Class Size Around the World

By Catherine Rampell

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.

DESCRIPTIONSource: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
DESCRIPTIONSource: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

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:

DESCRIPTIONSource: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

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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Professor N. MaryAnn September 11, 2009 · 5:20 pm

Small class sizes are not the cure all, that school proponents advocate. The small class sizes in some OECD countries have nothing to do with mandates or quality improvement. Russian and Italian and Greek populations are severely contracting for complex societal reasons. Children are rare and pregnancy unwanted. Schools are not particularly strong despite the better teacher: student ratios. These societies will have other problems as the average age increases.

I think the Asian classrooms are larger because there is more discipline and less tolerance for behavior deviance. They are also less afraid to seat students by their academic rank. ie. No.1 student -first seat, followed by Number 2 and down the rank to jno. 40. It is humbling but realistic and motivates the last student to try harder. This would never fly in American classrooms due to ‘self-esteem’ issues. The bad kids sit in the back and undercut and distract teacher time,

Susan Cummings September 11, 2009 · 5:36 pm

I think the better cultural comparisons would come from looking at GB, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. This information will make sense only in the context of the performance of students in other developed countries with similar, western cultures.

And the Mexico anomaly is based on the choices Mexican families make regarding private schools. Private schools are so much more valued than public schools that parents will put up with larger sized classes.

Another factor which must be examined is campus size.

Radha September 11, 2009 · 5:37 pm

Hi,

In India, the class size is 65! and a high success rate too!
But then, the parents rally around the children in education, ie the parents are the primary teachers to the children.

Thanks,

just_the_facts September 11, 2009 · 5:41 pm

just an observation…but on issues of REAL significance, such as education, the peanut gallery is amusingly quiet…*crickets*

twnNca September 11, 2009 · 5:43 pm

There were always 50 students in all the public K12 schools I attended in Taipei back in the 80’s and 90’s. I am sure the class size remains similar today. I had never had any problem learning with 49 other students. Class size is just an excuse for poor education!

David September 11, 2009 · 5:50 pm

I’ve done some studying of japanese classrooms, and there is often a second adult in the room, which makes the large class size misleading.

No matter, it’s the behavior of our students and the amount of time discipline and motivation requires of teachers that take away from instuctional planning and delivery.

Phil M September 11, 2009 · 5:57 pm

I think it is actually is a cultural thing that makes the Eastern Asian countries have large class sizes. I think Korea and Japan focus on primary school more as preparation for future education, rather than in Western society, where parents expect their teachers to be role models, and free childcare.

Dismayed September 11, 2009 · 5:57 pm

An academically homogeneous group of well-behaved, motivated students will succeed no matter the class size. Class size itself is irrelevant; it’s the composition of students and their states and traits that underlies success or failure.

Lewis B. Sckolnick September 11, 2009 · 6:04 pm

Who wants to be compared with the countries of northwestern Europe. Those countries killed 8,000,000 of their own in World War I and then went after my people the Jews in World War II. Bunch of very sick folks.

synapse September 11, 2009 · 6:05 pm

My mom grew up in Taiwan, and there were routinely 50 kids in a classroom. She said it made it easy to play hooky- she just got one of her friends to say “Here!” for her (in Chinese) during roll. The teachers, with that many kids, didn’t know everybody’s voices, especially after hearing only one word. (The trick was that the friend had to say a crisp, immediate “Here!” If the friend was tentative, saying, “Here?” the teacher would figure it out and punish both students.) My mom went on to university, though, and eventually taught at the university level before moving to the States.

Parents and society enforced that children had to respect and obey their teachers, even if they were factually wrong. Teachers were very respected members of the community and were paid well. Standards were much stricter, and all children were expected to adhere to them. The standards were also clearer and more focused- teachers knew exactly what they had to teach, and taught it. The school day was longer, I think. There was much, much more high-stakes testing- multiday, all-day tests to get into high school as well as college. (My mother had a stomach flu and vomited on one day during the exams to get into college, and only got a 70 that day instead of around the 90s she got in every other subject. There was no chance for a retest. She didn’t get into the prestigious, free public university system and had to pay to go to a private one.) Because of that, and because of the strong tradition of Confucian learning, there was also a lot more memorization- children who didn’t understand what they were doing or saying could still do it and say it. Another outcome of the testing was that students were “tracked” much earlier, and non-academically-oriented (or learning-disabled, or dyslexic, or whatever) children were marginalized from a very early age.

