With the understand that you were asking the above rhetorically, of course it’s a problem. Broad’s tentacles reach into every crevice of the public commons, with the goal of complete privatization. His unabashed plutocratic trappings differ very little from his close allies on the fringe-right including names like Walton, DeVos, Bradley, Koch, Scaife, and Tilson.

Few people have caused more damage to the public education system than Eli Broad. For Ms. Weingarten to be associated with his vile machinations in any fashion is a frightening betrayal of the educators she is supposed to serve, and in turn, the communities served by those educators.

This is a result of several factors: poverty, family life and society. Another: testing culture. We are pushing down 1st and 2nd grade skills to kindergarten. Back in our day, what did we learn: social skills, cooperating with other, etc, etc. Kids today need that more than ever before. Screen time is breaking down the social skills of our society.

The last couple of years I have had to use the term “middle school behavior” more and more to my 7th grade students. There is a lack of interpersonal skills that we are not teaching our kids, both at home and in the early grades.

I have a relatively small classroom size this year – 20 2nd graders. This includes 9 ESL students (7 of whom have no one in their home who speaks English), 2 EC (exceptional children – special needs) students, 5 students who are receiving counseling through social services, 2 students who have lived off and on in homeless shelters, 1 student with severe anger issues and a 5 page behavior plan, 5 students who live in more than one household (3 of those in more than 2 households), 3 students who have been prescribed medication for ADD/ADHD (and are inconsistently medicated), 3 gifted and talented students, 13 students in RTI tiers (Responsiveness to Instruction — also called Response to Intervention) and 1 with a serious health condition.

Obviously these student “sub-groups” overlap.

I have no assistant and am overwhelmed with caring for all of the special needs of these wonderful children. Paperwork to support all their issues is time-consuming.

As you might imagine, the varied issues that come up in the classroom throughout the day prevent optimal learning for each child. Discipline – although it is challenging – is only one of dozens and dozens of concerns. You could remove discipline issues from the equation and my day would not be much different.

I consider myself lucky to have such a small class. The likelihood of having a class this small next year is very low. We typically have 24 students in our K-2 classes.

And the make-up of each of the classes at my Title I public elementary school is similar. Of course in 3rd through 6th grade the numbers are higher – 26-30.

I would dare ANYONE criticizing public education in this country to spend, not a day, but a week or more in a REAL classroom as a teacher, not an observer.

While we do need time to focus on students individually, the bigger problem is that teachers are not able to effectively to the GROUP. Too many of our kids today are not prepared to participate effectively. Students are unruly, disruptive, disrespectful and disrespectful and that has an effect on the entire class. Whether there are 15/20/30 kids in the class, just a few undisciplined students can ruin the learning environment for everyone.

And, what’s even worse is that in an economy where we are already strapped for funding, where do you think we’ll get the money to build additional schools, hire more teachers, pay for more infrastructure if we want smaller classrooms? Just ain’t gonna be, folks. The BEST thing we can do is improve the classroom maangement/discipline aspect where teachers ARE able to manage and teach the larger classrooms. We just are NOT going to get to that “nirvana point” where teachers are able to have classrooms of 12-16 in our public schools. When the group cooperates and behaves, there is ample time, energy and attention to teach more children. But even Romney isn’t talking about that…

For more on this discussion including references to research and data, please visiti http://corinnegregory.com/blog/2009/08/03/its-not-the-size-of-the-classroom/ While we can continue to reduce class sizes as much as practical, we have to deal with this other part of the classroom size issue if we’re going to get anything done.

- Corinne Gregory
Author, “Education Reform and Other Myths”
http://www.corinnegregory.com