Smaller Is Better?

While newspapers spend copious space on class size -- an issue promoted by education unions wishing to expand membership -- research indicates that the more significant issue is school size. Education writer David W. Kirkpatrick discusses this dilemma:
We seem unable to learn from experience. This is particularly amazing in education/schooling which, of all fields of endeavor, is the one that professes to teach critical thinking and problem solving. Yet it seems unable to think critically and solve its own problems.

For example, class size. As has often been stated, class size does matter, but it depends on many variables - subject matter, type of students, teacher skills, teaching method, etc. The only guaranteed effect of smaller class sizes set at some arbitrary number regardless of all the variables is greatly increased costs. Unfortunately almost everyone buys into it, including parents, taxpayers and the general public. One review of 152 studies on class size found a handful, about fourteen, showed minor gains. About the same number showed negative results, while the great majority, about 125, found no difference.

On the other hand, literally hundreds of studies have shown that school size does make a difference with larger schools being less effective and efficient than smaller ones. For example, one study found that the average dropout rate for high schools with 2,000 pupils is twice that for schools of 600. At their annual conference some years ago, the National Association of Secondary School Principals adopted a resolution that secondary schools should not be larger than 600 pupils. Yet the public school establishment continues to build and maintain huge schools, some with as many as 5,000 pupils, with correspondingly weaker results.

Smaller Is Better -- The evidence is coming in: Smaller schools produce results by Hanna Skandera and Richard Sousa, Hoover Institution, No. 1, 2003. "A comprehensive review of 103 studies revealed the following: The academic achievement of students in small schools is at least equal to, and often superior to, that of large schools."

Smaller High Schools Proving to be Educationally More Effective by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, March 25, 2003. "[There is] growing movement to break big high schools into little pieces and never again let them get bigger than 600 students."


Robert I. Soare is a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago, a position that gives him a unique insight into the "product" delivered by high schools. On his website, he has written about the phenomenon of "gatekeeping" and "pyramiding" in large high schools, such as New Trier on the North Shore of Chicago's suburbs:

"[J]udging the school's success by the performance of the elite, rather than a broader-based group of students, leads to weaknesses like 'gatekeeping' and pyramiding.
"A national survey used the term 'gatekeeping' to mean 'faculty room jargon for offering hard courses only to the best students and finding something easy for everyone else.' New Trier ranked only 30th in this national survey on the breadth of AP (Advanced Placement) participation. Can't we encourage more 3 level students to take AP courses as other high schools do?
"The second weakness is pyramiding, which occurs particularly in interscholastic sports, but also in the performing arts and other highly competitive activities. New Trier Basketball Coach Rick Malnati in the Winnetka Talk, November 7, 2002, said 'Freshman year, the six feeder schools each have 25 of the best tryout, and we can only keep 24 or 25.' This is a reduction of the 150 potential athletes from the six feeder schools to only 25 places on the Freshman team. The situation is similar in Girls Volleyball. The students cut would often have made the varsity at many high schools around the country."
Prof. Soare has additional comments about pyramiding and gatekeeping on his page for parents.


Thinking Small ... Is downsizing the answer? by Laura Fording, Newsweek, September 22, 2003. This article is an interview with Thomas Toch, writer in residence at the National Center on Education and the Economy and author of "High Schools on a Human Scale: How Small Schools Can Transform American Education". The article starts, "Are smaller schools better for our kids? Many educators believe they are." One interesting exchange concerns large high schools in the suburbs: "[Newsweek] Is this happening as much in the suburbs as it is in urban areas?

[Toch] The focus at this point is on urban areas, although I think an increasing number of suburban school leaders are realizing that large comprehensive schools don't do well by most kids in the suburbs either. People who run schools in the suburbs think they are doing well because a higher percentage of their kids go to college. Well, the fact of the matter is that those kids are going to college not because they are getting a better education, but because they come from more advantaged families. The problem, in my view, is no less acute in the suburbs than it is in the cities, but it will take some time to convince people."

Dumbing Down By Sizing Up by Craig Howley, The School Administrator [American Association of School Administrators], October 1997. Subhead: "Why smaller schools make more sense if you want to affect student outcomes." The article warns of efforts to further consolidate schools, giving details on these principles: "First, very few before-and-after studies of consolidation exist. ... Second, consolidation does not seem to save money. ... Third, small schools seem to be especially productive for poor kids. ... Fourth, increasing school size doesn't reliably produce better curriculum. ... Interest in the benefits of small schools and small districts has grown stronger over the past decade. Some proponents contend all schools need to be small. This seems to me to be an overstatement. Some large schools (up to 1,000 or so students) probably can exist in very affluent communities without harming children. What's clear is that extremely large schools serve no one particularly well ..."


Why We Need Small Schools, Parent Power [Center for Education Reform], October 1999, Vol. 1, Issue 5.


