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starbright
(3) Does not matter if class sizes > 20. Small class sizes do not help with student outcomes. There have been some good American statistical studies of this. The reason people think that small sizes help is because posh schools with better students and better teachers and more resources tend to have small class sizes.
This is anecdotal, but I'm married to a teacher and am friends with many teachers and administrators, and none of them seriously contend that smaller class size = better educated students. However, all of them want smaller class sizes, particularly at younger ages (pre-teen), because it is much less burdensome for the teachers, which might indirectly affect the quality of education at some point.
The largest factor to making education work seems to be the student's home environment. How invested the parents are, how many extracurricular academic programs the parents enroll the student in, economic background (is the kid hungry, safe, etc.).
In the US, we have a merit-based entry system for classes that are offered in junior high school (ages 11-14) and high school (14-18), but generally, not for the younger ages. I think where public schools fail is consistently teaching kids up from the lower programs to the higher ones. Seems like the same segregation between ages 11-18 in my experience.
As a side note, one of the things that really pisses me off as a parent that I never thought about pre-kids is how schools evaluate a child's aptitude for math:
**Kids are being tested on mathematic subjects that they have never been taught.**
I think it is ridiculous that a school evaluates a child's mathematical aptitude based on his/her knowledge of a mathematic subject, when in reality, whether or not the child knows the subject is entirely out of his/her hands - it's luck of the draw if they got the "right teacher" that taught the subject to them. That is so frustrating to me.
So I am constantly cramming with my kids for all these stupid mathematical aptitude tests, teaching the subject matter to them that I believe their teachers should be teaching them but aren't, so that they can be appropriately placed in the right group.
That is so ridiculously stupid.
I get into fights with my wife about this all the time. She says, "Oh, those kids are good at math, they know XXX." I'm like, "They know XXX because SOMEONE TAUGHT IT TO THEM! EVERYONE COULD KNOW XXX IF SOMEONE SAT DOWN AND TAUGHT IT TO THEM!" And she's like, "ASK ANY TEACHER, THAT'S HOW WE EVALUATE!" And the conversation goes into a death spiral from there.