This is just one study, of course. But the picture doesn’t get any clearer if you look at all the studies of class size—and there have been hundreds done over the years. Fifteen percent find statistically significant evidence that students do better in smaller classes. Roughly the same number find that students do worse in smaller classes. Twenty percent are like Hoxby’s and find no effect at all—and the balance find a little bit of evidence in either direction that isn’t strong enough to draw any real conclusions. The typical class-size study concluded with a paragraph like this:
In four countries—Australia, Hong Kong, Scotland, and the United States—our identification strategy leads to extremely imprecise estimates that do not allow for any confident assertion about class-size effects. In two countries—Greece and Iceland—there seem to be nontrivial beneficial effects of reduced class sizes. France is the only country where there seem to be noteworthy differences between mathematics and science teaching: While there is a statistically significant and sizable class-size effect in mathematics, a class-size effect of comparable magnitude can be ruled out in science. The nine school systems for which we can rule out large-scale class-size effects in both mathematics and science are the two Belgian schools, Canada, the Czech Republic, Korea, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, and Spain. Finally, we can rule out any noteworthy causal effect of class size on student performance in two countries, Japan and Singapore.
Did you follow that? After sorting through thousands of pages of data on student performance from eighteen separate countries, the economists concluded that there were only two places in the world—Greece and Iceland—where there were “nontrivial beneficial effects of reduced class sizes.” Greece and Iceland? The push to lower class sizes in the United States resulted in something like a quarter million new teachers being hired between 1996 and 2004. Over that same period, per-pupil spending in the United States soared 21 percent—with nearly all of those many tens of billions of new dollars spent on hiring those extra teachers. It’s safe to say that there isn’t a single profession in the world that has increased its numbers over the past two decades by as much or as quickly or at such expense as teaching has. One country after another has spent that kind of money because we look at a school like Shepaug Valley—where every teacher has a chance to get to know every student—and we think, “There’s the place to send my child.” But the evidence suggests that the thing we are convinced is such a big advantage might not be such an advantage at all.1
3.
Not long ago, I sat down with one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. He began by talking about his childhood in Minneapolis. He would go up and down the streets of his neighborhood at the beginning of every winter, he said, getting commitments from people who wanted their driveways and sidewalks cleared of snow. Then he would contract out each job to other children in the neighborhood. He paid his workers the moment the job was done, with cash on hand, and collected from the families later because he learned that was the surest way to get his crew to work hard. He had eight, sometimes nine, kids on the payroll. In the fall, he would switch to raking leaves.
“I would go and check their work so I could tell the customer that their driveway would be done the way they wanted it done,” he remembered. “There would always be one or two kids who didn’t do it well, and I would have to fire them.” He was ten years old. By the age of eleven, he had six hundred dollars in the bank, all earned by himself. This was in the 1950s. That would be the equivalent today of five thousand dollars. “I didn’t have money for where I wanted to go,” he said with a shrug, as if it was obvious that an eleven-year-old would have a sense of where he wanted to go. “Any fool can spend money. But to earn it and save it and defer gratification—then you learn to value it differently.”
His family lived in what people euphemistically called a “mixed neighborhood.” He went to public schools and wore hand-me-downs. His father was a product of the Depression, and talked plainly about money. The man from Hollywood said that if he wanted something—a new pair of running shoes, say, or a bicycle—his father would tell him he had to pay half. If he left the lights on, his father would show him the electric bill. “He’d say, ‘Look, this is what we pay for electricity. You’re just being lazy, not turning the lights off. We’re paying for you being lazy. But if you need lights for working—twenty-four hours a day—no problem.’”
The summer of his sixteenth year, he went to work at his father’s scrap-metal business. It was hard, physical labor. He was treated like any other employee. “It made me not want to live in Minneapolis,” he said. “It made me never want to depend on working for my father. It was awful. It was dirty. It was hard. It was boring. It was putting scrap metal in barrels. I worked there from May fifteenth through Labor Day. I couldn’t get the dirt off me. I think, looking back, my father wanted me to work there because he knew that if I worked there, I would want to escape. I would be motivated to do something more.”
In college he ran a laundry service, picking up and delivering dry cleaning for his wealthy classmates. He organized student charter flights to Europe. He went to see basketball games with his friend and sat in terrible seats—obstructed by a pillar—and wondered what it would be like to sit in the premium seats courtside. He went to business school and law school in New York, and lived in a bad neighborhood in Brooklyn to save money. After graduation, he got a job in Hollywood, which led to a bigger job, and then to an even bigger job, and side deals and prizes and a string of extraordinary successes—to the point where he now has a house in Beverly Hills the size of an airplane hangar, his own jet, a Ferrari in the garage, and a gate in front of his seemingly never-ending driveway that looks like it was shipped over from some medieval castle in Europe. He understood money. And he understood money because he felt he had been given a thorough education in its value and function back home on the streets of Minneapolis.
