Is our researchers smart?

Someone sent me a link to a synopsis of a study Does class size matter?New research in Elementary School Journal questions deeply held assumptions about the educational achievement gap



Evidently the report “explores the hard data and finds that some of our basic assumptions about class size may be incorrect” and though it “found, not surprisingly, that smaller class size is a better situation for the children at all achievement levels” it also found “that the children who are already high achievers benefited the most from the extra attention afforded by smaller classes.”

The study then goes on to note this startling problem:

[small classes] produced higher variability in achievement which indicates that the achievement gap between low and high achievers is larger in small classes than in regular size classes

But wait! They’re denigrating positive results because it skewed a metric which may be a fallacy to begin with - that everyone can reach the same level of achievement.

Do smaller classes help students" Yes...and no. Konstantopoulos finds that “although all types of students benefited from being in small classes, reductions in class size did not reduce the achievement gap between low and high achievers”

Actually, it did help all students….there’s no “yes…and no” about it. What it didn’t help was the achievement gap.

Put simply:

If low achievers improve their grades by 10%
and the high achievers improve their grades by 15%,
then SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS: the achievement gap has widened!!!

If reduction of achievement gap is the only goal, then stop teaching the high achievers. Achievement gap narrows, mission accomplished! But the goal should never be to make everyone the same. It should be to make everyone perform at their highest level.

With thinking like this, one day all students will be ABOVE average.