I heard this story today on Market Place about Bill Gates speaking to the nation’s governors in Washington, D.C. (You can read his blog post and listen to the speech here). In short, Gates said that given a choice between decreasing class size and focusing on teacher quality school districts will get more bang for their buck by focusing on teachers. Gates took great pains to make it clear that class sizes approaching 40 were not acceptable, but made it clear that if given a reasonable choice we should focus on teacher quality. What’s more, he was careful to note that teachers needed more feedback to be effective.
On the blog there is a graph that shows student spending compared to NAEP scores from 1975 to 2007 (from about $5,000 in 1975 to about $10,000 in 2007). The graph shows a significant increase in per pupil spending but only modest NAEP gains during that same period. The graph does not cite its source or note whether the dollar values are relative (Gates also does not say during the speech). In relative dollars the $5,000 per student in 1975 would be $19,300 using the Consumer Price Index or $15,800 using the GDP inflator (http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/). In other words, this graph might be misleading.
Unfortunately, I think the graph distracts from Mr. Gates’s point, which is that we need to focus on the behaviors of the best teachers and transfer those behaviors to others.