As a member of the World Affairs Council Houston, I was invited to tonight’s event which featured Mitt Romney. For those of you who don’t live in the US, Romney was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2008 United States presidential election, winning several caucuses and primaries but ultimately losing to John McCain.
A large part of his speech was rhetoric about the political situation, you can fill in what was said yourself. However there was an interesting item about education. Nearly always when lawmakers want to improve the quality of education, it is suggested to reduce the number of students in the class rooms. Where in most countries the number of students in a class room is set on a federal level, in the US the local school board determines this number.
When Mitt Romney was Governor of Massachusetts from 2003-2007, he was approached by lobby groups to reduce the maximum number of students to increase the quality of education. Because of the way the school districts are organized, there was a way to check the ‘class size’ hypothesis. Comparing all school districts with their class size vs. the performance of the students, no correlation could be found. According to Mitt Romney the quality of the teacher determines the eventual quality of the school not number of students in one class.
Unfortunately he didn’t have supporting evidence for his teacher hypothesis or how he determined the quality of the teachers.
No comments:
Post a Comment