As the Franklin School Board gets ready to jack up school taxes by 5.6% and is preparing predictable excuses as to why they have no choice but to do so, I hope you will read a few excerpts from an article that appeared in American Enterprise.
It dealt with myths about education in America.
Education myths
By Jay Greene
Myths aren't lies. They are beliefs that people adopt because they have an air of plausibility. But myths aren't true, and they often get in the way during serious problem-solving. This essay identifies seven common myths that dominate established views of education these days. Dispelling these misconceptions could open the door to long-awaited improvement in our nation's schools.
The money myth
If people know anything about public schools today, it's that they are strapped for cash. Bestselling books, popular movies, and countless lobbying groups portray urban schools as desperately underfunded, and editors of the New York Times write without fear of contradiction that "providing quality education for all America's children will take...a great deal of money." Bumper stickers declare, "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." No matter what aspect of education is being debated, activists generally find the solution in more school spending.
This is the most widely held myth about education in America--and the one most directly at odds with the available evidence. Few people are aware that our education spending per pupil has been growing steadily for 50 years. At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars. By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then, it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002.
Since the early 1970s, when the federal government launched a standardized exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it has been possible to measure student outcomes in a reliable, objective way. Over that period, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil doubled. So if more money produces better results in schools, we would expect to see significant improvements in test scores during this period. That didn't happen. For twelfth-grade students, who represent the end product of the education system, NAEP scores in math, science, and reading have all remained flat over the past 30 years. And the high school graduation rate hasn't budged. Increased spending did not yield more learning.
This big-picture evidence is strongly confirmed by academic research. Though you'd never know it from the tenor of most education debates, the vast majority of studies have found no sustained positive relationship between spending and classroom results. Economist Eric Hanushek of Stanford University examined every solid study on spending and outcomes--a total of 163 research papers--and concluded that extra resources are more likely to be squandered than to have a productive effect.
Still, countless people assume that our schools are underfunded. One explanation is that people don't want to believe that large amounts of public money have been used without producing significant results. There's plenty of room for debate on how best to reform our school system, but the sooner Americans realize that lack of resources is not the real problem in our schools the sooner we can have a meaningful debate on how to make education more productive.
The class size myth
Just about everybody agrees that smaller classes produce better results. This view was captured crisply in a Chicago Tribune feature story on schools: "The advantages of small classes seem intuitive; who wouldn't want children to learn in a small class? Parents crave them, teachers love them, and policymakers push for them."
As popular discontent with the state of education has grown, class sizes have emerged as a key political issue for both parties. The National Education Association has been particularly aggressive, supporting "a class size of fifteen students in regular programs and even smaller in programs for students with exceptional needs." Given that shrinking class sizes means hiring more teachers, and thus putting more money into the pockets of teachers unions, it is hardly surprising that unions are the loudest supporters.
Unlike other myths, this one isn't totally baseless. Research suggests there may be some advantages to smaller classes--though if so, the benefits are modest and come at a very high price tag. And whether this research is actually correct is a matter of debate. So the strong claims for class size reduction made by political activists are not at all justified.
The centerpiece of class-size research was the STAR project, a 1980s experiment conducted by the state of Tennessee. Students were randomly assigned to one of three types of classes as they progressed from kindergarten through third grade. The first type was a regular-sized class of around 24 students with one teacher. The second option was a regular-sized class with a teacher plus a teacher's aide. The third alternative was a small class of around 15 students with one teacher.
The study found that students in the small classes showed a one-time benefit in test scores as compared to students in regular-sized classes (the teacher's aide resulted in no significant difference). The increase, however, was not large--the equivalent of an eight-percentile-point improvement in performance for a student starting in the middle of the pack. But follow-up research found that 44 percent of students in STAR's small classes took college entrance exams, compared to 40 percent among regular-class students--not so trivial a difference. If we could be reasonably sure that this increase resulted from smaller classes, and could be replicated on a large scale without sacrificing other educational priorities, then class-size reduction would be solidly supported. Unfortunately, the evidence does not allow us to reach those conclusions.
There were a number of shortcomings in the STAR program's implementation that raise doubts about the accuracy of its findings. Most significantly, students weren't tested when they entered the program--so we can't confirm that the three groups started out at the same level as the experiment began. There is no way to know if the project's random assignment method was accurate, and thus no way to be certain that differences observed among the groups weren't there from the beginning.
There is reason to be suspicious because of an anomaly in the research findings: If smaller classes really do improve student performance, we would generally expect to see these benefits accrue over time. But instead, the improvement in STAR test scores was a one-time event. This is unusual and unexpected. Considering that the project's supposed benefits were moderate to begin with, this raises serious doubts about whether the STAR results should lead to policy prescriptions--particularly since evidence on large-scale class size reduction is much less encouraging.
In California, the state appropriated $1 billion in 1996 to reduce elementary school class sizes. When California's test scores rose, advocates of smaller classes held up their program as a model. The reality, however, wasn't so clear. A RAND Corporation study concluded that California students who attended larger elementary school classes improved at about the same rate as students in smaller classes. Though California's overall educational performance went up, it did not seem to be due to smaller classes. (The state had also undertaken a number of other major education reforms at the same time it was reducing class sizes.)
Even if class size reduction does improve performance under optimal conditions in a small, controlled experiment like the STAR project, labor pool problems may prevent this from being reproduced on a large scale. Replicating the benchmarks of the STAR project would entail hiring almost 40 percent more teachers nationwide. Digging that deeply into the teacher labor pool would require accepting a lower quality of hire, likely bringing disappointing results.
And the financial costs of reducing class sizes on that scale would be exceptionally high--$2,306 per pupil according to calculations by Caroline Hoxby of Harvard University. There is only a finite amount of money available, so every dollar spent on class size reduction is a dollar that will not be available for salary increases, books, equipment, or the implementation of other reform policies. This will be true no matter how much money a school system has. Given that other reform strategies are more promising and less costly, the modest benefits of class size reduction simply can't justify the very large sacrifices that would have to be made.
Jay Greene is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Education Myths, from which this essay is adapted.
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