A professor of theology in Chicago wonders if schools and kids can get what they need this Christmas. Or, will they just get more “toys” that don’t really educate them, don’t love them, and mean absolutely nothing shortly after kids get them?
About 250,000 jobs in US public schools have been lost since the recession, including teachers, psychologists, reading and math specialists, librarians, nurses, and so on, the New York Times reported Sunday. The reduction in the teaching force is especially bad since student enrollment in the public schools has increased by about 800,000 students since 2008. Both of these changes make class sizes larger.
Stockings with money and coal. What will schools get this Christmas?
In a Christmas message to his blog readers, John Thomas, a professor and administrator at the Chicago Theological Seminary, says what kids want for Christmas is a few more teachers. “Think how much better a teacher would be as a Christmas gift than an expensive doll or a pricey electronic game,” he writes.
Or a standardized test.
The trend of increasing class sizes
We will not weigh in on the class-size debate. It is not possible (or ethical) to conduct controlled studies on kids that would answer the question, but reports from teachers suggest bigger classes are tougher to teach and cause more stress on the part of the teachers.
Just do the math. A teacher who has to grade essays for an honors or AP class probably spends about 12 or 15 minutes per essay, judging from experience. And that’s a conservative estimate, because I have spent much longer on essays some students write. If the class size is 20, that gives us a four-hour period for grading the essay, at a minimum.
In many school districts—especially those in affluent neighborhoods where most of the school’s revenue is from property taxes, i.e., in most affluent suburbs in America—class sizes are around the low 20s.
However, as we try to run schools like a business and minimize expenses, we fire teachers, and class sizes increase. Take the same essay used above but give the teacher a class of 32 students. That means, in addition to the school day, the teacher now has an eight-hour period he has to use, probably at home, to grade the essays fairly.
One of two things is going to happen. Either the teacher will give each essay the attention it deserves and drive himself to the point of a nervous breakdown from sleep deprivation and from reading the often unwieldy scribblings of adolescent minds, or the teacher will reduce the attention he devotes to students and they will receive just a mediocre education.
The teacher in both scenarios—class size in the low 20s and class size in the low 30s—is of the same quality, has the same family and personal life, and so on. All that’s different is the class size, and the more essays he gives in order to give students an opportunity to become better writers, the higher his chances become of either losing it or reducing the quality of feedback he provides.
Why schools can’t afford more teachers
The answer here is obvious: we spend all the money on standardized tests, test preparation materials, computers, such as in 1-to-1 technology programs, and other potentially wasteful programs. A comparison of how much states currently spend on reading and math tests mandated under federal law and how much they will spend when the new PARCC tests are put into place this year in several states, including Maryland and Illinois, was run on these pages a while back.
Rev Thomas writes:
But unless our priorities change, unless we radically rethink how we allocate resources for all of our public schools, and unless we begin to recognize the real value of highly trained, well paid, experienced teachers, many of our children will find little more than the proverbial coal in their stockings.