One of my criticisms of NCLB is that it causes too many schools to focus all of their attention on the bottom 25% of a school’s population while ignoring the middle- and upper-level students. Some of the effects of this focus in my school are: fewer upper-level course choices in order to create more lower-level courses, larger [...]

I came upon another article about class size and student success. According to the article’s author, “Small classes are more engaging places for students because they’re able to have a more personal connection with teachers, simply by virtue of the fact that there are fewer kids in the classroom competing for that teacher’s ...

I sometimes feel this way about standardized testing and class sizes in my school.

Is it possible to create a culture of failure? My school is currently being asked to discover why the Freshman failure rate is so high. 1/3 of the Freshmen failed a class during their first semester in high school, and statistically speaking 30% of Freshmen who fail a course in their first high school year do [...]

The district agreed to help us bring down class sizes for freshmen and sophomores from 31-32 to 28, which would be great. This would mean a lowering of students per day of 15-20 students for some of the English teachers. 140 students a day sounds much better to me than 160. Just for perspective, when [...]

According to the latest national education statistics: Washington now ranks 46th in class size. Washington is now 45th in per-pupil spending. Yikes! We’re getting worse.

I’m not teaching as well as I should want to right now. I’m just going to throw out my frustrations in a venting session and call it good. Catharsis time. 1. My classes are just too large! My smallest class has thirty kids, and all of my courses are literature and writing courses. I’m getting [...]

According to the U.S. Census Bureau the United States has a current population of 303,124,730 and according to the NPP the Iraq War debt is about $481 billion. Based on the population in Washington State, our share is approximately $10.4 billion. This could be used, at $58,000 per teacher, to hire almost 180,000 teachers. Obviously this is ...

According to kids interviewed in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the keys for creating successful students are mostly cheap and obvious. The students listed these items as the keys to their successes: - a quiet environment, - fewer distractions, - smaller classes, - encouragement from teachers, - help from teachers, and - the ability ...

I just learned some new information about why our classes are so big. The special ed. department stopped servicing 38 students in English, so those students were added to English with no additional support. Not only that, but those students were placed in groups of 9-10 into four classes taught by two teachers. This completely changes the ...