Just Right: School Size Matters
By Ann Marie Moriarty
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 7, 2002; Page H09
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 teaches fifth and sixth grade at Friends Community School in College Park. Her son and daughter attended small secondary schools -- Thornton Friends and the Ethical Society's Nora School (60 students). "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 on-site 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 this spring 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.
It's unreasonable to expect school district administrators to read these reports and set about dismantling large secondary schools. Even if the entire district were behind such an effort, it would take years to sort out.
So it's not surprising that most school districts -- including those in the Washington area -- are responding to school-size research with strategies for making the big schools they already have feel smaller and function more like smaller schools. Those strategies include establishing:
• Houses: groupings of a smaller number of students (typically close to 100) with a team of teachers. Such teams are frequently used in the middle-school environment.
• Academies: often programs with a career focus, with course offerings and staff that support that focus. Many, if not most, area school districts have established career academies within selected high schools.
• School-within-a-school: programs with a full course of study and a certain amount of autonomy in curriculum, staffing and budget. Examples include Banneker Academic High School at Ballou High School in Washington (which also houses a number of charter schools within existing schools) and the H-B Woodlawn program, which is physically separate from, but organizationally part of, Washington-Lee High School in Arlington.
• Small autonomous schools sharing a building: For example, the former Blair High School in downtown Silver Spring was renovated into two schools, Sligo Creek Elementary and Silver Spring International Middle School; and in the Old Mill complex in Glen Burnie, two middle schools and a high school share a building.
Montgomery County has just received a Smaller Learning Communities grant to assist with the establishment of the Downcounty Consortium of five schools, each with signature programs/academies. The county also has made a commitment to the concept of the ninth grade academy, a "house" approach that keeps ninth-graders together with teams of teachers.
Not One Size Fits All
While the benefits of small schools seem persuasive, there are some students who thrive in larger schools. Typically, these tend to be kids whose parents are well off and strongly involved in their children's education. Such students are most likely to benefit from what most people recognize as one of the main advantages of a large school: the increased variety of course offerings. Another perceived plus for large schools is the likelihood that the student body will reflect greater diversity.
Parents with children at a very large high school should look at this research as a set of signposts pointing to areas in which a smaller-scale, more personal approach can make a positive difference in their children's education. And they should recognize that those improvements are likely to cost more than the current approach. Furthermore, big changes take time and experimentation. Just as you can't double or halve a recipe and expect it to taste the same as the original without some tinkering, school systems will have to spend time fine-tuning the programs that they hope will bring small-school benefits to all kids.
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