Lesson of the Lighthouse

With the start of a new school year, parents around the country will soon face the call from government educators for increased spending in new structures all in the name of reduced class sizes. The pitch goes something like this: Reduced class sizes means I [the teacher] can give more individual face time with your student. This will result in improved achievement. After all, the secret to private school success is that in general their class sizes are smaller than those of our quality government schools. On the surface this idea of smaller class sizes seems to have some merit. However, studies on smaller class sizes, such as the one done by Professor Eric Hanushek, have shown little relationship between reduced class sizes and student performance. The Kansas City experiment also revealed how this mystique of the small class sizes can cost literally billions of dollars without any corresponding rise in achievement.

How can an idea which appears to be logical be so wrong? Thus we have forgotten the “lesson of the lighthouse”. Imagine you are in a boat on Lake Superior and you are following the guiding beacon of a lighthouse. You are soon joined by another boat; does the amount of light you receive from the lighthouse decrease with the addition of the other boat? You and the other boat are joined by additional boats; does the light that each boat receives from the lighthouse be of less brilliance than the light you received when you were alone in the water? The answer is of course not. The brilliance of the beacon has no correlation to the number of boats who are recipient of it. The illumination of the lighthouse is simply a factor of the wattage of the bulb.

It will also be told that the smaller class size allows for increased individual attention. Here again this sounds plausible but is it reality or is it even efficient. If a student has a question concerning a concept such as a math problem; it is likely that other students will have the same question. It would be pure nonsense for a teacher to address the same question from each individual student. If that were to be attempted then there would simply be little time left for any other instruction. Again the lesson of the lighthouse is that the instruction to a specific question will be no more enlightening whether it is addressed to one student or twenty students who all have similar questions.

The final logic of smaller classes has to deal with the ability to control the disruptive student. Certainly the probability of having an additional trouble-maker increases as the population of the class increases. For example in a class of twenty students there is one disruptive student who takes up valuable instruction time. If the class size was halved it would still mean that nine students would have their instruction time disrupted. There is absolutely no reason to believe that a disruptive student would be less so in any environment that contained more than themselves in a classroom. In this case half the students may actually benefit from the smaller size from the standpoint of instruction time. If there is more than one trouble-make, logic follows to separate them from each other. Following this practice no student benefits from the smaller class size.

One other note, why is it foreign students, whose achievements are far superior to our own students, come from class sizes which are nearly double what we have in our government schools. Perhaps it has to do with the brilliance of the lighthouse and the beacon of curriculum it sends out. As a matter of fact if one looks at the education of our private schools, one will notice a stark difference in the curriculum and the methodology in which it is taught. The problem with achievement in government schools is not the number of boats in the water, perhaps the problem lies with the lighthouse and its keeper.

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