[yequalsx]

Whether or not the magic number is 20 or 50 or 60 the point is there isn't much room for productivity growth. The U.S. may gain a one time increase in productivity growth by doubling the size of classrooms but the inherent problems addressed by the parent will still exist.

[bugsy]

Who knows. With Khan Academy you have one guy teaching 1 billion people. It works pretty well too. Maybe we can get rid of most teachers and school districts. It's not like giving them more money has ever yielded better results before, it's clearly fallacious to claim it will do so now.

[yequalsx]

With Khan Academy you have one guy providing supplemental help to motivated people. You do not have 1 billion people be taught. Do you know of any cases where Khan Academy (with nothing else) has taught a person enough about a subject so that person could pass a final exam for a corresponding course at a university? I really haven't heard of this and would like to know. My question is not a snarky one.

Actually, there are lots of a cases where underfunded schools improve student performance with more money. There is a strong correlation between school funding level and student test scores.

[tokenadult]

There is a strong correlation between school funding level and student test scores.

I'd be happy to look at the examples you can find citations for. In my state, Minnesota, school funding was largely equalized statewide in the 1970s. That political feat was lauded as the "Minnesota miracle," and got our then governor on the cover of Time magazine as a can-do, innovative governor. With special funding adjustments for high-poverty areas and special funding for school districts to promote racial integration, the inner-city school districts of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the two largest school districts in Minnesota, actually get MORE funding per pupil than most other school districts in the state.

But after a generation of this experiment, the results are disappointing. On the whole, schools anywhere in Minnesota are probably better than schools in most places in Mississippi, which is why many observers are guessing at the macro level that funding makes a difference.

But within Minnesota, both the Minneapolis and St. Paul districts are laggards in academic achievement, and most disturbingly to people like me who hope for all school pupils to learn and thrive, the "achievement gap" between "white" pupils and "pupils of color" is wider in Minnesota than almost anywhere else. That last observation is especially disturbing because Minnesota has no history of de jure school segregation or of impairing the civil rights of black people. (The first black graduate of the University of Minnesota graduated before my late grandfather was even born.) Something is seriously awry in the Minneapolis Public Schools, despite adequate funding, and when I read in the local newspaper, as I did a few months ago, that a union-endorsed candidate for the Minneapolis School Board has NEVER lost for as long as the schoolteacher union has been organized as a collective bargaining unit, I think that more than just funding levels are a problem here.

[yequalsx]

The bad schools in Minnesota tend to be much better than the bad schools in Mississippi. There will still be variation amongst school districts because there are lots of factors involved (not least of which are cultural factors). But what adequate funding to is to raise the average (and median) but not eliminate the variation. Well, at the very minimum, eliminating the variation would take more money than society is willing to pay.