By Trying to Reduce Class Sizes (Again), We’re Solving the Wrong Problem

Stop me if you've heard this one before . . .

What would you say if I told you that I could take an Op-Ed I wrote more than a decade ago, republish it today, and its observations about the state of American education reform would be just as (ir)relevant now as they were then?

Depressing, right? (Although remember when the Huffington Post was a thing?)

Yet I was reminded of that this weekend, when an article in my Sunday New York Times reprised a familiar battle cry that always seems like a surefire way to transform our schools: smaller class sizes.

This is a foundational promise of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new administration. It’s also a new state law, which is requiring the city to decrease the size of its public school classes to 25 students or fewer -- all of them, in a system with an enrollment that exceeds the populations of four states, in the next two years.

What could possibly go wrong?

To do so, the Times reports that the city will need to hire more than 10,000 new educators — it has 75,000 already — even as the state’s new teacher pipeline dries up. They need to do that at the same time Mamdani needs to close a $12 billion municipal budget gap, and as enrollment in university education programs in the state has declined more than 50 percent during the last 15 years.

Why is such a financially challenging idea seen as such a silver bullet?

To be clear, the arguments for reducing class size are well-known, and have a well-established research base. As Leonie Haimson, the founding executive director of the New York-based Class Size Matters, has said: “There is robust research showing that smaller classes lead to fewer disciplinary disruptions as well as higher student achievement and engagement - in fact it is one of the few education reforms that has such robust research behind it and a multitude of proven benefits.”

Why is it that smaller class sizes lead to everything from higher test scores to lower disciplinary referrals? As Great Schools explains to prospective parents on its website, it’s “because there is a greater opportunity for individual interaction between student and teacher in a small class.” And as a similarly impressive set of research studies have shown, high-quality, high-trust relationships between adults and children are the foundation from which everything else in a healthy school must grow.

In such a context, appealing for smaller class sizes is logical and important, and, in the short-term, it makes good sense.

If you take a longer view, however, there’s a subtle underlying assumption of both the research and the advocacy for smaller classes -- and it’s one that unintentionally reinforces our fidelity to the Industrial-era model of schooling.

Think of it this way: if a teacher is at the front of the classroom, imparting a lesson to everyone, the only way s/he can do that in a more personal way is if there are less students in the room. And if a teacher is charged with corralling the individual attention and energy of a roomful of students, their efforts to impose discipline and order will only be aided by having less bodies to manage.

But what if we viewed school with a different set of guiding assumptions?

What if, for example, the default mode of instruction didn’t depend on the transmission of knowledge via a single lesson? (And really, in the modern age, why should it?)

What if the philosophy of learning was that children should learn from one another as much or more than from any adult?

And what if the model of discipline was not based on restricting a child’s movements, but on unleashing them?

In fact, these are the theoretical underpinnings of Maria Montessori, whose theories of child development have informed the creation of more than 22,000 schools around the world - and who, based on a set of assumptions about teaching and learning that diverged sharply from the Industrial-era transmission model, actually preferred larger class sizes, not smaller ones.

In her classic book The Absorbent Mind, Montessori, who was trained as a scientist and whose theories of learning were continually revised and revisited based on her direct observations of children, explained her rationale this way: “When the classes are fairly big, differences of character show themselves more clearly, and wider experience can be gained. With small classes this is less easy.”

The University of Virginia’s Angeline Lillard, a professor of psychology who has studied the extent to which Montessori’s century-old theories have been affirmed by 21st-century research, unpacks Montessori’s preference for large class sizes a bit further. “She believed that when there are not enough other children in the classroom, there are not enough different kinds of work out for children to learn sufficiently from watching each other work, nor are there enough personalities with whom children can practice their social interaction skills.”

“In traditional settings” in which class sizes are reduced, Lillard explains, “when one person is teaching the whole class simultaneously, that person would have more attention to devote to each child, and fewer children would conceivably allow for better teaching.” By contrast, “when children are learning from materials and each other, having more varied possible tutors and tutees, a greater variety of people to collaborate with, and more different types of work out (inspiring one to do such work oneself) might be more beneficial.”

In other words, smaller class sizes help increase the likelihood of better relationships, but they do so via a theory of teaching that no longer serves our purposes.

Montessori schools (and schools like them) also create ample space for relational bonds to develop, and they do so via a theory of teaching that is aligned with what we now know about how people learn.

What should we expect in either case? A deeper investment in non-cognitive skills like persistence, motivation, and self-esteem; fewer disciplinary referrals; higher graduation rates; and greater levels of engagement and well-being.

The difference is this: whereas both approaches will improve our capacity to do all of the above in the short-term, only one requires us to radically alter the long-held assumptions we hold about teaching and learning.

So let’s keep pushing for greater investments in American schools -- and let’s start demanding a wholesale revision of how we think about, evaluate, and define adult roles and responsibilities in those schools.