Lots of Alpha, Not Much Numeric 
By Martin Harris

Among the many "facts" I learned in grade school and duly recited back at test-time was the notion that special written symbols for numbers were an Arabic invention, as our aide-deprived teacher solemnly instructed all 30 of us seated in our bolted-to-the-floor-in-rows chair-desk furniture units. Not now; today, the 9th-century Hindu origin of a numerical script is widely-publicized in places like Wikipedia and perhaps even grade schools. Before "Arabic" (more correctly, Hindu) numerals, the Greek and Roman West struggled with letters representing numbers, (the Greek invention of gematria partially filling the gap) and even today in the year MMX (did I mention that the Hindus also gave us "zero"?) we enjoy the use-difficulty they create. Now we have symbols for both letters and numbers, so we call our language alpha-numeric. We also call our leaders "alpha’s" to distinguish them from us lesser beta’s, gamma’s, and delta’s, and periodically they make speeches instructing us on how to welcome governance by them.

One such (annual) class was presented (no real-time student questions allowed) by Vermont Governor James Douglas early last month as his gubernatorial swan song. His language was heavy on budget matters in alpha terms but, for the single-largest budget item, light on the essential proof demonstrable in numeric terms. That budget item is public education, whose own alpha-type leaders have remarkably pursued a strategy of increasing staff numbers in the context of decreasing student numbers, so that taxpayers in the year MMXI will be paying some $14,000 per pupil in school taxes, direct and indirect, to fund a pupil-teacher ratio of 11 to 1 and a pupil-staff ratio of 5-to-1, both the lowest in the Nation. The alpha politician proposed a modest increase in p/t ratio to 13-to1 and posited a cost saving of "as much as $100 million", but without the numerics to make that thesis at all convincing. Here’s the math. It’s better than he says.

Vermont now spends about $1.4 billion annually for public education, 60% or $840 million allocated to direct instruction. Increasing class size (typically quite close to overall p/t ratio) from 11 to 13 reduces instructional costs by 2/11 or 18% of the allocated $840MM, which is $153 MM, remarkably close to the $150MM red-ink amount recently identified by the Rutland Herald as the current State deficit. Parenthetically, increasing class size to the national average of 16-to-1 would increase class size by 5 students or almost half, and 5/11 of $840MM works out to $382MM, more than twice the State deficit. What impact would a class size increase, whether 2 or 5 or 7 (in 1980, class size averaged 18) have on student achievement? That, too, has a numeric answer, which you can see in easy-to-grasp graphic form on the educational studies web site of MW Hodges, where reading scores show a horizontal line in the 280 range (out of a possible 500) from 1970 to 2000, while class sizes were shrinking from 23 (1970) to 13 (2009). Eric Hanushek, senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, argues: "Well, student-teacher ratios, over a 35-year period, have fallen to 17.3 in 1995 from 25.8 in 1960. Yet, overall student performance has not improved, nor have U.S. students shown any improvement in international achievement tests." Numeric logic suggests that an educational-policy strategy which resulted in no discernable upward achievement results in one direction (ever-smaller class size) will similarly have no discernable impact if modestly reversed (slightly larger class size). Other researchers –Caroline Hoxby at Harvard and Richard Vedder at Ohio University defied peer pressure to publish their findings, but have since found it necessary to leave academia for think-tanks—came to identical conclusions.

It’s traditional of course, for the alpha politician presenting a "State of the State" lecture to put his comments more in alpha (literal) terms than in numeric (mathematical) terms, even though most of the subject matter is numeric –budgets, for one traditional example—and less is alpha or verbal or non-numeric –non-traditional marriage, for one non-traditional example. But surely a numeric point could have been and should have been presented in visual-graphic terms that Golden Dome folks could have understood without having had to –ugh-- do actual numeric math.

You could, I suppose, express a non-numeric concept like cynicism on a numeric –say, 1 to 10—scale, and so I will exercise scribal privilege here to express just that opinion of the alpha politician’s unreinforced suggestion for a modest 2-student increase in class size, and readers can determine where on the scale my comments fall. The present administration (nor prior ones, for that matter) never raised a serious regulatory proposal in the class size area, preferring not to mention that a State Education Department legislatively empowered to set maximum class sizes could just as appropriately set minimum levels per teacher, nor has such an abhorrent-to-the-voting-teacher-bloc notion ever been raised under the Golden Dome. I would opine, having seen no previous governmental interest in the subject, that both the Executive and Legislative branches have only symbolic, non-serious interest in it now.

May subsequent history prove my cynicism totally wrong. On a numeric scale, that would be written as the Greek- Roman- and Franco-Germanic-deprived, Hindu-invented, Arabic- and then Western-Civ-appropriated zero.

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights