David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Redwood City had to play them on their own court, and the opponents supplied their own referee as well. The game was at eight o’clock in the morning. The Redwood City players left their hotel at six to beat the traffic. It went downhill from there. The referee did not believe in “one, two, three, attitude, hah! ” He didn’t think that playing to deny the inbounds pass was basketball. He began calling one foul after another.
    “They were touch fouls,” Craig said. Ticky-tacky stuff. The memory was painful.
    “My girls didn’t understand,” Ranadivé said. “The ref called something like four times as many fouls on us as on the other team.”
    “People were booing,” Craig said. “It was bad.”
    “A two-to-one ratio is understandable, but a ratio of four to one?” Ranadivé shook his head.
    “One girl fouled out.”
    “We didn’t get blown out. There was still a chance to win. But…”
    Ranadivé called the press off. He had to. The Redwood City players retreated to their own end and passively watched as their opponents advanced down the court. The Redwood City girls did not run. They paused and deliberated between each possession. They played basketball the way basketball is supposed to be played, and in the end they lost—but not before proving that Goliath is not quite the giant he thinks he is.
    1  Roger Craig, it should be said, is more than simply a former professional athlete. Retired now, he was one of the greatest running backs in the history of the National Football League.

1.
    When Shepaug Valley Middle School was built, to serve the children of the baby boom, three hundred students spilled out of school buses every morning. The building had a line of double doors at the entrance to handle the crush, and the corridors inside seemed as busy as a highway.
    But that was long ago. The baby boom came and went. The bucolic corner of Connecticut where Shepaug is located—with its charming Colonial-era villages and winding country lanes—was discovered by wealthy couples from New York City. Real-estate prices rose. Younger families could no longer afford to live in the area. Enrollment dropped to 245 students, then to just over 200. There are now eighty children in the school’s sixth grade. Based on the number of students coming up through the region’s elementary schools, that number may soon be cut in half, which means that the average class size in the school will soon fall well below the national average. A once-crowded school has become an intimate one.
    Would you send your child to Shepaug Valley Middle School?

2.
    The story of Vivek Ranadivé and the Redwood City girls’ basketball team suggests that what we think of as an advantage and as a disadvantage is not always correct, that we mix the categories up. In this chapter and the next, I want to apply that idea to two seemingly simple questions about education. I say “seemingly” because they seem simple—although, as we will discover, they are really anything but.
    The Shepaug Valley Middle School question is the first of the two simple questions. My guess is that you’d be delighted to have your child in one of those intimate classrooms. Virtually everywhere in the world, parents and policymakers take it for granted that smaller classes are better classes. In the past few years, the governments of the United States, Britain, Holland, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, and China—to name just a few—have all taken major steps to reduce the size of their classes. When the governor of California announced sweeping plans to reduce the size of his state’s classes, his popularity doubled within three weeks. Inside of a month, twenty other governors had announced plans to follow suit, and within a month and a half, the White House announced class-size reduction plans of its own. To this day, 77 percent of Americans think that it makes more sense to use taxpayer money to lower class sizes than to raise teachers’ salaries. Do you know how few things 77 percent of Americans agree on?
    There used to be as many as twenty-five students in a classroom at Shepaug Valley. Now that number is sometimes as low as fifteen. That means students at Shepaug get far more individual attention from their teacher than before, and common sense says that the more attention children get from their teacher, the better their learning experience will be. Students at the new, intimate Shepaug Valley ought to be doing better at school than