ORLANDO, FL — Mitt Romney is turning the discussion to education this week, positing a vision for improving schools that might seem counter-intuitive: the push for smaller class sizes, he says, is basically a scheme by unionized teachers to pad their membership.
Smaller classes does not make a better education, Romney says. Better teachers and school choice programs like voucher systems do.
In the debate here Thursday night, Romney brought up the idea during a back-and-forth with Rick Perry.
“All the talk about we need smaller classroom size, look that’s promoted by the teachers unions to hire more teachers,” he said.
Back when he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney said, he did a study of class size versus student improvement.
“We looked in our state, the best thing for education is great teachers. The best and brightest,” he said. “Pay them properly. Make sure that you have school choice.”
Romney made this argument in his book, No Apology: The Case For American Greatness, as well. You can read the pages about Romney’s Massachusetts study and his belief that smaller classes don’t make better students here.
In the spin room after the debate, Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom explained Romney’s position to TPM:
When Gov. Romney was in office in Massachusetts, we could test it. So we were able to look at how individual school districts were performing and we know how much money they were receiving. So we thought to see if theirs a correlation between class size and performance. And what we found was that there was absolutely no correlation whatsoever, that the size of the class did not determine the performance of the students on the test.
The National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the country, told TPM their push for smaller class sizes comes from the parents. They say PTAs across the country — including those in Texas and Florida, according to the NEA — have continued to push for smaller class sizes despite tightening budgets. The union points to an oft-cited Tennessee study in the 1980s that showed classes of 13-17 students performed better than classes of 22-26 students to bolster their case.
But Romney’s not the only one skeptical of the labor position. While some studies have shown major gains from smaller classroom sizes, especially for grade school students, others have found that the benefits are relatively minor compared to the enormous cost of implementing strict statewide limits. Even the Obama administration has suggested reduced class sizes shouldn’t be the main goal of education reform: Arne Duncan has called it a “sacred cow.”
Matt Chingos, a fellow at the Brookings Institution whose research focuses on class size, argues that policy makers might achieve more dramatic gains by putting their limited resources elsewhere.
“It’s not a crazy thing to say that we need to think about the quality of the teacher as well,” Chingos told TPM. “For intuitive reasons smaller classes afford students some opportunity to do better. But you have to think about what you could have done that that money instead: higher pay for teachers, more technology, longer school days, more textbooks.”
Other aspects of Romney’s education rhetoric are even more controversial. He spoke out last night during the debate in favor of the private school voucher system Republicans installed in Washington, DC and kept in place over the objections of the White House as part of the deal to prevent a government shutdown in April.
At CPAC Florida in Orlando Friday, Romney again talked up letting parents move their children among the schools.
“What was the answer about improving schools?” Romney said, referring to his Massachusetts tenure. “School choice. Recruiting the best teachers.”
Benjy Sarlin contributed from Washington.
