Reward or punishment? Class size and teacher quality

The high stakes testing and school accountability components of our K-12 education system create an incentive for principals to behave strategically to maximize school performance. One possible approach is the adjustment of class sizes based on observed teacher effectiveness. Conceptually, this relationship may be positive or negative. On one hand, performance-maximizing principals may place more students in the classrooms of more effective teachers. But because administrators may have compensation constraints, it is also plausible that they may reward more effective teachers with fewer students in the classroom. This paper examines whether principals reward effective teachers by decreasing their class size or whether they increase the size of classes of more effective teachers as a means of enhancing the school outcome. Results overall indicate that more effective teachers do have larger classes. This result holds implications for prior policy studies of class size as well as for education policy more generally. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 859 396 0987. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (N. Barrett), [email protected] (E.F. Toma). 1 Tel.: +1 859 257 5741; fax: +1 859 257 1937. 2 See Hanushek (1997, 1999) and Krueger (1999).