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The world of education never hurts for reforms. The real difficulty is deciding on the best policies when resources are limited. This issue of Brookings Papers on Education Policy addresses two of the most prominent reforms on the current agenda: reduced class size and school size.

For more than a decade, an influential camp of education experts has argued that smaller classes would bolster student achievement. More recently, a "small school" strategy has arisen, alleging that schools have grown too big and impersonal to educate effectively. Such reforms seem to offer structure, safety, discipline, and a sense of community that larger, more bureaucratized settings cannot provide. In a world of limited resources, however, difficult trade-offs are inevitable: ramifications of these reforms could include increased costs, a dilution of teacher quality, and reduced capacity for maintaining a broad range of programs and specializations.

Politicians and school reformers often tout the potential benefits of small classes and schools while paying scant attention to the difficulties of downsizing. The contributors to this volume argue that while such strategies sometimes produce results, pursuing either strategy in a blanket fashion is likely to prove wasteful. Deciding when and where to implement these reforms is the true challenge, and this volume offers sound guidance to that end.

Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He is the coauthor (with Michael J. Petrilli) of No Child Left Behind Primer (Peter Lang, 2006) and editor of Educational Entrepreneurship: Realities, Challenges, Possibilities (Harvard Education Press, 2006).

Tom Loveless is director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of the annual Brown Center Report on American Education and coeditor (with Julian Betts) of Getting Choice Right: Ensuring Equity and Efficiency in Education Policy (Brookings, 2005).