Passage Summary: Smaller classes are popular but don't actually help students that much. Since money is tight, we should stop spending it on smaller classes and instead use it to get better teachers, which is a better use of the budget.

Conclusion: Public education funds should be redirected from reducing class sizes toward recruiting and retaining higher-quality teachers.

Reasoning: Reducing class size provides only minimal benefits, and because funds are limited, the government must prioritize the most productive use of every dollar.

Analysis: The author is assuming a 'Missing Link' here: that spending money on better teachers is actually more productive than spending it on smaller classes. If hiring better teachers turned out to be even less effective than reducing class sizes, the argument's recommendation would fail. To find the necessary assumption, ask yourself what *must* be true for this trade-off to make sense. The argument requires that the benefit-to-cost ratio of teacher quality is superior to that of class size reduction.