Improving Education With Better Sorting

Dana Goldstein reprints an email from Jennifer T sticking up for smaller class sizes. I don't really think there's a ton to be said about the class size issue—an effective teacher could be more effective at the margin on a per capita basis if she has fewer students, but an effective teacher could also teach more kids at the margin if she had more students.

But Jennifer's micro-explanation of the benefits of small class size is provocative:

This teacher believes that class size is tied with improving teacher education as the number one issue in education today. Really good teaching is differentiated teaching—meeting each and every kid where they are and raising their level of work bit by bit, day by day. Only by knowing each kid, conferencing with each kid and providing instruction to each kid how he or she best learns can we honestly close the achievement gap. We cannot do this with 26 second graders and only one teacher. It is impossible. Even for excellent (Highly Effective, even!) teachers in well-funded schools with amazing PTAs that pay for full-time assistants who are graduate students of education. Not with reading specialists and ELL teachers and all sorts of other personnel.

I think this points to the most underrated virtue of school choice—differentiation. My girlfriend has a strong preference for burritos over sandwiches, whereas I like a good sandwich. Nobody is "right" or "wrong" about this, but the fact that DC provides places to buy sandwiches and places to buy burritos is a welfare enhancing measure. If we consolidated all the sandwich and burrito vendors into a single monopoly provider then even under the most utopian assumptions about the quality of the sandwiches and burritos offered, you'd be stuck with a large level of inefficiency. It the people working at Chipotle and Potbelly's were constantly switching back and forth from burritos to sandwiches, their output of meals per hour would plummet.

A student's not a takeout lunch (obviously) but if it's really true that "good teaching is differentiated teaching" then life should get easier for teachers if more of the differentiation happens on the front end. Schools would offer a narrower range of products, but students would have a wider range of schools to choose from. I would, personally, absolutely hate it if my job required to me to somehow try to craft a blog that was appealing to whatever random subset of readers happened to come through the door. I always try, of course, to grow my audience. But the idea is to specialize—I simply take for granted that the overwhelming majority of English-speaking people in the world aren't going to read this site, and try to create value for a relatively narrow niche, secure in the knowledge that other people will read other things.