Class size and school time are two sides of the instructional time coin that just keep coming up in education policy and research debates. As more states relax class size restrictions in an effort to cope with rapidly shrinking budgets, the discussion has become more urgent, but still seems to fall into a black and white “less or more” argument.
Are there innovations that will move beyond this? Are the experiments with class structure and schedule coming out of the federal Investing in Innovation and Race to the Top grants the right way to find a path forward?
This morning at Education Week’s Innovation Insight leadership forum here in Chicago, I’ll be talking with three practitioners who are really in the weeds on this—Terry Holliday, Kentucky education commissioner, Peter C. Gorman, superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, and Regis Fields, education consultant with the non-profit Education Resource Strategies. Subscribers can join the discussion virtually here, or let me know in the comments below how education research can play a role here.