Classes with not more than 20 students are ideal for teachers to interact with students personally.
Education is not about completing syllabus,but of moulding character of the students.
With children spending more time with teachers than parents ( both of them being career oriented), the child has only the teacher to turn to for emotional support.
Investment on Education is an asset for every Nation.
Balanced children will contribute to society , social stability with no bad habits and develop into stable individuals with out psychological problems.
Also it is difficult to monitor more than 20 students.
Story.
“With this smaller group you can touch students more,” the longtime teacher said as she reminded a girl to carry the 1.
That remains a popular sentiment among Texas educators, many of whom decry state legislators’ recent recommendations to scrap the cap on elementary school classes.
But for all the concern about packed classrooms, experts have found little evidence that slightly larger classes deter learning. A commonly used waiver means hundreds of the state’s kindergarten through fourth-grade classes already exceed the current, 22-student limit for those grades…..
“A bad teacher with 15 students is just as bad as with 25 students,” said Allen ISD Superintendent Ken Helvey, who says districts must learn to balance effectiveness with efficiency. “I would encourage the Legislature to give us some flexibility, to allow the local community to monitor how comfortable it is rather than set a hard cap everyone has to follow.”
Currently, districts must find extra space and add a teacher when a kindergarten through fourth-grade class hits 23 students. Ending the law could save up to $558 million a year statewide but could also eliminate almost 12,000 teaching jobs.
The most comprehensive assessment dates back just as far as the Texas law, to a four-year study that tracked more than 7,000 Tennessee students from kindergarten through third grade. The study found classes with 13 to 17 students performed better than classes with 22 to 25 students, even when the larger classes had a teacher’s aide. A follow-up showed students from the smaller classes succeeding more later in life.
Educators began proclaiming ideal class sizes in the teens. But Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and chairman of the Executive Committee for the Texas Schools Project, doubts the numbers.
“If you ask people in school, the optimum is always five fewer than we have today,” he said, adding that research shows little effect on classes that range from 15 to 30 students. “Part of the reason is because with a change of one or two students in a class, what you see is teachers doing exactly what they did before.”
Hanushek said class-size reduction has turned into a trend, one districts should re-examine. “Class-size reduction is the most expensive kind of reform,” he said.
Subsequent studies in California and Florida produced mixed findings, none with a magic number. A 1999 Texas Education Agency report linked academic benefits with classes under 20 students. It said research remained too preliminary to show any advantages to altering classes by one or two students.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/education/stories/010511dnmetclasssize.a024eb.html
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