She took three years of high school math at William Howard Taft High School and graduated 30th in her class of about 360 last June.
If students with limited English skills were to be taught in classes of the average national size -- about 17 pupils per teacher -- up to 290,000 teachers would be needed for them, said Dr. Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, a Harvard education professor and an expert on immigrant children.
There's a terrific scene in Class Of 92, the documentary about Manchester United's FA Youth Cup winning side of that year, when its six most famous players, Ryan Giggs, David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt and Gary and Phil Neville, are sitting in a restaurant reminiscing about the ways in which Alex Ferguson would tell them they'd been dropped from the team.
"Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost," Thrun told me.
Class sizes in kindergarten through third grade hover around 25, even though the Tennessee STAR study, conducted in the 1980s and renowned in education circles, found that small classes of about 15 during those early years can make a big difference for students' long-term outcomes.
In each school, one or two classes of about fifty students were selected at random.
There were only three seats left in a class of about 10 people so I quickly scanned the room and picked a seat next to a guy who looked friendly and cute.
In May, another class of about 300 is expected to be sworn in, and there may even be a fourth class of 300 sworn in before the year is out.
