Mitt Romney: Class Size & Private Schools

In another of Romney’s “what is alright for me, but not alright for you” moments he spoke about how class sizes for students and for teachers really doesn’t matter with regard to achievement levels.

A post over at DailyKos explains it well, and has some good links…like the one to the private school where Romney sent some of his boys…guess how many were in their class?  Answer: No more than 12…can you imagine teaching a class with 12 students, and all of them coming from upper-achieving well-to-do families….sounds nice huh?

These parents thought class size mattered for these kids. Just not for other people’s kids.

Mitt Romney’s visit to a West Philadelphia charter school Thursday didn’t go so smoothly, with teachers there challenging Romney’s view that class size doesn’t matter:

“And I can’t think of a parent that would say I would like my teacher to be in a room with a lot of kids and only one teacher,” Morris continued. “So I’m wondering where this research comes from.”

Though he seems not to have mentioned it Thursday, Romney certainly felt that way—he sent his own sons to a private school that advertises an average class size of 12.

In fact, educational double standards really were the theme of the day: As Jed Lewison pointed out, a bright spot of Romney being challenged on class size was that he “largely escaped being mocked” for doing his “charter schools are awesome” event at a school in the kind of academic trouble that, were it a traditional public school, would have had Romney thundering about our broken education system and the horrors of teachers unions.

About these ads