This week’s Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s “Fun Fact Friday” video disputes the claim that more money, and smaller class sizes, are the answer to fixing problems in education!.
Fun Fact Friday! – Student/Teacher Ratio from Education Gadfly on Vimeo.
Kind of interesting, isn’t it?
And would you care to guess what the student-to-teacher ratio is in India (rapidly turning out the most advanced workforce in history)?
Would you believe 40.1 to 1? And in urban areas, it’s 80 to 1!
Now I’m not saying we need to increase class sizes to the level that India has, but *** as Don Kingsland says in Set Our Teachers FREE!, *** it seems we should be putting more emphasis on students LEARNING in those classes, rather than one-to-one “face time” with their teacher.
We need more emphasis on teaching students to be MOTIVATED to learn, rather than wasting time in school OR seeing it as a social experiment.
I’m not trying to brag, but I received a TOP NOTCH education at the private Catholic schools I attended as a child and young adult. I always scored in the top 99 percentile on every national test and received a total of twelve FULL scholarships as a result of what I learned.
The only reason I mention this is to emphasize every class I attended in elementary and high school had a MINIMUM of 50 students to every teacher.
It’s NOT the size of the class that matters (no matter what the NEA may say). It’s what happens DURING those classes!
Brennan
January 19th, 2010 at 2:29 am
Dear Brennan,
You are right, the most important is what happened during those class and teacher’s ability to motivates their students.
Nonetheless, a thought that the smaller ratio of student to teacher is also good rather than 80:1.
I had an experience when I were in high school in Indonesia. Usually I felt boring if facing math lesson. But one day a math teacher come to my class and teach us with his own style. Sometime he inserting a little math humor so the math lesson is not boring anymore and how he gave the lesson is easy to understand. He always tried to interact with students, so I’m not feel being teached but feel like learning together. Then he become my favorite math teacher, namely Mr. Sam.
Tikno