Class size

In recent teacher strikes the big concern has been wages but a close second is class size. The two big school districts that I work in have a total of 6,500 employees and 3,500 are teachers. Total number of students is 45,000 so the student to teacher ration is 12 students per teacher but this is very misleading because of special ed students. These student require sometimes one to one teaching so the real class size for most teachers is 25 to 30. A teacher would normally be able to handle this except for the small percentage of students who are disruptive. In a typical classroom the teacher will spend 80% of his time on 20% of his students and this is similar to what managers in industry experience.