Pete Sessions: “We need to be sure we are not spending $2.4 billion a year in encouraging a further investment in classrooms and…”

“We need to be sure we are not spending $2.4 billion a year in encouraging a further investment in classrooms and overhead for schools on a policy that sounds good--that is, to reduce class size even further than we have reduced it in the last 30, 40 years--when we may not be receiving an educational benefit from it. I do not know about all the studies, but I know this professor examined 277 of them as of 1994. He found no benefit statistically proven for smaller class sizes in education. Isn't that stunning? It is almost counterintuitive. But that is what he found. No studies that I have seen have shown any dramatic improvement. So I think we ought to allow the local school systems a choice as to whether they want to go to smaller class sizes, improve their science lab, or have better teachers, more funding for top-quality teachers, more training for teachers who are weak. That kind of choice would be better for education. We need to be more humble in this body about what we think we know.”