David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

billions of dollars on class-size
reduction did so, in large part, because
of the results of STAR. But STAR was
far from perfect. There is strong
evidence, for example, of an unusual
amount of movement between the large-
and small-class arms of the study. It
seems that a large number of highly
motivated parents might have succeeded
in getting their children transferred into
the small classrooms—and
underperforming children may have been
dropped from the same classes. More
problematic is that the study wasn’t
blind. The teachers with the smaller
classes k n e w that it was their
classrooms that would be under scrutiny.
Normally in science, the results of