Where everybody knows your name -- Can smaller schools give students an edge?
For the last few years, school has been a scary place for Raymond. The Vietnamese immigrant was constantly bullied by fellow students at the large, overcrowded school he attended.
With so many students on the playground, adults never saw what was happening. He was afraid, unhappy and extremely angry.
Raymond (not his real name) exhibited all of the survival techniques that bullied students tend to adopt: he was distant and sarcastic, never smiled and had few friends. He was on his way to becoming a statistic - at best a dropout, at worst someone who might be provoked into retaliating.
Sacramento High School students crowd into the cafeteria (right) and race to their next class (below). With smaller learning communities being established within the megaschool, it is hoped that students will no longer get lost in the crowd.
This fall, Raymond was enrolled in the newly opened International Community School in Oakland, where he is one of only 240 K-5 students. And he is blossoming, says teacher Raquel Rodriguez Jones, a member of the Oakland Education Association. "After his third week here, he started smiling and getting along with the other kids. He says he feels safer and doesn't get picked on. That's because there are more adults around and because we are building community here."
"At a small school like this, we feel like we can make a difference," she says. "If a student is having a hard time, we can really do something about it."
The megaschools of today simply aren't working, says Rodriguez Jones, who until last year taught at an elementary school so crowded that classes were held in hallways, storage rooms and the cafeteria. Some students do fine in large schools, but others feel lost and anonymous.
A growing number of teachers consider small schools to be the "missing piece" of school reform. They can help solve problems like low achievement, student alienation, truancy and violence - especially in low-performing schools with predominantly disadvantaged and minority students - by providing more personalized attention and a sense of belonging.
Research supports the contention that small schools have a positive effect on learning:
A newly-released report by the University of Minnesota's Center for School Change found that smaller schools offer a safer atmosphere, fewer disciplinary problems, higher achievement, higher graduation rates and a more challenging environment.
A study by the Bank Street College of Education in New York City found that students in 150 small Chicago schools attended class more frequently, earned higher grades, were less likely to drop out and showed more motivation than peers in larger schools.
A survey by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NREL) found that small schools have proportionally fewer incidents of vandalism, aggressive behavior, theft, substance abuse and gang participation; more positive student and teacher attitudes and interpersonal relationships; a greater sense of belonging among students; and much higher and more varied levels of extracurricular participation. Moreover, students from small and large high schools do not differ from one another on college-related variables such as entrance examination scores, acceptance rates and grade point average.
The NREL study also found that disadvantaged students and minorities are more adversely affected - academically, attitudinally and behaviorally - by attending large schools than are other students. Unfortunately, "poor and minority students continue to be concentrated in large schools."
Despite mounting evidence in favor of small schools, a study by Public Agenda reports that 62 percent of parents and 59 percent of teachers believe the size of a school's population is irrelevant as long as it is not overcrowded. Few of those polled believe smaller schools are a key component of school reform, and many believe creating smaller schools is impractical. They do, however, concede that smaller schools are better at spotting troubled students and more likely to have strong parental involvement.
"This is a serious awareness issue," says Public Agenda President Deborah Wadsworth in a Washington Times article. For those who believe that small schools go a long way toward fixing what's wrong with schools today, "there's a real need to explain why."
"It makes a lot of sense," says CTA Vice President Barbara E. Kerr. "In a small school setting, it's easier to become a community of learners. All of the teachers know all of the students - even those who are not in their classes. Kids are more likely to be encouraged to learn - and behave - in a place where they are known. Parents are more comfortable getting involved in smaller schools, because the schools are more welcoming and less intimidating."
The trend is for secondary schools with large populations to break up into smaller units, often referred to as "learning communities" or "schools within schools." The U.S. Department of Education allocated $47 million in 1999 and $120 million in 2000 to help restructure large high schools into smaller learning communities.
Teachers at San Francisco Community School all feel accountable to each other, says Head Teacher Tanya Friedman, shown here with Davina Brooks.
While there is no consensus as to what constitutes a "small" school, many researchers say a small elementary school doesn't exceed 400-500 students and a small secondary school doesn't exceed 400 to 800 students. Florida legislators have passed a law that prohibits districts from building new schools bigger than what will accommodate 500 elementary students, 700 middle school students or 900 high school students, beginning in 2003.
Oakland is the first school district in the state to begin downsizing into small neighborhood schools. It is a trend that is spreading throughout California - and other states - after showing success in Philadelphia, New York and Chicago.
Despite a growing movement toward small schools, the push for school and district consolidation - resulting in bigger schools - is continuing for economic reasons.
Between 1940 and 1990, the total number of elementary and secondary public schools declined 69 percent - from approximately 200,000 to 62,037 - despite a 70 percent increase in population. As a result, the average school enrollment rose more than five-fold, from 127 to 653. More than 70 percent of all U.S. students go to high schools with 1,000 students or more. Schools of 2,000 to 4,000 students are not uncommon in California.
One argument often used to support school consolidation is that it costs less per pupil for districts to operate large schools than small schools. However, since small schools have a lower dropout rate, it may actually be more cost-effective to educate students in a small school than to warehouse them in a larger school. Researchers have also found that the relationship between size and cost depends upon the circumstances of individual schools. According to one study, "Many small schools are operated very economically, while many large ones have exorbitant per-pupil costs."
The concept that bigger is better academically can be traced to the 1950s, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into orbit. While America worried that a decline in public schools was responsible for losing the Space Race, policymakers embraced Franklin Keller's The Comprehensive High School as a way to thwart the perceived Communist threat. And James Conant's 1959 book, The American High School Today, accelerated the school consolidation trend. Both authors argued that larger schools could churn out scientists and professionals at a faster rate than smaller schools by offering a broader curriculum of math, science and foreign language. Soon, the concept of larger schools being superior filtered down to middle schools and elementary schools.
"Today, we agree that it was ridiculous to build bigger high schools to produce more scientists and engineers," says Michael Klonsky, co-director of the Small Schools Workshop at the University of Illinois in Chicago. "But the things that drive us have very little to do with educating children. Unfortunately, very little of what we do with schools is based on sound educational research."
"Perhaps the best argument for smaller schools is safety," says Klonsky. "It's the No. 1 issue on parents' minds, especially since Columbine. