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

States or other developed countries. In addition to cultural and political differences, Israel has a lower standard of living and spends less on education per pupil than the United States and some OECD countries. And, as noted above, Israel also has larger class sizes than the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. So the results presented here may be showing evidence of a marginal return for reductions in class size over a range of sizes that are not characteristic of most American schools.”
    For a discussion of the relationship between drinking and health as an inverted-U curve, see Augusto Di Castelnuovo et al., “Alcohol Dosing and Total Mortality in Men and Women: An Updated Meta-analysis of 34 Prospective Studies,” Archives of Internal Medicine 166, no. 22 (2006): 2437–45.
    Jesse Levin’s research on class size and achievement is “For Whom the Reductions Count: A Quantile Regression Analysis of Class Size and Peer Effects on Scholastic Achievement,” Empirical Economics 26 (2001): 221. The obsession with small class sizes has real consequences. The one thing that all educational researchers agree about is that teacher quality matters far more than the size of the class. A great teacher can teach your child a year and a half’s material in one year. A below-average teacher might teach your child half a year’s material in one year. That’s a year’s difference in learning, in one year. That suggests that there is much more to be gained by focusing on the person at the front of the classroom than on the number of people sitting in the classroom. The problem is that great teachers are rare. There simply aren’t enough people with the specialized and complex set of skills necessary to inspire large groups of children year in, year out.
    So what should we be doing? We should be firing bad teachers. Or coaching them in order to improve their performance. Or paying the best teachers more in exchange for taking more students. Or raising the profile of the teaching profession to try to attract more of the special kind of person who can excel in the classroom. The last thing we should do in response to the problem of there being too many poor teachers and not enough good teachers, though, is go out and hire more teachers. Yet that is precisely what many industrialized countries have done in recent years, as they have become obsessed with lowering class size. It is also worth pointing out that nothing costs more than reducing class size. It costs so much to hire extra teachers and build them classrooms in which to teach that there is precious little money left over to pay teachers. As a result, the salaries of teachers, relative to other professions, have steadily fallen over the past fifty years.
    In the past generation, the American educational system has decided not to seek the very best teachers, give them lots of kids to teach, and pay them more—which would help children the most. It has decided to hire every teacher it can get its hands on and pay them less. (The growth in spending on public education over the course of the twentieth century in the United States was staggering: between 1890 and 1990, in constant dollars, the bill went from $2 billion to $187 billion, with that spending accelerating toward the end of the century. That money went, overwhelmingly, toward hiring more teachers in order to make classes smaller. Between 1970 and 1990, the pupil-staff ratio in American public schools fell from 20.5 to 15.4, and paying for all those extra teachers accounted for the lion’s share of the tens of billions of dollars in extra educational spending in those years.
    Why did this happen? One answer lies in the politics of the educational world—in the power of teachers and their unions, and in the peculiarities of the way schools are funded. But that is not an entirely satisfactory explanation. The American public—and the Canadian public and the British public and the French public and on and on—wasn’t forced to spend all that money on lowering class size. They wanted smaller classes. Why? Because the people and countries who are wealthy enough to pay for things like really small classes have a hard time understanding that the things their wealth can buy might not always make them better off.

Chapter Three: Caroline Sacks
    The discussion of the Impressionists is based on several books, principally: John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (MOMA, 1973); Ross King, The Judgment of Paris