Mitt Romney, time to educate yourself on class size!

President Biden’s Covid relief program includes $60 billion to prevent teacher layoffs and close budget gaps, and $50 billion to implement smaller classes, exactly what kids will need after the various losses and deprivations they’ve suffered over the last year. 

Yet during the Senate hearings for Education Secretary designee Miguel Cardona, Mitt Romney took his allotted time to attack the entire goal of lowering class size.  As the Salt Lake Tribune noted, he “did not mention state he now represents. Utah has the largest average elementary school class sizes in the country & has for years. Some studies have shown a correlation between class size and learning, particularly among younger students. “

In some Utah schools, in an ordinary year, class sizes can be as large as forty kids per class.

Nor did Romney mention the fact that he attended the elite Cranbrook Academy in Michigan , which has average class sizes of 14 , or that he sent his sons to Belmont Hill School in Massachusetts, with average class sizes of 12.

Instead, in his comments, he referred to a  McKinsey study from 2007  that pointed out that some high-performing nations like South Korea and Singapore have large classes.  But these sorts of studies, including those from the OECD, too often omit two key factors:

Families in these nations spend a huge amount  of their annual income on private tutoring programs. In 2010, South Korean families spent 10.7%  of average household income on private tutoring, and amount has risen since then. South Korean students spend so much time in these private evening programs that they take pillows to help them sleep at their desks.  Moreover, many of these nations like South Korea are making an effort to lower the class size in their schools.

There are several other Mckinsey reports that cite the value of smaller classes.   See this 2010 McKinsey report which points out that “Research suggests, for example, that poor children who enter school behind their more affluent counterparts benefit from smaller class sizes that help them catch up.”  

Or this 2012 report:  “Students often better understand and apply concepts in discussion with peer classmates. Traditional classroom environments often do not allow this, especially with large class sizes or when students live far from one another.”

In his comments, Romney claimed that there was no relationship between students’ class size and their Naep scores.  To the contrary, several peer-reviewed stuies show that smaller classes are correlated with higher NAEP scores after controlling for student background.  Here is a selection: 

• Lubienski, S. T., et.al. (2008). Achievement Differences and School Type: The Role of School Climate, Teacher Certification, and Instruction [secureservercdn.net]. American Journal of Education, 115. Multilevel analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics data for over 270,000 fourth and eighth graders in over 10,000 schools finds that smaller class size is significantly correlated with higher achievement.
• Unlu, F. (2005). California Class Size Reduction Reform: New Findings from the NAEP [secureservercdn.net]. Princeton University. Study found that California’s fourth grade students who were in reduced class sizes in grades K-3 had substantially higher scores in math on the national assessments (NAEPs), of between 0.2 and 0.3 of a standard deviation, compared to closely matched students who were not in smaller classes.
• Grissmer, D., et. al. (2000). Improving Student Achievement: What State NAEP Test Scores Tell Us [secureservercdn.net]. RAND. “States with higher per-pupil spending, lower class sizes and more pre-K have higher achievement levels. Disadvantaged children are the most likely to gain benefits from such programs.”
• McLaughlin, Donald and Gili Drori.(2000) School-Level Correlates of Academic Achievement: Student Assessment Scores in SASS Public Schools [secureservercdn.net]. U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. The most authoritative study showing the importance of class size is in all grades, analyzing the achievement levels of students in 2,561 schools, as measured by performance on the NAEP (national) exams.  After controlling for student background, the only objective factor found to be positively correlated with student performance was class size, not school size, not teacher qualifications, nor any other variable that the researchers could identify. Student achievement was even more strongly linked to smaller classes in the upper rather than the lower grades.

 Many other studies demonstrate the benefits of smaller classes, particularly among disadvantaged students, showing their positive impact on state test scores, graduation rates, disciplinary issues,  the likelihood of attending college and even graduating with a STEM degree.  Nearly all these effects are twice as high for low-income students and students of color, showing how class size is a key driver of equity.

In 2012, Romney got in trouble for expressing the same erroneous views during his Presidential campaign. He should be praised for being one of the few Republican officials to call out  the lies of Donald Trump.  Isn’t it time that you stopped spreading misinformation and educate yourself on class size, Mitt?  

How Betsy DeVos much-criticized tweets echo earlier disinformation campaigns by Bill Gates and Arne Duncan

In recent days there has been much criticism of Betsy Devos for putting out this deceptive graph on Twitter that purported to show that school spending has no impact on student achievement as measured by the NAEPs:

The Nation’s Report Card shows that test scores continue to stagnate. This is not something we’re going to spend our way out of and not something we’re going to regulate our way out of. #RISE2018 pic.twitter.com/H6GHz8YpYg

— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) April 12, 2018

Here's a sample of the criticisms that she received:

Chart has some enormous flaws best refuted by research by @SchlFinance101 & @KiraboJackson Data in the hands of simpleminded education commentator is worse than ignorance itself because it will mislead others. But will fight fire with fire in my next post.