“I wanted to have more freedom. I wanted to aspire to have different things. Money was a tool that I could use for my aspiration and my desires and my drive,” he said. “Nobody taught me that. I learned it. It was kind of like trial and error. I liked the juice of it. I got some self-esteem from it. I felt more control over my life.”
He was sitting in his home office as he said that—a room easily the size of most people’s houses—and then he finally came to the point. He had children that he loved very dearly. Like any parent, he wanted to provide for them, to give them more than he had. But he had created a giant contradiction, and he knew it. He was successful because he had learned the long and hard way about the value of money and the meaning of work and the joy and fulfillment that come from making your own way in the world. But because of his success, it would be difficult for his children to learn those same lessons. Children of multimillionaires in Hollywood do not rake the leaves of their neighbors in Beverly Hills. Their fathers do not wave the electricity bill angrily at them if they leave the lights on. They do not sit in a basketball arena behind a pillar and wonder what it would be like to sit courtside. They live courtside.
“My own instinct is that it’s much harder than anybody believes to bring up kids in a wealthy environment,” he said. “People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they’re ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth. It’s difficult at both ends of the spectrum. There’s some place in the middle which probably works best of all.”
There are few things that inspire less sympathy than a multimillionaire crying the blues for his children, of course. The man from Hollywood’s children will never live in anything but the finest of houses and sit anywhere but in first class. But he wasn’t talking about material comforts. He was a man who had made a great name for himself. One of his brothers had taken over the family scrap-metal business and prospered. Another of his brothers had become a doctor and built a thriving medical practice. His father had produced three sons who were fulfilled and motivated and who h
ad accomplished something for themselves in the world. And his point was that it was going to be harder for him, as a man with hundreds of millions of dollars, to be as successful in raising his children as his father had been back in a mixed neighborhood of Minneapolis.
4.
The man from Hollywood is not the first person to have had this revelation. It is something, I think, that most of us understand intuitively. There is an important principle that guides our thinking about the relationship between parenting and money—and that principle is that more is not always better.
It is hard to be a good parent if you have too little money. That much is obvious. Poverty is exhausting and stressful. If you have to work two jobs to make ends meet, it’s hard to have the energy in the evening to read to your children before they go to bed. If you are a working single parent, trying to pay your rent and feed and clothe your family and manage a long and difficult commute to a physically demanding job, it is hard to provide your children with the kind of consistent love and attention and discipline that makes for a healthy home.
But no one would ever say that it is always true that the more money you have, the better parent you can be. If you were asked to draw a graph about the relationship between parenting and money, you wouldn’t draw this:
Money makes parenting easier until a certain point—when it stops making much of a difference. What is that point? The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call “diminishing marginal returns” sets in. If your family makes seventy-five thousand and your neighbor makes a hundred thousand, that extra twenty-five thousand a year means that your neighbor can drive a nicer car and go out to eat slightly more often. But it doesn’t make your neighbor happier than you, or better equipped to do the thousands of small and large things that make for being a good parent. A better version of the parenting-income graph looks like this:
But that curve tells only part of the story, doesn’t it? Because when the income of parents gets high enough, then parenting starts to be harder again. For most of us, the values of the world we grew up in are not that different from the world we create for our children. But that’s not true for someone who becomes very wealthy. The psychologist James Grubman uses the wonderful expression “immigrants to wealth” to describe first-generation millionaires—by which he means that they face the same kinds of challenges in relating to their children that immigrants to any new country face. Someone like the Hollywood mogul grew up in the Old Country of the middle class, where scarcity was a great motivator and teacher. His father taught him the meaning of money and the virtues of independence and hard work. But his children live in the New World of riches, where the rules are different and baffling. How do you teach “work hard, be independent, learn the meaning of money” to children who look around themselves and realize that they never have to work hard, be independent, or learn the meaning of money? That’s why so many cultures around the world have a proverb to describe the difficulty of raising children in an atmosphere of wealth. In English, the saying is “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” The Italians say, “Dalle stelle alle stalle” (“from stars to stables”). In Spain it’s “Quien no lo tiene, lo hance; y quien lo tiene, lo deshance” (“he who doesn’t have it, does it, and he who has it, misuses it”). Wealth contains the seeds of its own destruction.
“A parent has to set limits. But that’s one of the most difficult things for immigrants to wealth, because they don’t know what to say when having the excuse of ‘We can’t afford it’ is gone,” Grubman said. “They don’t want to lie and say, ‘We don’t have the money,’ because if you have a teenager, the teenager says, ‘Excuse me. You have a Porsche, and Mom has a Maserati.’ The parents have to learn to switch from ‘No we can’t’ to ‘No we won’t.’”
