Pros And Cons Of Reducing Class Size

Education is everything. It makes the backbone of a modern and developed society. When children get a high-quality education it opens up a life full of choices and opportunity for them; meanwhile, everyone, children’s parents, teachers, and their communities benefit from this. To equip schools with qualified teachers and in the meantime to reduce the size of classes in public school, it has been the main concerns during the past several decades in the United States of America. Especially during the end of the twentieth century, it was a very hot debate among the scholars and policy makers whether to reduce the size of the class in public schools. For this reason, hundreds of experiments and studies were conducted and billions of dollars were

These critics argue that reducing class size is not only the matter that causes students to achieve high scores and do better academically. According to Catharine Lewis, an expert on the Japanese educational system, the reasons behind the student’s academic success in Japanese schools are “the cumulative general of self-reflection, rather than by rewarding and punishing”. Meanwhile, the Japanese academic calendar is 40 days more than the American academic calendar that enables teachers to spend more time with their students. Furthermore, they are from one ethnic group and are not coming from diverse families and do not have different languages. (Zorpette, 2001). However, it is not practical to compare Japan with the USA because the US is a multination country with different types of ethnicities that have different types of cultures. People in the United States strongly believe in individualism while in Japan the group orientation is strongly

In a smaller class in addition to more individualized student attention, there are fewer workloads for the teachers also. When it comes to common sense considering a class that has around 40 students to one teacher, of course, it is very hard for the teacher to control that particular class perfectly. Students who do not want to pay any attention to the lectures can sit at the end of the class and start chatting with their peers. Moreover, it is very easy for these students to go unnoticed till the end of the class. On the other hand, if a class is composed of fewer students it is very easy for a teacher to control that class and none of the students will be able to do disruptive work and go unnoticed till the end of the class. Fewer students mean that each one gets attention from the teacher, and they are encouraged and pushed to take part and express their opinions. Furthermore, the results show that the benefits of smaller classes for the students who were in these classes till grade three lasted through their high schools. These students were less likely to drop out and to graduate on time, more likely to understand hard subjects in high school easily and have a higher acceptance of college than their peers do in normal classes. (Helen Pate-Bain, et al ,