Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Public Education Funding in Oregon

Sigh... From The Oregonian: In class size, Oregon ranks No. 49

Should We Care? This is one of the biggest debates in labor/education economics:








My reading of the literature is that for traditionally disadvantaged individuals (e.g., low income US and developing countries) it matters more than for non-disadvantaged students - for whom it might not matter much at all. Overall, however, the mass of evidence seems to pretty clearly support the idea that large classes are detrimental to student achievement. But, as always, much more work needs to be done.

A thought: if Novel H1N1 is bad this year with significant absences, might this provide a natural experiment to study the class size effect in Oregon schools?

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