2. Class sizes – I’m with teacher on that one. I’ve taught 30, its fine, more than 30 gets a bit nutty. When you start hitting 40, I end up with space issues, resource issues, breathing issues, and grading lab reports starts taking up more time than I have. Speaking of labs, while this is not about achievement, check out the NSTA’s website, National Science Teachers Association. They commissioned a study about lab safety and class sizes. When you go over 24 students in a class, incidents of lab accidents increase dramatically. They recommend that science teachers with over 24 students not teach labs. So class size does matter.

As voters, we need to stop being so wishy washy about how involved we want schools to be in our kids’ lives. If you want teachers to police behavior, fine, but don’t hamstring us with hand-wringing over whether we’re hurting kids’ self-esteem or inconveniencing busy parents when we decide to hold them for detention. Let us deny them the right to disrupt class by removing them rather than making us tolerate their uncontrolled outbursts. Let us fail them when their work doesn’t meet standard.

If you want schools to butt out, that’s also fine. Discipline your kids at home in a way that makes it clear: messing around at school in unacceptable.

Call your BOE and tell them to stop coddling kids. Elect BOE members who aren’t afraid of discipline or terrified of lawsuits. Hire principals whose focus is not avoiding conflict at all costs.

And John, I love the idea of making administrators teach classes. I’m going to suggest it at my next faculty meeting.

1) Cut the DOE by at least 50%

2) Cut all administrators salaries by 20% making over 6 figures.

3) Cut all administrators by 20%

4) Require all administrators to teach 1 class.

5) Charge a fuel fee to make bus service revenue neutral

6) Charge a fee for all extra activity at the school to make it revenue neutral

7) Put a freeze all new building and see if we can use cross utilize existing space ie high school class space for colleges courses at night.

Put a freeze on all travel and entertainment expense at the local level as well as the DOE

9) Increase lunch fees at a rate that it becomes revenue neutral

10) Solicit volunteer community help for office and class room assistants

11) Look at any revenue generating ideas for facilities not in use

The studies are invalid, because of the push toward inclusion. With that said, I do think call size would be less of an issue if the schools did not force disruptive kids into the classroom and did not had kids with broad range of abilities in the same class.

It is very difficult for a teacher to handle kids with cross range of abilities and behavior issues. Itfwe used the old method of ability grouping and separate tracks for non 4 year college bound kids instead of an one size fit all system it would be more effective and save money.

And if administrators were forced to teach 1 class a day they would be all over fixing the problem.