The May 1998 issue of Catalyst (a magazine focusing on school issues in Chicago) was devoted to the topic of school size. The cover said it all: "Smaller is better."

Smaller is better by Veronica Anderson. "Those three words sum up stacks of studies that have produced one of the most solid findings in school research: All other things being equal, elementary schools with fewer than 350 children are likely to be more successful than larger ones."
Small school by design: identifies different design strategies for creating smaller schools
Characteristics of Chicago's elementary facilities: statistical summary of Chicago schools by size
Research sampler: quick review of a few key studies on school size



Let Lawmakers Discover Smaller Schools by Thomas Dawson, Bridge News, December, 1999. "...cutting class size is a hit among politicians of almost every stripe. Despite spending billions on class-size reduction at the federal, state, and local levels, recent evidence suggests policymakers should have focused more attention on smaller schools, not smaller classes."


"Dollars and Sense: The Cost-Effectiveness of Small Schools," Knowledge Works Foundation, September 2002. Even though people may appreciate the benefits of small schools, some argue that the cost of such schools is prohibitive. This detailed analysis replies that small schools are very much cost-effective, and that small schools can be built and operated in cost effective ways.


Small Schools Are Cost-Effective, Yet communities keep building larger and larger schools by George A. Clowes, School Reform News, January 1, 2003: "A new review of research on school size concludes investing in smaller rather than larger schools is a wise move when the cost per graduate is taken into account. In making the case that small schools are not cost-prohibitive, the report identifies educational and social benefits of small schools and contrasts these with the negative effects large schools have on students, teachers, and members of the community."


The Problem of the Megaschools by Anna Quindlen, Newsweek, March 26, 2001. This excellent article is not online, but see the following two links.


In reviewing violence in schools, this author points to one cause, quoting from the Quindlen article mentioned above: "The Megaschool: James Garbarino of Cornell, an expert on adolescent crime, said that if he could do one thing to stop violence, 'it would be to ensure that teenagers are not in high schools bigger than 400 to 500 students.' (Newsweek, "The Last Word," March 26, 2001). In this same article, Anna Quindlen points out that between 1940 and 1990 the average size of high schools has risen fivefold. I went to a tiny high school, with only 50 students in the entire place. So I was a varsity basketball player, I was President of the FFA, I went to all the high school parties. Everyone but a few fundamentalist sectarians were involved in everything, and everybody knew everybody. Indeed, we knew the same people since we were in first grade. All 12 grades were in one building. In huge high schools, it is easy for a shy loner, a late developer, to be part of nothing. But this is surely not the only factor. Even when I was in school, there already existed some megaschools. I had a classmate from Cincinnati where there were 15,000 students in one high school."


Bigger Schools, Greater Violence: "The experts say that the megaschool is a big mistake."


Planning Policies Impact on Schools (PDF file) by Kelly Ross, Home Builders Association of Portland. This interesting report comes from a fresh perspective, that of developers and urban planners. Excerpts: "All of the educational research conclusively establishes that the trend must be for smaller schools ... Monolithic 'big box' schools without adequate recreational facilities create the disenfranchisement and alienation that educators are scrambling to avoid."


Sizing Things Up: What Parents, Teachers and Students Think About Large and Small High Schools by Jean Johnson, Ann Duffett, Steve Farkas and Kathleen Collins, Public Agenda, 2002. "Parents whose children attend small high schools were more likely to praise academics and say struggling students get help, while parents whose children were in large schools reported more students falling through the cracks. Teachers say that large schools are more likely to be overcrowded but also provide more academic options. Students report many problems, such as drug and alcohol abuse, carry across large and small schools."


Will Parents and Teachers Get on the Bandwagon To Reduce School Size? by By Jean Johnson, Phi Delta Kappan, Volume 83, Number 5, January 2002. "'Small-school' reformers believe that they have an idea that will improve student learning, enhance school discipline, increase parent involvement, and catch more children who might otherwise be lost." Also get part two of this story.


Bigger Is Not Better by David W. Kirkpatrick, April 3, 2002. "Few aspects of education have been more thoroughly researched than school size; few findings have been more consistent; and few have been more consistently ignored."


Breaking Up Large High Schools by Tom Gregory, ERIC Clearinghouse. "Essentially all of the research on high school size conducted in the past 30 years suggests that we need to move to much smaller schools. ... Despite growing support for smaller schools, high schools have continued to grow in size."


Big Trouble: Solving Education Problems Means Rethinking Super-Size Schools and Districts by David N. Cox, Sutherland Institute, January 2002. "What research has demonstrated regarding district size, it has even more clearly demonstrated regarding school size. ... Reviews of more than 100 research projects regarding school and district size, show conclusively that bigger is not better once schools increase beyond a certain size. ... Larger schools are not necessarily less expensive either."


