Improving The Education Of All Students Is Unfair!

Because of my daily wanderings through the museum of contemporary liberalism — especially its attitudes regarding race, discrimination, etc. (whose ever-changing but always familiar exhibits are on display in politics and in the mainstream, academic, and specialized media), I have long since lost whatever capacity I might have had in the past to be shocked or surprised by even the strangest and most outlandish artifacts produced by this increasingly alien culture as it strays farther and farther from traditional American values.

But every now and then I stumble upon an argument or analysis so bizarre that I actually find it encouraging, revealing as it does that I have not yet altogether lost the capacity for surprise, shock, and even bemusement. Such an article (or, more precisely, an article that lays the groundwork for and offers at least implicit support for such an argument) appears online today in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “It’s Not All About Class Size,” by Stephen J. Ceci, a professor of developmental psychology at Cornell University, and Spyros Konstantopoulos, an assistant professor of educational research, measurement, and evaluation at Boston College. This article is, sadly, so representative of a major strain of contemporary liberal thought that it would be worth your while to find it in hard copy if you can’t read it online: it is in the “Commentary” section of Vol. 55, Issue No. 21, Page A30 (January 30, 2009).

Noting that

[o]ur students’ test scores lag behind those of our international trading partners, and our top students in math and science fall far behind the top European and East Asian students who will be the next generation of engineers, scientists, innovators, and business leaders

and that President Obama promised during the campaign to reverse that trend and improve our schools, Professors Ceci and Konstantopoulos point to research that, at first blush, seems to promise a means of fulfilling those promises.

“Many studies,” they point out,

have shown the benefits of smaller class sizes — including random experiments like the Student Teacher Achievement Ratio Project conducted in 79 elementary schools in Tennessee, which assigned children to either small or regular-size classes, as well as large-scale analyses of small and large classrooms that have occurred naturally. Although researchers may quibble over the exact magnitude of gains associated with smaller classes — or the means by which small classes bring about such gains — few of them disagree with the basic fact that smaller classes result in higher average achievement.

By reducing elementary-school classes from 23 students to 15, achievement, as measured by standardized exams like the Stanford Achievement Test, increases about 7 percent on average. And the longer students are in smaller classes, the greater their achievement gain is.

Good news, no? Well, no, at least according to Ceci and Konstantopoulos, or at least not unalloyed good news. To put it another way, while many observers may see the potential of reducing class size as a silver lining of sorts, Ceci’s and Konstantopoulos’s purpose is to call our attention to the dark cloud surrounding it.

“What if,” they ask,

rather than closing America’s international achievement gap, our nation’s leaders had a different education goal in mind: to reduce our domestic achievement gap, the one that separates black and white, rich and poor? In fact, our new president has pledged to do just that. Will reducing class size accomplish that goal, too? Will smaller classes raise the achievement levels of the poorest-performing students — those who are disproportionately minority and low income?

The signs are that it will not. In fact, it is possible that smaller classes will actually widen the domestic achievement gap between the haves and have-nots.

…. many educational interventions, like reductions in class size, don’t just increase the average achievement for all groups of students. They also increase the variability in achievement. In other words, children become more dissimilar as a result of the intervention; their scores spread further away from one another. That greater variability can be seen among children in the same classroom, or among children in different schools and school districts.

Reductions in class size show that effect dramatically: Even as all children gain from being in smaller classes, the “haves” often gain more than the “have-nots.” In fact, when placed in smaller classes, children in the top 10 percent of the score distribution often gain two to four times more than those in the bottom 10 percent. The result is that even though all students make gains in smaller classes — including the lowest-scoring students — the highest-scoring students make bigger gains.

The net result can be a widening of the achievement gap between rich and poor students, and between minority and nonminority students. So, as class-size reduction helps our top students gain ground on the top students in other countries, it also helps further distance them from our own lowest-scoring students, exacerbating an achievement gap that is already large to begin with.

Now, in fairness to Professors Ceci and Konstantopoulos, they do not actually oppose measures to reduce class size. And they certainly should not be blamed for pointing to research indicating that there is “a trade-off” to reducing the size of classes.

It behooves President Obama and Congress to ponder such research results as they begin to make good on their campaign promises to fix America’s schools. It may be possible over a long horizon to close both the domestic and international achievement gaps. But, in the near term, it is not likely to be accomplished by the universalization of interventions like as [sic] class-size reduction….

I can see the argument that all this is sensible advice, and it is certainly true that policymakers should consider as many of the effects of their policies as possible. But what I see primarily, and what I suspect most liberals and their friends in the educational bureaucracy will see, is the argument that any policy that helps everyone but helps the bright or industrious more than it helps others is unfair.

It is the educational equivalent of the liberal economic argument that tax cuts that give something to everyone but more to those who pay more taxes are unfair.