— Ed Law Blog (@DerekWBlack) April 13, 2018

Here's the response from economist Kirabo Jackson, showing his contrary analysis that indeed, money matters in improving student achievement:

Here is a similar graph without the nonsensical scaling.https://t.co/1CgoRZxlT1 pic.twitter.com/MZw6NfAP7p

— C. Kirabo Jackson (@KiraboJackson) April 12, 2018

Yet the sort of deceptive chart employed by DeVos has been disseminated for years by corporate reformers.  This includes corporate reform Sugar Daddy Bill Gates, who provided this chart while asserting to the Governor's Association in 2011 that  "Over the last four decades, the per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled, while our student achievement has remained flat, and other countries have raced ahead."

 

In his speech Gates implicitly endorsed the successful effort subsequently undertaken by many Governors to defund their public schools - which our education system has still not recovered from.  

The chorus of boos that recently met Betsy Devos' tweet on school spending is similar to how another one of her tweets was received last month:

Does this look familiar? Students lined up in rows. A teacher in front of a blackboard. Sit down; don’t talk; eyes up front. Wait for the bell. Walk to the next class. Everything about our lives has moved beyond the industrial era. But American education largely hasn’t. #SXSWEDU pic.twitter.com/kyy2r7bTud

— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) March 6, 2018

This tweet got 6.7 thousands comments on Twitter, most of them scathing.

Yet just a few weeks before, Laurene Powell Jobs had made essentially the same claim to the New York Times, when her Emerson Collective LLC sponsored a nationwide television program that centered around the assertion that our high schools haven't changed in 100 years:

“For the past 100 years America’s high schools have remained virtually unchanged, yet the world around us has transformed dramatically,” intones the familiar voice of Samuel L. Jackson in a video promoting the TV event."

This contrast in how misinformation is received is also reminiscent of Arne Duncan's distressing record as Education Secretary, when he proclaimed to the American Enterprise Institute in 2010 that that budget cuts to education should be enthusiastically accepted as the “new Normal”:

“My message is that this challenge can, and should be, embraced as an opportunity to make dramatic improvements. I believe enormous opportunities for improving the productivity of our education system lie ahead if we are smart, innovative, and courageous in rethinking the status quo....

In our blueprint for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we support shifting away from class-sized based reduction that is not evidence-based. It might be that districts would vary class sizes by the subject matter or the skill of the teacher, or that part-time staff could be leveraged to lower class size during critical reading blocks.

I anticipate that a number of districts may be asked next year to weigh targeted class size increases against the loss of music, arts, and after-school programming. Those tough choices are local decisions. But it important that districts maintain a diverse and rich curriculum--and that they preserve the opportunities that make school exciting, fun, and engage young people in coming to school every day.

What did he suggest as the best most “smart” and innovative way to drastically cut budgets? That states and districts should adjust by allowing “smartly targeted increases in class size.”

Then again in 2011, Duncan told journalist Dana Goldstein that “Class size has been a sacred cow and we need to take it on."  Indeed, Duncan got his wish.   Schools all over the country laid off thousands of teachers during the recession, and most haven't recovered from the onslaught to their budgets and class sizes.  According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, while the number of students increased by 1.4 million since 2008, the number of public K-12 teachers and other school workers fell by 135,000.

In 2012, when Mitt Romney was running for President, he visited a Philadelphia school and proclaimed that class size doesn't matter.  His views were greeted with catcalls by many of the same Democrats who had kept their mouths shut when Arne Duncan said essentially the same thing.  Indeed, Obama ran a campaign ad, raking Romney over the coals for his erroneous views on class size, ignoring how this had become a standard line purveyed by Gates-funded DC think tanks and his own Education Secretary.

My point is simple: what's bad for the goose must also be bad for the gander.  Don't let educrats or so-called philanthropists get away with their false claims and damaging policies, no matter what party they belong to or how much funding they offer your organization. Because their rhetoric can become the "New Normal" and hurt kids and our schools for generations to come.

Noah Gotbaum vs. Mitt Romney on who parents trust more, the union or Michael Bloomberg?

See the video below, in which NYC parent leader Noah Gotbaum confronts Mitt Romney at the propaganda fest known as Education Nation about how parents support the teachers union more than the Mayor, a proposition that Mitt says he doesn't believe. Noah is right , of course.

Parents do support the teachers union far more than they support Bloomberg and  the Chancellor as seen in this Quinnipiac poll from last February. The poll found that overall, NYC voters trust the teachers' union more than the mayor to protect the interest of public school children 56 - 31 percent; and public school parents trust the union by an even larger margin: 69 - 22 percent.

The same was true in Chicago, with most registered voters supporting the teachers, even during the strike, according to this Sun-Times poll. According to another independent poll, 66 percent of Chicago parents supported the striking teachers. Why?

Because parents understand that teachers are fighting for smaller classes and other reforms that would actually improve our neighborhood public schools, rather than impose even more high-stakes testing, increase class size, or close them down and turn them over to private corporations, and as the mayors of NYC and Chicago would like to do.

Despite all the corporate, venture philanthropy and hedge fund millions going to into campaigns to convince us to support mayoral control, the spread of charter schools and online learning, the weakening of union protections, and now the "Parent trigger", most public school parents are too smart to be tricked by their lies.