Do small class sizes increase your chances of having weak teachers? Joanne Jacobs found a report from a Canadian newspaper that suggests so. The logic goes like this: if you lower enrollments, you've got to add extra classes, so then you need more teachers to staff them. And the more teachers you need, the more likely you'll get people who are average or below average in front of the room.

Hmmm... sounds sensible. And yet, if this were true, then any large institution with a large pool of teachers would be filled with poor teachers, no matter what the class size. But that's not the case -- larger places tend to draw the best teachers into their ranks, because they can often afford to pay higher salaries. In any case, the logic doesn't follow; the dynamic is more complicated than can be predicted. A quality of a teacher's work functions independent of the talent pool. And besides, one counter-argument might assert that the smaller the class size, the better the teacher is able to manage student needs and the less overworked they'll be by paper grading. In fact, even if that teacher starts out below average, if they are allowed to grow and develop "on the job" in a classroom that is manageable and not overcrowded, then perhaps over time the teaching pool as a whole will increase in quality. But if you put a batch of poor teachers into a terrible working condition, it follows that they'll likely remain poor for a very long time.

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