Recently Detroit Public Schools announced that it was closing 70 public schools and that some classes might have over sixty students in a class. High school classes would resemble college lecture halls with the teacher down in front while students listen attentively (well maybe) in rows of stadium-style seating.
But, you say, that is Detroit; Milwaukee is not likely to see sixty students in a class. The reality is such class sizes have happened in Milwaukee and other places in Wisconsin.
Music classes, in particular chorus, band and orchestra, often have class sizes well beyond forty students. Another place schools can pack those students in is physical education. School libraries might see virtually every seat filled every single hour. Good luck on getting any help beyond checking out a book.
Webcams and video would allow schools to share a teacher from one school site with other students around the city. Frankly, this might be a good use of technology and increase student offering city-wide. But it would also allow the school system to load up a teacher’s class. That teacher might have only twenty or thirty students physically in a classroom but with another twenty or thirty students logging on with their computers from other schools around the city.
The most likely mammoth class sizes are to come from the return of study halls. Over the last twenty years, Milwaukee has gotten rid of the study hall concept because students really didn’t do much studying in those halls. Every comprehensive high school had at least one large study hall where huge numbers of students could be packed in just to keep the numbers lower in the academic classes. Get ready for the return of the study hall concept even though it isn’t very sound educationally.
A master teacher in front of a massive number of students is often supported by conservative intellectuals who keep saying the quality of instruction is more important than the class size. They are right, but only to a point.
I keep hearing from older folks that Catholic schools used to have fifty students in a classroom and everyone learned just fine. The reality was somewhat different. (I attended Catholic schools in the 1950s through the 1970s.) Many Catholic intellectuals in the 1950s considered Catholic education to be inferior to public education. Msgr. John Tracy Ellis railed against the anti-intellectualism in Catholic colleges and universities at the time, and anti-intellectual attitudes permeated primary and secondary Catholic education as well. Large classes were not the cause of this anti-intellectualism, but large classes did inhibit education much beyond rote memory and conformity. Forget individual creativity and thought.
In 1966, Father Andrew Greeley published a study stating that Catholic schools had finally caught up with their public school counterparts. Improved teacher qualifications and lower class sizes were contributing factors in the improvements. Today, many parents choose parochial schools because the class sizes are actually smaller than neighboring public schools.
Class size does matter. When so many families in Milwaukee teeter on the edge of existence, and our children so often lack meaningful adults in their lives, having fewer adults in the schools to interact with these students is not the direction we should be going.