@Prof. MaryAnn- you’re praising the fact that in Asian societies, teachers put unmotivated students in the back, but you’re scolding American teachers who do the same?

mari September 11, 2009 · 6:22 pm

Private schools in other countries may value a lower student:faculty ratio, but be hampered by different private funding models. One reason my private school was able to achieve an astounding 8:1 student:faculty ratio was because it could count on returns from its considerable endowment, private gifts to the annual fund, and the occasional outside grant in addition to tuition and fees. But private educational institutions in other countries may be more likely to rely on tuition alone, or supplemented by only meager outside funding sources.

In Japan, for example, private schools are frequently outlets for students who could not succeed in the academically stronger public schools.* They to lack the resources we associate with private schools in the U.S., as even the good ones may be crippled by lack of endowment and reliance on tuition receipts.

*(This is not always true–there are some excellent private schools in Japan, including a few famously excellent ones. But in general public education is considered the higher caliber option.)

contrary dave September 11, 2009 · 6:24 pm

Visited sister high school in Dalian, China. Walked into classroom with 60 kids paying rapt attention to the teacher. Found out why when being toured around the area. Alternative is studying hard and going to college is to get to build highways with a pack and shovel and the like. Bascially if you were not college material, you didn’t go to high school.

Other interesting one was a computer classroom that was all boys. Asked if they segregated computer classes. “No, girls are just not as interested in that sort of thing”.

I think we come off as dumb because we compare the top 100% of our students with the top 20 or 30% of many other countries.

Maybe if we tought the seamy side of history and literature, students might be a lot more interested.

Professor N. MaryAnn September 11, 2009 · 6:43 pm

@10, Synapse
Regarding Student Seating:

It is different if students are assigned seats and do not end with their mates. The free seating is in an average American inner-city high is equivalent to the Lord of the Flies with unbridled youthful excess leading to mini posses and cliques.

Lisa September 11, 2009 · 6:45 pm

In Germany, where I grew up, only a very small percentage of students attended private schools. And it is true that the private schools tend to serve a different function: at least in my experience the only kids that went to private schools went there because they were problem students (either because of lagging academic achievement or because of behavior issues). The perception was that parents send their kids to private schools to buy the grades that the kids couldn’t get on their own in public schools. I’m not sure why private schools would have systematically larger class sizes though. Maybe a small sample issue? Or maybe the private schools actually have less money to spend? German public schools tend to be well funded and private schools are generally not as extravagantly expensive as in the United States.

Lawrence September 11, 2009 · 6:47 pm

Class size is a distant third to teacher quality and students’ home life (read motivation).

pdxtran September 11, 2009 · 7:01 pm

Asian classrooms get by with larger class sizes because the students are more disciplined and parents instill respect for teachers and learning from an early age.

Parental attitudes in the U.S. have changed since I was a child in the 1950s. I remember well-behaved classrooms all through elementary school. In our family, my parents made it clear that if we committed any punishable offenses at school, we would get an extra dose of punishment at home for annoying the teacher and shaming the family. (And I’m not even Asian.)

At some point between then and now, parents have become their children’s unconditional defenders. Nowadays, if the student misbehaves, it’s because the teacher is boring or doesn’t understand the little angel’s utter specialness. We were never allowed to use boredom as an excuse for misbehavior, but even parents of college students think that’s an adequate defense nowadays.

Anyway, if one has to deal with American children and youth, class size is extremely important. The teacher is faced with an extreme mixture of behavioral standards, and if there are too many students, the class becomes uncontrollable. In a large class, the students feel anonymous and take that as a cue to carry on private conversations and cheat on tests. In a small class, the teacher can figure out what makes each student tick and keep an eye on everyone at once.

I used to tutor street kids for their G.E.D.’s, and I found that most of them were stuck at about 4th grade level in math. I asked them what had happened at that level to prevent them from further learning. All of them said that long division and multiplication of two- and three-digit numbers had confused them. Their highly dysfunctional parents had been unwilling or unable to explain these arithmetical processes, and the teacher, stressed out with a roomful of thirty children from dysfunctional families, had neither the time nor energy to help them.

That’s why I believe that small classes are essential in an American context, especially in schools with large numbers of poor and dysfunctional families. These children and youth desperately need individual attention, or all but the most exceptional will drift out of school.

