Parental participation and income matter most in education
The premise of the Review-Journal’s Sunday editorial (“The class-size reduction trick”) could certainly be debated. But the editorial missed the bull’s-eye by a wide margin. There was nary a mention of parental involvement and family income.
There is a huge body of education research showing those two factors — parental participation and income — are the prime indicators of a child’s success in school. Therefore, I don’t care how talented a teacher may be. If students who come from a low-income, low-interest-in-school household, they will struggle.
Because a school district has no control over a family’s income or a family’s participation in the child’s education, the fewer students there are in a classroom, the more likely it will be that those students can succeed. Discarding the class-size reduction model, as your editorial suggests, would be a mistake.