The National Coalition of Small Schools

 

"It's relationships, not programs, that change children.  A great program simply creates the environment for healthy relationships to form between adults and children. Young people thrive when adults care about them on a one-to-one level, and when they also have a sense of belonging to a caring community."
-Bill Milliken Founder and vice-chairman of Communities in Schools

Just Right: School Size Matters

By Ann Marie Moriarty

Goldilocks had it easy. She could tell right away which chair was too big, too small or just right. The question of whether a school is too big, too small or just right for a middle-school or high-school student is a lot more complicated - and one that rarely makes it onto the radar screens of most students or parents.

While parents know they should be thinking about class size, student-teacher ratio, extracurricular activities and test scores - to name just a few concerns - few wonder about school size and what it might mean to their child. If they did, they'd learn that school size has an impact on all those other issues. It may be the biggest educational issue that parents aren't fretting about.

But educational researchers are. They've been looking at school size in a serious way for at least the past 20 years. And the clear message from their results is that smaller schools work better for most kids.

Some background: Most of the nation's current high-school students attend schools with 1,000 or more students. For the last few decades, the national trend has been toward consolidating small school districts and building ever-larger secondary schools - especially in areas where land is expensive and in short supply. Also, one big school costs less to build per child than multiple small schools.

Those all sound like "right" answers. But researchers studying school size would tell us that they're answers to the wrong questions. The right questions have to do with the community's goals and aspirations for its young people.

Marcy Seitel has lots of experience with small schools. She has taught in a variety of small schools, and her son and daughter attended small secondary schools - Thornton Friends and the The Nora School, both in Silver Spring, MD. "If your goals," she says, "are to put lots of physical resources in one place - big computer labs, gymnasiums and such -- then you build a big school. But I think education is about the teaching relationship.

"If you have 150 essays to grade, you can't give much feedback," she says. "If you have 30, you can." And beyond that, she says, "I wanted my kids to be in a place where they have relationships with adults, where they have mentors who are willing to be present to their moral questions, who see those kinds of questions as important and not something to be ignored because they're outside the curriculum."

Smaller schools foster such relationships -- and they also produce results that are easier to measure. In her recent review of current research on school size commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, local education and youth services consultant Fran Rothstein concluded that at the high-school level, small school size has more of a positive effect on student success than small class size. Here are some of her findings:

Academics: Students in small schools tend to perform as well as, or better than, students from larger schools in terms of "grades, test scores, honor roll membership, subject area achievement and higher-order thinking skills."

Equity: Small schools are more effective in closing the achievement gap between higher income, mostly white and Asian students and students from lower-income and minority families. Poverty and poor achievement are 10 times more likely to go together in a big school than a small one.

Attendance: Students in small schools come to class more regularly and drop out less often, and that effect is even greater for low-income and minority students.

Extracurricular activities: There is a "direct correlation between school success and involvement in extracurricular activity." Big schools offer fewer opportunities to participate. There are only so many places on the sports teams, the chorus, the band, the cast of the school play or the staff of the school paper. In a big school, only the superstars get to play, while in a small school, just showing up can get a kid onto the team or into the club - and give that child a reason to feel good about coming to school.

Attitude: Students in small schools have a more positive attitude toward school, and there is less "truancy, classroom disruption, vandalism, aggressive behavior, theft, substance abuse and gang participation."

Violence: A national panel of "school security experts convened by the U.S. Department of Education favored reducing school size" -- as opposed to gun control, metal detectors or onsite policing - as "the most effective method of reducing school violence."

But the best argument in favor of small schools, according to Rothstein, speaks directly to the "economy of scale" argument that's used to support the big-school option. "If you look at cost per student, a large school is more cost-effective. But if you look at cost per graduate -- or cost per success, if your goal is to teach kids and not just keep them somewhere - the costs are quite similar."

Perception Counts

So researchers think small is beautiful. What do parents, teachers and students themselves think? That's what Public Agenda tried to find out with its "Sizing Things Up" study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They found that in all but a handful of areas, parents of students in small high schools rated those schools higher than did parents of students in large schools. "Small-school parents," said the report, "are considerably happier with their schools on social issues such as civility, student alienation and parent-teacher engagement." Large-school parents are about twice as likely to say that students are "falling though the cracks" or that dropping out is a serious problem in their schools. There were similar responses among teachers, but large-school teachers were more likely to identify problems with overcrowding, large class size and students "being passed through without learning."

Students of both large and small schools appear to be "upbeat about their education," with two-thirds of students surveyed in both large and small schools saying they are happy with their schools. Slightly more students in small schools than large ones said their teachers know a lot about their subject matter, treated students with respect and took a personal interest in students.

 

Deborah Meier cites seven reasons why small schools work:
1. Governance. Communication is easier when the whole staff can meet around one common table.
2. Respect. Students and teachers get to know each other well.
3. Simplicity. Less bureacracy makes it easier to individualize.
4. Safety. Strangers are easily spotted and teachers can respond quickly to rudeness or frustration.
5. Parent involvement. Parents are more likely to form alliances with teachers who know their child and care about his or her progress.
6. Accountability. No one needs bureaucratic data to find out how a student, a teacher, or the school is doing. Everyone knows.
7. Belonging. Every student, not just the academic and athletic stars, is part of a community that contains adults.

 

Links to Member School Web Sites

1. The Advent School (Boston MA)
2. Aspen Country Day School (Aspen, CO)
3. Cambridge Friends School (Cambridge, MA)
4. Eagle Rock School (Estes Park, CO)
5. Foothills Academy (Wheat Ridge, CO)
6. Friends’ School Boulder (Boulder, CO)
7. The Karuna School (Lincoln, MA)
8. The Nora School (Silver Spring, MD)
9. Lowell Whiteman Primary School (Steamboat Spring, CO)
10. York Country Day School (Grantley, PA)

 

Other Resources

• The Case for Small Schools
  Making the Case: Gates Foundation
  Gates Foundation Small Schools Brochure
  Small Schools, Safety, and Learning PDF
  Small Schools Statistics
  Small Schools and School Climate
  The Small Schools Project
  School Size, School Climate, and Student Performance
  Research Reports on School Size
  School Size: Safety and Learning