U-Bend

I am writing these words one day after a meeting at my daughter's school. That's a meeting with the principal and school board to discuss the future structure of the kindergarten and primary school.

There have been efforts to expand the school. As parents, many of us say we want a secondary school for our children.

Reality check: There will be financial implication in building a new school, and it might not be easy to find a school which is closing down. Now that a secondary school is not guaranteed, the number of classes will dwindle. That means having one class in the first grade instead of two. The principal said that if we don't want to turn down students after kindergarten we would have to fill more students within one class in the primary school. How many of us want our children to have a place in the same primary school? Nearly all hands go up. How many of us want a bigger class?

Few hands.

But there is not much we can do about the size of the class. Which brings us, somewhat uncomfortably, to the question of whether a bigger class size translates into worse result.

This is not the way it is. As Malcolm Gladwell put it (in his recent book David and Goliath), we are operating in a U-shaped world. That means we should not expect a straight line when we plot the academic achievement against the class size. Why should there be a U-curve relationship between the number of children in a classroom and academic performance? As is too often the case in education, quality is more important than quantity. Yup, smaller class implies fewer children to follow, more time to know the children, and fewer papers to grade. But the trade-off for a smaller and smaller class is less interactions between students. Well, it's chaos when the classroom is too crowded, but it's not a good choice when the classroom is too silent. Small class size makes teaching easier until a certain point - the point when "diminishing marginal returns" sets in. Human nature simply dictates the critical point. Here's an example. You give me two minutes to write this blog, and I will end up with mistakes and rubbish. Let me have another half hour, and I'll write better. What about giving me another week? Would you expect me to spend the whole week writing this paragraph?