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How do we ensure poor students attain grade level proficiency? Increasingly, policymakers are latching on to class-size reduction as a cure-all, imbuing smaller classes with the power to eradicate intractable achievement gaps. While shrinking class size can be a good thing (after all, what parent wants their child in larger classes with fewer teachers?), research suggests it’s no quick fix for struggling schools.

But that’s not stopping educators and lawmakers in North Carolina. Since 2000, the State Board of Education and the General Assembly have implemented class-size reduction with little effect on student performance. The Charlotte Mecklenburg School Board has just jumped on board after reviewing the 2007-08 school budget, adding another 40 teachers to high-poverty elementary schools.

If simply padding teaching staff at low-performing or low-income schools isn’t the answer, what is? For starters, we need to get back to basics, reexamining the kinds of teachers we put in the classroom. Rather than blithely ascribing to a "strength in numbers" philosophy of education, we need to pay more attention to teacher quality. Having more teachers doesn’t make a school successful, but having good teachers assuredly does.

That said, there’s a lot we can do to maximize teaching effectiveness and give low-income and struggling schools the leg up they sorely need. A 2006 report from the Hamilton Project proposes a system that would up-end current conventions, instead weighting flexibility and teaching effectiveness above teaching credentials. This makes good sense – after all, efficacy in the classroom is generally unrelated to teaching certification.

Specifically, the report’s authors advocate a raft of changes to identify good teachers: hiring more competent, but uncertified, instructors; making it increasingly difficult for bad teachers to earn tenure; providing bonuses to highly effective instructors at disadvantaged schools; establishing evaluation systems to measure teaching effectiveness; and implementing data systems to track student performance and teaching effectiveness over time – all steps in the right direction.

In addition to ensuring teachers perform in the classroom, we need to make certain they’re prepared when they first get there. According to education researcher and analyst Kevin Carey, our country has a long history of laxity when it comes to teacher preparation. Carey cites the September 2006 report from the Commission of the Future of Higher Education finding “a remarkable absence of accountability mechanisms to ensure that colleges succeed in educating students.”

Since congressional passage in 1998 of the Higher Education Act, states have been required to submit an annual list of low-performing teacher preparation programs (determinations of performance levels are left up to the state to decide). But 31 states have never identified a single teacher preparation program as at-risk or low performing. Carey concludes that state "accountability systems deliberately circumvent the spirit of the law." Obviously, our teacher preparation programs could use an infusion of academic rigor. That won’t come at the hands of more federal regulations, however. But it will grow out of an education ethos that demands highly trained teachers and rewards those who produce in the classroom.

Clearly, we have work still to do when it comes to preparing and utilizing our teaching work force. But if we’re serious about closing achievement gaps (and maximizing success for all students), we already have a promising blueprint for reform. Here’s what that might look like: freeing educational institutions from mandates, relying on results (i.e. student achievement), relaxing teacher certification requirements, and rewarding highly effective instructors.

Policy debates over the merits of class size reduction are sure to rage on. But they won’t change the bottom line: success in the classroom hinges on the effectiveness of the teacher, not the number of students warming the seats.

Lindalyn Kakadelis is Director of the North Carolina Education Alliance, a resource network providing North Carolinians with comprehensive data on topics affecting K-12 education. This aritcle also appears in Lindalyn’s Journal on the NCEA Website.