Fewer kids per class won't help. Who teaches them willStop spending money on smaller classes

Pouring money into smaller classes buys a wave of newly certified teachers rather than the good ones who can lift struggling students.

New York City has just written class size limits into law, at a cost of roughly a billion dollars a year. Is any of it worth buying?

The classic evidence has fallen apart

Tennessee's STAR project reported that small classes raised black students' odds of attending college by 2.7 percentage points. Israel studied an obscure rabbinical rule: any class over forty students had to be split, and students in the smaller halves did better.

It sounds settled. But in 2019 the Israeli authors redid their own study and found the effect gone after 2000. Outside Tennessee, other experiments found roughly nothing. Pool 66 studies and 2,819 estimates, and the effect is negligible everywhere except classes under fifteen.

Good teachers are the bottleneck

Small classes work in small pilots because a pilot only ties up a few good teachers. Roll it out statewide and the trick collapses: California's policy produced a tiny gain while classrooms filled with people who had neither experience nor full certification.

The budget is fixed. Pay one strong teacher more, or split a class and hire three ordinary ones? America has picked the second for decades.

Spend the same money on pay and you pull stronger people into the job. Spend it on splitting classes and you simply spread the same teachers thinner.

Fake grades are the real scandal

A columnist described her daughter earning straight A's at a bad school and then failing the exam, running upstairs to cry on her bed. The school had taught nothing and handed out grades instead.

Poor schools should get more money, and per pupil they already get more than wealthy districts. But it has to buy the teachers who change lives, not smaller rooms.