Michael K. September 11, 2009 · 7:09 pm

Class size means nothing. I went through grade school in the USSR, one of 42 kids in the classroom. By fifth grade I had mastered math that I wouldn’t see in the US until eight grade, and had five years of English and Ukranian in addition to the obligatory Russian.

It is certainly true that the atmosphere was authoritarian and fairly unpleasant. But the standards and expectations were extremely high and usefully indifferent to social status or intellectual capacity. It was simply assumed that everyone could and would, with sufficient effort, master the material being taught. There was also a meritocracy of sorts: the highest achievers were held out as models and earned perks. Finally, the state and the family were deeply involved: underachievers received visits from the authorities who wanted to see what was going on at home that impeded the students’ progress.

Most of this would not go over too well in the U.S., and I would not advocate it. But as a parent, a professional educator and spouse of a grade school teacher, it is crystal clear to me that our approach is seriously wrongheaded. Schools of education (my university has one of the most reputable ones) are a joke, teaching drivel and ideological fantasies about self-esteem and pedagogical “techniques” designed not to disturb the students’ fragile psyches. Our classrooms are staffed by ignorant, if well-meaning, teachers. Our curricula are absurdly slow-paced, demanding little of students. And our social expectations are distorted by a worship of individual uniqueness, irrational fear of psychic injury, exorbitant consumerist entitlement, and indifference to ignorance.

Math is great example. Students who encounter difficulty in math class panic and are immediately reassured by their parents that “math is hard,” “I didn’t like it either.” “it isn’t really necessary in everdyday life.” But math is always hard, even for the gifted student. It is a highly peculiar language for representing highly abstract relationships and therefore requires cognitive effort. It is not okay to give up on it because the going gets tough; on the contrary, that’s when real learning can take place. It is not the teacher’s job to premasticate the material and to make sure students’ senses of themselves are not disturbed. They must be disturbed—that is what learning does.

Marilyn September 11, 2009 · 7:15 pm

I have been teaching a world language for 35 years in a public school. My first classes had more that 30 students in them. They were well behaved, motivated and homogeneously grouped. Now I cringe if I have a class over 26. Of course now we are heterogeneously grouped due to self-eteem issues. In addition, each class has several special education students for whom I must differentiate instruction even though it is understood that they will be unable to go on to the next level. The icing on this cake is that today’s child has been raised to be the “center of the universe”. It is extremely challenging to teach 26 “centers of the universe” who (parents included) feel that you are only there for them!

gattrell September 11, 2009 · 7:52 pm

When I was in school here in the US we ALWAYS had classes between 30-36 students, and they taught more subjects than they do now. I think it is that the kids these days are harder to control.

cjp September 12, 2009 · 12:32 am

Self-esteem killed education. I went to kindergarten in a private basement, went to first grade in an old church with ridges in tables so we couldn’t write without poking holes in the paper, and went to second through sixth in an 1888 school, forty to 45 students per class. Colorado was too full and hadn’t enough school space. In high school, we had seven rows of seven or eight. The end of the alphabet sat right next to heaters. The students had to go down the aisles sideways. This is the sixties after a new school addition for the high school. I had only three substitute teachers in all my school years; it was my sophomore year of high school. Teachers presented the info and we had to take it in. Now, we enable students to do less and less. It is so wrong to put students who can’t do algebra into AP classes just because parents think they deserve equal treatment. When is it the brighter students’ turns to learn? It is so wrong to put behavior disordered problems into regular classrooms as too much time is spent with the child who shouldn’t be there. Why not put all students who want to learn in one class. Let’s see the U.S. compete globally then.
In the seventies, German kids went to school 8 to 1 and also went on Saturdays. At nine years of age, they were split for gymnasium (high school) or industrial tracks. At twelve, a boy studied Greek, English, and German. His sister studied French, English, and German Math was emphasized. Even the Germans don’t do six days a week now. The U.S. ranks low internationally, now, but high on the amount of money spent per student. Our priorities are out of order.

Bill Towne September 12, 2009 · 12:30 pm

Could you also show (from the same OECD report) the number of hours teachers in the US are in front of students compared to the rest of the world? In an effort to save money, our planning/teaching ratio is severely too low.

