Earlier this week we posted some new data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on teachers’ working hours, pay and demographics around the world.
At a reader’s request, let’s now look at the size of primary and secondary classrooms in these countries.
While this particular reader was unhappy with the congestion of the typical American classroom, American schools aren’t really much more crowded than educational institutions in other developed countries. An average of 23.1 students fill the typical American primary school classroom, which is just above the O.E.C.D. average of 21.4 students. In lower secondary schools, the average American class size is 24.3 students, compared with 23.9 across the O.E.C.D.
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Note that some of the countries with some of the world’s highest achieving student bodies — like Korea and Japan — have the biggest class sizes. Perhaps this has to do with cultural differences; societies with Confucian roots may have stricter hierarchies within the classroom, so perhaps it’s easier (or more expected) for a single teacher to manage a bigger group of students. But presumably there are other explanations, too. (Readers?)
The charts above are for public and private institutions. But class sizes for these types of schools vary, so here’s a breakdown of class sizes for each group of institutions, in primary education:
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In the United States, the typical public primary school classroom has 23.6 students, more than four more students than the average private primary school classroom (19.4 students). Across the O.E.C.D. the public-private class size gap is narrower, at 21.4 students per public primary school class and and 20.5 students per private primary school class.
Surprisingly (at least to me) there are plenty of countries where public primary classrooms are smaller than private primary classrooms. Countries that fall into this category include Chile, Japan, Australia, France, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Austria, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Luxembourg.
Perhaps private schools in such countries fulfill a different role than they do in the United States, where many parents seem to see them (rightly or wrongly) as a means for the wealthy to escape overcrowded public schools. The government and individuals interact with education systems in different ways in different countries — and the portion of students who attend public versus private schools varies by country, too, which could also skew the data.
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