David and Goliath

Gladwell turns his attention to Shepaug Valley Middle School in Connecticut. Although the school was originally built to accommodate large numbers of children during the baby boom, it now has a very small enrollment rate, since the surrounding area’s population has shrunk considerably. There are, for example, only 80 children in the sixth grade. Given these statistics, Gladwell asks readers a question: “Would you send your child to Shepaug Valley Middle School?” To address this question, he reminds readers that the story about Ranadivé suggests that common conceptions of advantages and disadvantages are not always accurate. He then guesses that the majority of parents would like to send their children to Shepaug Valley because of its small class sizes, since the general assumption is that this is an advantage.

Many people believe that smaller class sizes are desirable, Gladwell notes, adding that multiple governments have made substantial efforts to reduce the number of students in each class. In the United States, 77 percent of the population agrees it would be better to use tax money to decrease the average class size than to raise teachers’ salaries. Considering that Americans rarely agree upon something so unanimously, this is quite significant. The question remains, though, of whether or not students actually benefit from smaller class sizes. To address this, Gladwell looks at the class sizes at another middle school in Connecticut from between 1993 and 2005. The numbers fluctuate greatly, but what experts have found is that there are no “statistically significant effect[s]” of the changes in class size.

Gladwell acknowledges that there have been many studies on class size, and all of them have yielded different results. Some find that there is a positive correlation between class size and student success, but just as many studies find that there’s a negative correlation (meaning students actually do worse in smaller classes than in larger classes). For all intents and purposes, then, it makes sense to say that smaller class sizes don’t meaningfully impact how well students perform. And yet, the United States hired roughly 250,000 new teachers between 1996 and 2004 in order to reduce the average class size, meaning that taxpayer costs rose by 21 percent. Despite all this spending, though, Gladwell argues that reducing class size isn’t the advantage everyone thinks it is.

Switching tracks, Gladwell introduces an unnamed character, whom he identifies as one of the most successful and powerful people in Hollywood. This executive grew up in Minneapolis, where he worked hard as a kid to organize a conglomerate of neighborhood children to shovel his neighbors’ driveways, contracting these workers out and taking a cut of their pay. This entrepreneurial spirit arose from the working-class values the boy learned from his father, who emphasized the importance of hard work and admonished him when he left lights on or acted lazily. When he was 16, he worked at his father’s scrap-metal business and found the work unbearably taxing and boring. He now thinks his father hired him to encourage him to “escape” a life of manual labor. When he went to college, he started a laundry service for his rich classmates, then attended business and law school.

The Hollywood executive eventually started working in Hollywood (of course) and became so successful that he now has a mansion in Beverly Hills and owns both a private jet and a Ferrari. Gladwell upholds that the executive has a unique understanding of money because of his working-class upbringing in Minneapolis. The executive fears, however, that he won’t be able to give his children the same kind of understanding of the value of money, since they are growing up surrounded by wealth and could technically have whatever they want—if, that is, he gave it to them. He tells Gladwell that people underestimate how difficult it is for rich parents to raise children, suggesting that there’s most likely some place between poverty and extreme wealth that is ideal for childrearing. 

Gladwell acknowledges that people are hesitant to sympathize with millionaires complaining about their wealth. At the same time, he points out that the Hollywood executive’s concerns about parenting underscore an important idea that he believes most people intuitively grasp—namely, that “more is not always better” when it comes to how money affects parenting. Needless to say, it’s difficult to raise children in poverty, since parents need certain resources to make their jobs easier. Struggling to make enough to care for a child is exhausting, emotionally taxing, and time-consuming. And yet, Gladwell asserts that more money doesn’t always make it easier to raise children. Instead, “money makes parenting easier until a certain point—when it stops making much of a difference.”

Researchers have found that money stops profoundly affecting happiness around a household income of $75,000. Once a family makes more than that amount, they stop noticing substantial differences. For example, if one family makes $75,000 and their neighbors make $100,000, their neighbors will perhaps be able to own a nicer car or go out to restaurants more often, but the extra $25,000 won’t make it significantly easier for them to be “good parents.” Keeping this in mind, Gladwell proposes that a graph of the relationship between parenting and wealth would show a curved line that slowly plateaus after reaching the $75,000 mark.

Continuing his argument about the effect of money on parenting, Gladwell says there’s a certain point at which wealth starts making parenting harder again. This is because it’s difficult to say no to children when the kids know their parents could buy them whatever they want. In working class families, parents need only explain that it’s not financially possible for them to buy a pony, but wealthy parents have to find ways to explain that although they’re capable of purchasing a pony, they’re not going to do so. In accordance with this, a proper graph of the relationship between parenting and wealth would be what’s known as an inverted-U curve (a graph with a line that resembles an upside-down U). On the left side, the graph shows a positive correlation between wealth and parenting, but the line plateaus once it hits the $75,000 mark and then begins to plunge.

Returning to the topic of academia, Gladwell proposes that the relationship between student success and class size is also an inverted-U curve. To explain this, he suggests that, though class sizes have no effect on academic achievement when classes are in a “medium range,” they do have noticeable effects at either end of the spectrum. For instance, there are classes in Israel with as many as 40 students, and these classes perform worse than other classes in Israel with only 20 students. In Connecticut, though, some teachers have found it even more difficult to effectively educate children in extremely small classes. This is because it’s helpful to have enough students to start exciting discussions or to break into even groups. Plus, small classes sometimes feel too intimate for shy students, therefore making it harder to draw them out of their shells.

The downsides of small classes are so stark that Teresa DeBrito—the principal of Shepaug Valley—actively worries about the school’s shrinking enrollment, despite what most people think about the benefits of small classes. A former teacher herself, she fondly remembers teaching a class of 29, though she admits it was quite a bit of work. Still, this larger size made it easier for her to get students excited or involve them in more interesting discussions. Of course, she doesn’t want all of the classes at Shepaug Valley to have 29 students, but her fear of extremely small cohorts underscores the fact that people have become blindly obsessed with the idea that smaller classes lead to greater success—something that isn’t always true.

To illustrate Teresa DeBrito’s point, Gladwell references an elite private boarding school in Connecticut called Hotchkiss. The tuition at Hotchkiss is $50,000 per year, and the administration proudly boasts about its “intimate” class sizes. Even though research shows that classes can be too small, Hotchkiss continues to abide by the idea that smaller is better. This, Gladwell says, is because the school has unquestioningly accepted that “the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages.” This, however, is untrue, as evidenced by the successful Hollywood executive’s difficulty in raising his children.