ATLANTA – The Atlanta Board of Education has busted through the myth that small class sizes are crucial to student success, and will instead spend its money on attracting and hiring the best possible teachers through higher wages.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that school leaders will keep their class sizes at the state maximum. That decision allows them to not only reward existing educators with their first general pay raise in six years, but it’s believed the higher salaries will help attract top job seekers to the district.

Atlanta school board members see the move as a no-brainer.

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“Would you rather have a large class size with a great teacher, or a small class size with a not-so-great teacher? The choice between the two would hopefully be obvious,” school board Chairman Courtney English told the news site.

The choice is obvious to those who’ve been following the growing body of research on class sizes, which shows lower teacher-student ratios don’t really have much impact on student learning. For instance, two Harvard researchers released a study in 2011 that found small class sizes and higher per-pupil spending make little difference in a school’s ability to effectively teach students, the Washington Post reports.

Instead, the researchers found that things like “the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations” have far more impact on a school’s effectiveness.

Despite the evidence, class size reductions are a typical demand of teacher union leaders during contract negotiations. It’s easy to understand why: Unions like small classes because they require the hiring of more dues-paying teachers. That, in turn, means more political influence for the unions at the state capital and in Washington D.C.

Parents also like smaller classes because they want their kids to get as much one-on-one instruction as possible. Cozy classrooms simply feel “right” to them.

In a perfect world, schools would have both high-performing teachers and small, intimate classes. But the reality is that there’s a finite supply of money and truly effective teachers. That means school leaders are forced to make trade-offs.

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It’s almost never a bad decision to spend money on quality instead of quantity.

School leaders in Atlanta understand that, and their students will be the better for it.