As an anti-class-size-reduction activist, my heart was warmed by today’s New York Times article on the subject. Mainly because it contained the most honest defense of the real agenda behind class size reduction that I’ve ever seen:

it makes teachers happy

Simple enough. Okay, here’s the full passage:

“We can say we just want more good teachers, which would be great, but that’s a policy that we just don’t know how to do yet,” said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an education policy professor at the University of Chicago. “The nice thing about reducing class size is that it makes teachers happy in their own right and it’s the one thing that we know how to do.”

Got that? It makes teachers happy, and we know how to do it (true: It’s not complicated. You just make class sizes smaller. Usually by hiring lots of teachers. In order to do this, you hire teachers of lower quality.)

Of course, we do know how to improve teacher quality. The trick is, you don’t hire and promote based on seniority and meaningless degrees, and you fire bad teachers. The only way in which we don’t know how to do this, is we don’t know how to do it in a city like New York, where doing so would violate the New York City teachers contract — a roadblock put in place by, yes, you guessed it, the teachers unions.

You also get better teachers by ditching arbitrary teacher certification requirements and making use of innovative ideas like alternative teacher certification. See: New York City Teaching Fellows, Teach for America, etc.

To be clear: Class-size reduction has it’s place. With some of the most disadvantaged students, it can be a positive step. But it’s an expensive step, and, for the most part, your marginal tax dollar is better spent on trying to improve teacher quality than on reducing class sizes.

Class-size reduction is very appealing, as the article makes clear, because parents and the public can understand it; they can see it. You can’t necessarily see teacher quality.

How do you solve that problem? By tracking teacher performance in a value-added, merit-pay system. I look forward to the Times op-ed calling for those innovative (and obvious) steps.