Class sizes and the dead hand of history

THESE arrangements are the upshot of a history beginning in the 1950s when babies of the postwar boom flooded into schools, and stayed and stayed, soon producing intolerable working conditions for students and teachers. I know, because I was there. In 1952 I was one of sixty-three students in a Grade V class in suburban Adelaide. My first (1964) class as a teacher contained only forty students, a concession to the fact that I was first year out.

I was one of those teachers (and, later, teacher educators) who stormed against the circumstances in which we were asked to work. Like every teacher I wanted to put a limit on the number of students we had to cope with in any one class. Indeed my first-ever public speech was from the floor of a mass meeting protesting against big classes and small salaries. I was an active supporter of the campaign to get what was so obviously necessary by turning our genteel "professional association" into a proper union, a transformation symbolised its entry into the ACTU.

There is no doubt that class sizes had to come down, and they did. Exact figures are hard to come by except in the proxy form of student:teacher ratios, which fell from around twenty-four in my day to around fourteen by the 1990s. Maximum class sizes range from the low twenties to thirty or so, depending on the age of the children, the subject being taught and so on. The average class size is of course markedly lower than the maximum and most classes are smaller than the average.

Nor can there be any doubt that this was a solution that produced a number of problems. One of them is that fixed maxima make it difficult for schools to do within what Gonski wants to do between schools – put most resources to work where there is greatest need. Within schools, that means some small classes, some big, and some in between, which would in turn mean trouble with the employer or the union or both.

The larger problem, however, is that reducing class sizes is very expensive and not very effective, particularly when compared with the alternatives. Per pupil expenditure in real terms was in 2003 around two-and-a-half times the level when I was teaching, but there is no evidence to suggest commensurate gains in student learning or welfare, and some evidence to suggest that in key areas (literacy and numeracy) there have been no gains at all.

As for teachers' status and salaries, and for standards of entry to their professions, these are as low as they were in my day, or worse, particularly now that opportunities for women are so much better than they were then. Small classes have been purchased at teachers' expense.

Small classes may well stack up as a cost-effective tactic in some educational circumstances, as Zyngier's summary of the evidence suggests. But as a strategy, class size reduction is exhausted. Its further pursuit will be futile, and counter-productive.

As the struggle to find the Gonski dollars demonstrates, the days are over when we can just add more dollars every time a new problem or deficiency turns up. This policy by cumulative incrementalism is viewed by most of those involved as muddling through, getting us there, bit by bit, eventually. To the contrary: new problems and new tasks and new costs are piling up faster than improvements. In the coming years the most defensible reason for asking for new money will be to lubricate the more effective allocation of money already in the system.

But even if there were money on tap there would still be an unanswerable case for putting it to work where it works best. That represents responsible stewardship of public monies, hardly a right-wing virtue. Finding better ways to use what we have is the most credible possible basis for any claim for more. It is to face the facts of the past: just keeping on keeping on isn't working any more. It is also to face facts of the future hinted at by emerging virtual and hybrid secondary schools. It is to do the best we can by the kids, and by the people who teach them.

One of the many hazards facing Gonski is that his $6.5 billion will be used on more of the same old same old. It is a weakness in Gonski and one of several blunders by the government that they failed to use the promise of new money as a lever on employers and unions to free up the old.

That education academics, teacher organisations and the profession as a whole are so blind to these realities and imperatives is a tribute to the power of paradigms (see also the "rabbit-duck illusion" of thought and practice to dominate minds long after the circumstances of their production have disappeared. The English historian and public intellectual Tony Judt said of social democrats that they are focused on defending the gains of the past fifty years to the exclusion of working out what should be the gains of the next fifty. He could have been thinking of the debate over class sizes.