Class size or teaching?

I've found that one of the most controversial debates when it comes to education, especially in developed countries, is what is the best way to spend the scarce money we have on education. The debate often boils down to a choice between two things: smaller classes, or better teachers.

Personally, I've always felt it's obvious that we should pay teachers better, especially in Malaysia. There is no reason to hold teachers to a rigid pay scale based on seniority, let alone the pay scale of the civil service. Teachers perform a much more important job than civil servants, and I daresay deal with a lot more stress. It only makes sense to pay them more, and especially to pay the outstanding teachers more.

The argument for smaller class sizes seems rather vague to me, and it's predicated essentially on the notion that it's hard for good teachers to pay attention to more than 20 pupils at a time. While I think there is probably room to rethink the traditional classroom dynamics of one teacher lecturing/supervising a classroom of pupils, I think that diminishing marginal returns kick in pretty quickly past the point of 30 pupils. While I don't have much data, from my personal experiences, the rowdiest classrooms have been those of 35 or more, with not much difference below that, especially not below 30 students.

Recently my attention was drawn to a University of Auckland study, which claims to have brought together 50,000 different studies and looks at a total of 83 million pupils around the world. The study's conclusion is that class size is not very important, and that the quality of teaching easily outstrips class size in terms of importance. The professor who authored the study is John Hattie, who I have not heard of before. He seems to have published quite a bit on this subject, but I was unable to turn up much about this latest study of his, so it is worth taking with a grain of salt.

Nevertheless, I think it's still a question worth asking: what matters more, teaching quality or class size? Obviously Malaysians have some other things to worry about, such as our horrible exam system, but there already seems to be a general consensus that we need to raise the standards of our exams, and try to orient them away from general memorisation of facts. There is, however, nothing close to a consensus on the question I'm raising.

What do you think? Should we spend more money on hiring good teachers to teach to classrooms of 30 or 40, or should we spend more money to hire the same quality of teachers but with smaller classrooms of 20 to 30?

In praise of good research on race and education

Very often, we talk about issues of race and education without having much survey to back up our rhetoric. I'm sure that myself and Tony are guilty of this more often than not. This is not to say that we should not discuss issues of race and education. Sometimes, there are important links there. Sometimes, there are not. What we need is more quality research into these questions, research which is currently not happening in Malaysia.

This article in the Economist caught my eye the other day. It discusses the state of African Americans / Blacks in the US and how certain policies or cultural practices have helped or hindered their social progress.

One person they highlighted was a young Black economist by the name of Roland Fryer, who at 30, is already a professor at Harvard. He's done some really interesting work on issues of race and education by using pretty interesting research methods. For example, he sampled high school kids to try to find out how popular white and black kids were depending on their kids to test the hypothesis that 'studiousness is stigmatised among black schoolchildren' and found that this was indeed true.

He also has some pretty interesting policy suggestions on education such as giving kids cash incentives for doing well in exams and even giving them free mobile phones.

There are a million and one things which we can do both qualitative and quantitative work on in regard to the education realm in Malaysia. For example, I'd be interested to find if there is a link between spending in schools and exam results. And then I'd use these results to identify the outliers and find out why some schools succeed despite having not much money spent on them and why some schools fail despite having a lot of money spent on them. I'd like to look at the performance of students from the matriculation stream versus STPM and test to see if one was better than the other (even after controlling for race).

One of the main obstacles to better research in this area is that a lot of the data is deemed sensitive by the MOE, the MOHE, the schools and our public universities. If the government were more liberal in their attitude towards this kind of data, they could release this data to certain researchers and then work with them to come up with better education policies.

With this kind of research in hand, one would be able to speak more conclusively and authoritatively on matters of race and education and more importantly come up with innovative solutions to improve the quality of education across the board.