Washington State's legislature is engaged in a futile exercise in education reform.  See HB 2261, which passed the House last night, 71-26.  HB 2261 would define basic education based on a "prototype school" model.  The central feature of this expensive reform, for which there are no funds, would reduce classroom sizes to 15 students in K-3 and 25 students in 4 through 12th grade. 

    Unfortunately, dreaming about paying billions of dollars to create small class sizes does nothing to address the real problem facing education:  the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the teachers in our classrooms.

    Today, Chancellor Joel Klein and Rev. Al Sharpton's Education Equality Project released their analysis of what ails education in Teacher RX: The Perfect Storm for Reform.  This report summarizes the research which shows that placing an effective teacher in the classroom is more important than any other factor, including class size, in raising student academic achievement.  The report identifies education practices which allow ineffective teachers to remain in the classroom for a lifetime.  It points out that teacher certification "matters little" for student achievement.  It points out that school officials, instead of increasing teacher credential! requirements, need to discard the teacher pay scale and create a performance-based teacher pay system which rewards teachers based on student learning.  

    From the Klein and Sharpton report: "Without 'the right people standing in front of the classroom,' concludes a Brookings Institution analysis, 'school reform is a futile exercise.'"

    Washington State would be well served by allowing public schools to hire individuals of "unusual competence" without a credential, just as private schools are allowed to do.  Washington needs a perfomance compensation system led by a principal in charge who is accountable for student performance.  Washington needs principals who can evaluate and reward teacher performance based on student achievement and the needs of the students.    

    Instead of staffing ratios of teachers and administrators to students, as HB 2261 does, Washington State should create a finance system which allows the dollars to follow the children into their classrooms. In this way the money will be moved from funding rich bureaucracies skilled at staffing non-teaching positions to the local school classroom.  Principals ought to be given the authority to control the dollars. Principals with budgetary control will soon see what needs to be done to increase teacher effectiveness:  cutting non-teaching positions, hiring additional classroom teachers and adjusting schedules so teachers have only 80 students' papers to grade instead of 180 students' papers (reducing total student load). This reform is already working in New York City to dramatically increase student achievement.

    Reducing Total Student Load in this way to increase teacher effectiveness is a far more cost-effective way than mandating small class sizes across the board.  And besides, it has already proven effective in New York City and in other cities which have allowed principals to have budgetary control. 

    California's small class size experiment has proven unable to raise student achievement, as it ignored the key to student learning:  an effective teacher. HB 2261 follows California's lead, when it should be looking eastward to New York City.