One Size Does Not Fit All
The season of overindulgence has finally come to a close. No, we're not referring to the holidays. We're talking about the political season-- Election Year 1998--which brought some beautifully wrapped gifts to the world of education. Among the presents promised by the candidates trolling for votes, one flew off the shelves faster than a Furby doll--class-size reduction. It's cute, it's cuddly, and universally adored. But it, too, will soon be remembered as just one more passing fad, another Cabbage Patch Doll or Tickle Me Elmo. It simply cannot live up to the hype.
Why not? Certainly, conventional wisdom says that class-size reduction is a win-win for teachers, students, and parents. But there's scant research to show that it helps students learn more. And there's good reason to be skeptical of anything handed down from the state as a cure-all for schools. As we've learned time and again, every school is different, and no one thing can cure them all.
It will, of course, be hard to resist the urge to spend money to reduce class size. It is the perfect political issue for the late '90s. With our booming economy, state and federal coffers are brimming, and Fat City on the fiscal front means politicians have something of a free hand to indulge in popular-but-costly projects. Polls, meanwhile, suggest that education is now the number-one domestic issue, a fact that means politicians of every stripe say...
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