Small Classes Unimportant to Bloomber

By MICHAEL POWELL

Published: December 5, 2011

RelatedThere is an “autumn of the patriarch” feel to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg these days.

Freed — perhaps — of presidential daydreams, freed — perhaps — of desire for another term as mayor, Mr. Bloomberg sounds unburdened by inhibition and convinced that Americans hunger for his insights. Last week he journeyed to M.I.T. to talk entrepreneurship and to distinguish between the private sector (muscular and unsentimental) and the public (flaccid, filled with protesters waving placards and legislators who want only to spend).

Then he turned to public school teachers and the silly preoccupation with class size. Most teachers, he said, come from the lowest quarter of their college graduating classes. If he could effect change, he said, “you would cut the number of teachers in half but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers.

“Double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for students.”

Hizzoner’s press aides are accustomed to running like firefighters into the breach when he opens his mouth. They quickly noted that he had spoken like this in past years. They quickly noted he was offering a hypothetical, which is true — sort of.

Karen Matthews, a reporter with The Associated Press, asked, via Twitter, whether the mayor saw one teacher and 62 children as a good model. The mayor’s press secretary, Stu Loeser, shot back: “Are you asking as a journalist, advocate, or mom?”

No doubts haunt the mayor. In 2008 he insisted that class-size research was “unambiguous.”

“I don’t even understand why the subject comes up anymore,” he said, adding that all that mattered was teacher quality.

In fact, studies show class size makes a substantial difference in lower grades. Studies are more ambiguous about higher grades. Prof. Aaron M. Pallas of Teachers College at Columbia University says no academic study has explored the effects of doubling the size of a public school classroom.

As I am a father to two sons who passed through the city’s public schools, and so perhaps compromised, I put the proposition to a friend, Serge Avery, who teaches at Brooklyn Technical High School, among this city’s best: If you survived the mayor’s culling of the herd, would you accept a salary in the low six figures in exchange for teaching classes of 62 kids each?

Mr. Avery, an archaeologist turned social studies teacher, was not enamored. He and his colleagues teach five classes totaling 170 students. Nights are often spent reading essays, grading and preparing lessons. They write 30 to 50 college recommendations a year.

“SIX figures is a lot of money for a teacher, so some would say, ‘Sure, I will teach 300 kids,’ ” he said. “But most teachers who care about what they deliver in the classroom would be against it.”

He loves teaching, but teacher morale has slipped into a ditch. The past decade, he said, with “its singular obsession over testing and data collection coupled with a concerted effort to demonize teachers and their unions have really delivered a knockout punch.”

Undoubtedly some teachers — city studies suggest 18 percent, not the mayor’s 50 percent — perform badly.

And Mr. Bloomberg deserves credit for expanding small schools, building a beautiful campus in Mott Haven and giving principals more freedom. But when he hails his reform efforts, the facts often fail to reward his confidence.

Many schools, particularly those serving the poorest, remain fractured. The Daily Newsdiscovered that Grace Dodge High School in the Bronx had failed to provide 300 students with English teachers. At Taft High School in the Bronx, the dropout rate spiked to 70 percent from 25 percent in the four years before it closed in 2006.

There’s a final oddity. Among the so-called meritocratic elite, low teacher-to-child ratios are beloved. The mayor’s daughters went to Spence, where classes hover from 10 to 15. Trinity, Dalton, Riverdale, Horace Mann: All charge $35,000 or more per year, and classes rarely exceed 12 in the lower grades.

These schools boast of teachers with advanced degrees. That’s true of Brooklyn Tech. Yet teachers at the latter feel like paper tossed into a receptacle.

“In a way, Bloomberg has been successful,” Mr. Avery notes. “Good teachers are leaving, and teachers like myself with a decade in are wondering if we can stomach another decade.”

As a warning call, that sounds unambiguous.