A fascinating op-ed today in the NY Daily News written by the chief litigator in New York City's Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) Case, Michael Rebell. For those of you not familiar with the landmark CFE case, it is by many accounts one of the nation's greatest legal victories at the state level on behalf of underserved children, the result of which was an approximately seven billion dollars in increased state level funding will be distributed to schools over the next four years (nearly $3 billion of which will go to New York City Schools and the majority of the balance to other urban school districts).

One nuance of the CFE case is that it didn't win a simple "blank check" for New York state's children. Instead, each district receiving new dollars will be required to complete a "Contract for Excellence" showing how they spend the money on five critical factors that were found to be most likely to impact student achievement: improving the quality of teachers and principals; reducing class sizes; increasing student "time-on-task"; restructuring middle and high schools; and providing kindergarten or pre-K for the full day.

However, the state legislature recently added a new requirement to the spending bill. It requires the New York City school district to state a specific goal for just how much class size will be reduced over the next five years. While doing so might seem a reasonable goal (albeit a clear nod in the direction of the powerful NYC teachers unions), Rebell makes a strong claim that this additional class size requirement may in fact serve to torpedo the whole bill. As Rebell writes:

As co-counsel for those who brought the landmark Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, I know how important class size reduction ultimately will be. But improving the quality of our teachers and principals must be priority No. 1. And a premature class-size reduction mandate is likely to lower the general quality of the teaching staff at a time when we desperately need to be raising it.

His argument is bolstered by the difficult experiences and negligible outcomes of two states which recently enacted expensive, ambitious class-size reduction proposals, California and Florida. In California, because the reduction proposals were instituted prior to teacher quality enhancement proposals (a sequence which Rebell suggests should be reversed), a wave of teacher openings were filled by low-quality, low-performing teachers--particularly in the districts where high qualitity teachers were needed most. A US News and World Report article noted how the California class size plan led to the hiring of "Nordstrom clerks, a former clown and several chiropractors," and a California department of education report found that, "Particularly troubling was the proliferation of emergency-permit teachers in high poverty areas."

The implications of this debate are critical for hundreds of thousands of New York school children, but they also have meaning for children across the country. It is one of the most challenging and, as I talk with students around the nation, least clear policy debates in the education reform world. If you have a choice between hiring more teachers, which is expensive but easy to do and easy to prove, or spending comparable resources in a harder to prove, much more complicated effort to hire better teachers, which should we do? The policy wonks side with the latter camp, and unions with the former, but where should America's students and parents side?