K-12 Budget Picture - Lean Years Ahead
Boosting productivity, though, requires grappling with the cost of teaching. Teacher salaries and benefits amount to half or more of district spending. The most promising way to control costs without slashing services is to get more value out of each employee. While American schools have been in a multidecade push for class-size reduction--cutting student-teacher ratios from 23:1 in the early 1970s to about 15:1 today--this massive increase in staffing has shown no evidence of academic benefits. While smaller classes are attractive in the abstract, the need to hire more bodies dilutes teacher quality. Indeed, some high-performing countries, like South Korea and Singapore, have some middle school and high school classes with forty or more students per classroom. Increasing aggregate student-teacher ratios by about two students, from 15:1 to 17:1, could cut district spending on salary and benefits by nearly 10 percent.
I suggest that, in the future, he considers class-size for academic subjects only when making a conclusion about the"academic benefits" of class-size reduction.
Please let us know of ANY schools in the US that have a 15:1 ratio in their high school math, science or English courses. It is typical for a US core subject teacher to have 150 students daily.
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