Go to Zillow.com, the No. 1 trafficked web site for real estate in the United States.
Then type in “Greenwich, CT” and click on any listing. There, you will be directed to information about the schools in Greenwich. Ultimately, you will be linked to even more detailed information on a site called education.com. And there you will see an important metric for how to compare schools: teacher-pupil ratio.
The same is true for other school comparison sites.
Whether we like it or not, this is one of the major benchmarks for measuring education performance. And education performance has an indirect impact on home values. Why else would every real estate web site on the planet link to education information?
It seems to me that common sense would dictate that a smaller teacher-pupil ratio would result in better education. There is copious research to support that. There is also research showing the the biggest difference comes in lower-income areas.
In its unanimous support last week to remove hard caps on minimum classroom sizes in Greenwich, the school administration and the school board said they would not use their new-found flexibility to increase classroom sizes significantly but to only temporarily manage down the onerous effects of having to hire expensive teachers when classroom sizes increase by one or two students.
So why do I have this palpable unease?