But “no we won’t,” Grubman said, is much harder. “No we can’t” is simple. Sometimes, as a parent, you have to say it only once or twice. It doesn’t take long for the child of a middle-class family to realize that it is pointless to ask for a pony, because a pony simply can’t happen.
“No we won’t” get a pony requires a conversation, and the honesty and skill to explain that what is possible is not always what is right. “I’ll walk wealthy parents through the scenario, and they have no idea what to say,” Grubman said. “I have to teach them: ‘Yes, I can buy that for you. But I choose not to. It’s not consistent with our values.’” But then that, of course, requires that you have a set of values, and know how to articulate them, and know how to make them plausible to your child—all of which are really difficult things for anyone to do, under any circumstances, and especially if you have a Ferrari in the driveway, a private jet, and a house in Beverly Hills the size of an airplane hangar.
The man from Hollywood had too much money. That was his problem as a parent. He was well past the point where money made things better, and well past the point where money stopped mattering all that much. He was at the point where money starts to make the job of raising normal and well-adjusted children more difficult. What the parenting graph really looks like is this:
That’s what is called an inverted-U curve. Inverted-U curves are hard to understand. They almost never fail to take us by surprise, and one of the reasons we are so often confused about advantages and disadvantages is that we forget when we are operating in a U-shaped world.2
Which brings us back to the puzzle of class size: What if the relationship between the number of children in a classroom and academic performance is not this:
or even this:
What if it’s this?
The principal of Shepaug Valley Middle School is a woman named Teresa DeBrito. In her five-year tenure at the school, she has watched the incoming class dwindle year by year. To a parent, that might seem like good news. But when she thought about it, she had that last curve in mind. “In a few years we’re going to have fewer than fifty kids for the whole grade coming up from elementary school,” she said. She was dreading it: “We’re going to struggle.”
5.
Inverted-U curves have three parts, and each part follows a different logic.3 There’s the left side, where doing more or having more makes things better. There’s the flat middle, where doing more doesn’t make much of a difference. And there’s the right side, where doing more or having more makes things worse.4
If you think about the class-size puzzle this way, then what seems baffling starts to make a little more sense. The number of students in a class is like the amount of money a parent has. It all depends on where you are on the curve. Israel, for example, has historically had quite large elementary school classes. The country’s educational system uses the “Maimonides Rule,” named after the twelfth-century rabbi who decreed that classes should not exceed forty children. That means elementary school classes can often have as many as thirty-eight or thirty-nine students. Where there are forty students in a grade, though, the same school could suddenly have two classes of twenty. If you do a Hoxby-style analysis and compare the academic performance of one of those big classes with a class of twenty, the small class will do better. That shouldn’t be surprising. Thirty-six or thirty-seven students is a lot for any teacher to handle. Israel is on the left side of the inverted-U curve.
Now think back to Connecticut. In the schools Hoxby looked at, most of the variation was between class sizes in the mid- to low twenties and those in the high teens. When Hoxby says that her study found nothing, what she means is that she could find no real benefit to making classes smaller in that medium range. Somewhere between Israel and Connecticut, in other words, the effects of class size move along the curve to the flat middle—where adding resources to the classroom stops translating into a better experience for children.
Why isn’t there much of a difference between a class of twenty-five students and a class of eighteen students? There’s no question that the latter is eas
ier for the teacher: fewer papers to grade, fewer children to know and follow. But a smaller classroom translates to a better outcome only if teachers change their teaching style when given a lower workload. And what the evidence suggests is that in this midrange, teachers don’t necessarily do that. They just work less. This is only human nature. Imagine that you are a doctor and you suddenly learn that you’ll see twenty patients on a Friday afternoon instead of twenty-five, while getting paid the same. Would you respond by spending more time with each patient? Or would you simply leave at six-thirty instead of seven-thirty and have dinner with your kids?
Now for the crucial question. Can a class be too small, the same way a parent can make too much money? I polled a large number of teachers in the United States and Canada and asked them that question, and teacher after teacher agreed that it can.
Here’s a typical response:
My perfect number is eighteen: that’s enough bodies in the room that no one person needs to feel vulnerable, but everyone can feel important. Eighteen divides handily into groups of two or three or six—all varying degrees of intimacy in and of themselves. With eighteen students, I can always get to each one of them when I need to. Twenty-four is my second favorite number—the extra six bodies make it even more likely that there will be a dissident among them, a rebel or two to challenge the status quo. But the trade-off with twenty-four is that it verges on having the energetic mass of an audience instead of a team. Add six more of them to hit thirty bodies and we’ve weakened the energetic connections so far that even the most charismatic of teachers can’t maintain the magic all the time.