Student to Teacher Ratio

My field mentor once made the comment that any student being gone makes a big difference in how the day feels. Even just one of them being gone makes the classroom easier to manage and calmer. The feel in the classroom when some of the class are in pull-out for reading or for ELL is much more relaxed and on task. When visiting classrooms this week the teacher-student ratio has been much smaller, and the atmosphere has tended to be more relaxed. I visited one kindergarten classroom with only 9 students. Over a summer I taught 18 months to 36 months old toddlers. When there were six I could manage, but when there were nine it became extremely difficult to control the class. Also in college I have gained a lot more from classes that have a 12 to 1 student-professor ratio--classes larger than this, even in a college setting, are harder to learn in. All this to say, while student teaching and in observing classrooms I have noticed the number of students in a class affects the atmosphere of the class. I wonder what decreased class size could do for the overall performance of our nation over time.

I know this is not something teachers can directly control. But I wonder if our policy makers and long-term plans could look at the benefits and costs of making the student-teacher ratio smaller across the country. Would it be worth it? All the teachers I have talked to are still fairly exhausted, and classrooms will also take effort to manage. Are the benefits of a low student-teacher ratio worth the trouble of providing teachers and classrooms for such a ratio?