As a parent of a special needs kid, my perspective may also be skewed the other way. I know that in a CBE classroom giving my kid the attention he needs is a bit of a zero-sum game; someone else is getting less one-on-one time. And there have been many times where it’s clear the teachers just don’t have the energy to meet him where he’s at and deal with it, so they just… leave him to his own devices. The ones who go above and beyond for him are the ones I’ll remember: they did more than their job to make sure one kid gets the help he needs, and I know they aren’t just doing it for one kid but for as many as they possibly can. And you can’t convince me that this isn’t hard work; it’s brutal. And it’s way harder if you have over 30 other students to also think about. It’s really common sense in my view: one on one teaching time is critical for many kids, and in large classes those kids will get less of it. Outcomes will suffer.
Sometimes it really is as simple as resources. Our children are the future of our society and it makes sense to invest in them. They aren’t drones who thrive on sameness and factory-style teaching in a system where the main lesson they can learn is to sit down and shut up and to get used to it because life sucks. That is how we get a generation of mediocre adults with no critical thinking skills.
That’s not to say that I put much stock in test scores per se. But by any measure, achieving good learning outcomes is going to be way harder with fewer teachers and more students.
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