Crowd control is not only for sporting events, concerts, and angry protesters. It’s now required every single second of the day in some of our public school classrooms.

I teach in Las Vegas, where class sizes are the largest in the nation. Just last year, I stood frozen in the middle of my classroom. It was filled to capacity with five-year-olds, including seven with IEPs and behavioral issues. 

Students were dumping crayons, throwing books, and crawling under the tables. I felt like a first-year teacher again, white-knuckling it until the dismissal bell and praying I wouldn’t scream, “Will you ALL please shut up and go home?” I had lost all control.

This scenario isn’t rare or unique. All over the country, teachers are hanging up their whistles, renting U-Hauls, and leaving the public school classrooms they once loved being in.

What happened to reasonable class sizes?

I started my teaching career at an at-risk school in the mid-1990s, on the heels of class-size reform. My room had 17 third graders, and it was a great learning environment. What a wonderful way to feel!

Fast forward to 2018. My friend Nicole Gonzalez is in a middle school math class with 40 students packed together in an 800-square-foot room, tight as sardines in a can.

“With these large numbers, it has become increasingly more difficult to recognize students that may be struggling,” Gonzalez wrote to me. “It’s almost like they are invisible.”

It’s true. The more students in one room, the louder, smellier, and more distracting it becomes. Individual teacher-student interactions and meeting student needs are impossible.