensive supports. But it doesn’t mean that parents’ concerns about the class size or their lived experience with having children in large classes and some of the ways that may accentuate challenges in terms of individualized attention and classroom management.
Surveys also indicate that class sizes are important to teachers, too. (I would like to see a more recent study on this, and couldn’t find one, so someone should ask teachers about this!)4 Again, we don’t necessarily need to reduce class sizes by policy because teachers would like to see it happen, but it’s helpful to acknowledge what people on the ground experience and seek to understand why they may see it that way.
My takeaway here is two-fold: (1) that sometimes the policy wonks themselves may oversimplify matters in an effort to get us all to support the “right” policies, or even start believing some of their own shorthand about certain issues that are not among their top-ranked policy priorities, and (2) that we should not be so quick to dismiss the preferences of families with regards to their children’s schooling.
Policy makers can and will still make what they believe to be smart choices about how to allocate scarce resources, or what to prioritize. But to say “class size doesn’t matter” trivializes a legitimate concern that families — and teachers — may have related to their own experience with schools today.
“The impact of a universal class-size reduction policy: Evidence from Florida’s statewide mandate," https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775712000271
“The False Promise of Class-Size Reduction,” https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-false-promise-of-class-size-reduction/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/class-size-what-research-says-and-what-it-means-for-state-policy/
https://www.scholastic.com/primarysources/pdfs/Gates2012_full.pdf