The Conversation – Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach
“Total spending, class size and teacher quality are important. So is a school’s culture, including how school staff work together and learn from each other, and how they respond to student needs. The characteristics of a student’s classmates matter, as does the fit between the student and her teacher. A randomized study conducted by researcher Helen Pate Bain and her colleagues in Tennessee in the mid-1980s, called Project STAR, provided the strongest evidence to date that children learn more when they are in smaller classes.” (more)