Smaller Schools, Smaller Districts: The Trouble With Big: This website was created by David N. Cox, a state representative in Utah. Rep. Cox has provided a number of new and useful references on both the issue of smaller schools and the issue of smaller districts.


Research: Smaller Is Better by Debra Viadero, Education Week, November 28, 2001. "Studies indicate that students in smaller schools come to class more often, drop out less, earn better grades, participate more in extracurricular activities, feel safer, and behave better. Researcher Mary Ann Raywid says the advantages of smaller schools has been established 'with a clarity and a confidence rare in the annals of education.'"


The Tragedy of School Consolidation by Bill Kauffman, The American Enterprise, September 2001. This provides a valuable historical insight into how we ever came to think that large high schools could possibly be a good idea.


Just Right: School Size Matters by Ann Marie Moriarty, Washington Post, August 7, 2002. "[School size] 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."


Connectedness Called Key to Student Behavior by Michael A. Fletcher, Washington Post, April 12, 2002. "Students who attend small schools are less likely than others to engage in risky behavior such as drug use, violence or early sexual activity, largely because they feel better connected to their teachers and one another, according to a study released yesterday. The results drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a federally funded survey of 72,000 junior high and high school students, found that when the number of students in a school increases beyond 1,200, students become more isolated from one another, which contributes to a wide range of unhealthy activity."


Teachers: Students In Large High Schools More Likely To 'Fall Through The Cracks', Education News.


Smaller, Safer, Saner Successful Schools by by Dr. Joe Nathan, who directs the Center for School Change, and Karen Febey. "The report offers twenty-two case studies illustrated by dozens of color pictures, and a summary of research showing how shared facilities and small schools have increased achievement and safety, while developing stronger community support and involvement in the schools. The case studies describe how schools have used small size or shared facilities (or both) to dramatically improve achievement, attendance and behavior."


'Small' Schools Popular, Effective: Dividing students, teachers into teams at large high schools improves test scores, behavior by Stephanie Warsmith and Katie Byard Beacon Journal (Ohio), Sun, Aug. 24, 2003. Excerpt: "When Amanda Grohe began her freshman year at Garfield High School, she was nervous about finding her way in the 1,400-student building. But that's not the case now." (Hmmmm: if this article finds that an enrollment of 1,400 makes a high school unpleasantly large, what does that say about megaschools with 4,000 or more students?)


A movement to small schools is supported by Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform. This organization mostly supports the "more money" approach to reform, with few serious changes to the system. But when it comes to school size, they firmly support small schools. They offer a link on resources on small schools, and also a book, Small Schools, Big Imaginations: A Creative Look at Urban Public Schools.


Small Schools -- or "Theme Parks"?
Small Schools of the Absurd by Ryan Sager, New York Post, June 25, 2004 "Wonderful news for New York City parents: Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is opening a high school called the 'Peace and Diversity Academy' in The Bronx. The brochure says students lucky enough to be admitted will be able to take courses on: peace, diversity, cultural identity, cultural awareness, bias, conflict resolution, discrimination, prejudice, social action and leadership, and -- why not? -- war. All at the same school! At another new Bronx school, kids will be able to take 'Hip-Hop & Citizenship.' Wonder when the students will have time for math and English ..."


This article provides an important caution regarding the push for small schools:

Gates Gets His Revenge by Andrew Wolf, columnist, The New York Sun, October 17, 2003. Excerpts: "To say that New York City's high schools are in trouble is an enormous understatement. Unfortunately, the answer to fixing the high schools will not be found in slicing and dicing all of the existing schools into new cutesy themebased mini-schools.
"The answer to our high school dilemma will come when we fix the education that we are providing to our children, from kindergarten through the 8th grade. ...
"The enthusiasm for these small schools is understandable, at least on the surface.After all,smaller seems better than bigger, and the big schools have been synonymous with failure and violence. However, the Daily News recently demonstrated no difference in test results between the old big schools and the new mini-schools. ...
"One has to be suspicious of schools such as the Acorn High School for Social Justice (affiliated with ACORN, one of the city's most radical political groups), the El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice (immortalized by Heather Mac Donald for offering Hip-Hop 101 and instructing children in the fine art of graffiti), and the Academy for Careers in Sports (that substitutes courses such as History of Basketball for more traditional academic offerings).
"Lurking behind the small schools is another agenda. Many of the key supporters of the mini-schools are also among the loudest advocates for ending Regents exams -- and all objective measures of accountability. They favor the use of 'portfolios,' 'roundtables,' and other subjective assessments -- devices that, in practice, are meaningless.
"There is good reason why the small school advocates seek to avoid giving students objective exams. These 'activists' know full well that they are unable to deliver the goods. 'Theme-park' schools, as parent activist Melanie Cissone derisively refers to them, may be more entertaining, but there is little evidence that they can provide what society expects and employers demand."