As a teacher, I would love to have twice the time that I have to plan so that I could make my lessons a bit better, plan with colleagues, and discuss individual student performance and ideas to turn kids around with other teachers.

With 1 hour of planning for,say, two or three completely different lessons (since we may have more than one class of the same subject), my ratio of planning to delivery is 1:3. If the same ratio was usedy for reporters in the New York Times, the paper would probably be six-inches thick each day, but most of it would be filled with dribble.

Unfortunately, some evenings at home upon reflection, I think that my lessons were nothing but dribble. But I can’t feel too sorry for myself, because I have to prepare for three hours of lessons for the next day.

Bill Towne September 12, 2009 · 12:36 pm

And my other thought is that it might be more interesting to look at classes for an “average” student….say one at the 50th percentile in tests and without any special education services. This could control for the proportion of kids in “special needs” classrooms that lower all of our averages.

In the district where I teach, my kids are in Kindergarten classes of 25, elementary classes of 28, middle school classes of 32, and high school classes of 35. However, the student/teacher ratio that is reported is 19:1. Because of the now large and ever growing special education programs, the average seems much lower than it is. When there are classes of 35, 35, 35, 35, and 3, the average seems much lower.

So, if the United States has a much larger proportion of special needs classes, as I suppose it does, the “average” kid in the United States probably attends each class with 30 or so others.

leonie haimson September 12, 2009 · 1:19 pm

There are movements to reduce class size in many parts of the world mentioned above, including Japan and Hong Kong, where there was a rally with nearly a million people on the issue last year.

The US does not shape up well in comparison with other Western developed nations in terms of class size, esp. if you look at our large urban school districts, where many students are high-needs and further disadvantaged by much larger class sizes than in the rest of the nation.

You also have look at the distribution of class sizes as well as averages. Here in NYC, about half of our middle school and HS students are in classes of 30 or more; and nearly 7500 Kindergarten students in NYC were in classes of 25 or more last year.

Gunther Stur September 13, 2009 · 7:21 am

Money is not everything, but it matters. I have my doubts about this statistics: I have 3 kids in school here in Germany, and class sizes are rather around 30 in all schools nearby; teachers on average are very bad, cannot be fired, and not surprisingly the kids don’t learn much (as evidenced by the Pisa study: Germany ranked No.23 out of 26 in the first study). So classs-sizes matter, but even more so, the quality of teachers (which may tend to rise with pay and -even more important– with the reputation the profession enjoys). In Austria, where I grew up, a teacher is still well paid and well regarded (Pisa rank No.6). The problem in the US (where I also lived for 6 years) is accountability, competition and parental choice (or rather lack of all those), all of which is fiercly opposed by the teachers’ unions –which no administration of the past many decades has ever dared to take on. Fortunately, a country as free as the US is developing solutions: I hear good things about charter schools, but haven’t had any personal experience. I would be curious to hear from people with kids in one of those.

Colorado voice September 13, 2009 · 12:26 pm

The earlier comments about marginalization at an early age are very pertinent. My understanding is that there is a great distinction between A-lelel track (e.g., in the UK) and tech school track. In many of these cultures, going to college is an investment of the entire family with the college attendee “lifting” the family with them.

The US education system focus on equality of outcome as opposed to euqality of opportunity marginalizes education. You cannot achieve equality of outcome.

And before the teachers unions get all the blame, recognize that the Bush Administration NCLB was designed to create a perception of failure. Many of the requirements were for over 50% of all school children top be above average – as judged by normed (i.e., graded so 50% of all students are below average).

The are many great public schools – there are many very poor charter schools. The one thing we must recognize is that the “privatization” advocates are looking for the same result as deregulation of the electricity markets – once the public option is gone it can never be rebuilt.

The big elephant in the room is the fact that arts, sports and extracurricular funding has been wiped out by one cause – the increasing mony requirement of special education. Our local school district spends over 14% of its budget on 3% of the students. If you look at NYC, there are over 1 MM studeents in the schools and 82 M special education students – just over 7%. The city of NYC budget for 2003-2004 showed the following expense structure:

General population:

$9.3 Billion total
$11,272 per studnt

Special Ed:

$2.72 Billion total
$32,924 per studnt

That is 22.6% of toal budget on 7% of the student population.

I am not saying it isn’t justified – I am saying that the education funding issue in this country is really a mental health funding discussion whether anyone recognizes.