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

students is a lot for any teacher to
handle. Israel is on the left side of the
inverted-U curve.
Now think back to Connecticut. In the
schools Hoxby looked at, most of the
variation was between class sizes in the
mid- to low twenties and those in the
high teens. When Hoxby says that her
study found nothing, what she means is
that she could find no real benefit to
making classes smaller in that medium
range. Somewhere between Israel and
Connecticut, in other words, the effects
of class size move along the curve to the
flat middle—where adding resources to
the classroom stops translating into a
better experience for children.
Why isn’t there much of a difference