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

concluded that there were only two
places in the world—Greece and
Iceland—where there were “nontrivial
beneficial effects of reduced class
sizes.” Greece and Iceland? The push to
lower class sizes in the United States
resulted in something like a quarter
million new teachers being hired
between 1996 and 2004. Over that same
period, per-pupil spending in the United
States soared 21 percent—with nearly
all of those many tens of billions of new
dollars spent on hiring those extra
teachers. It’s safe to say that there isn’t a
single profession in the world that has
increased its numbers over the past two
decades by as much or as quickly or at
such expense as teaching has. One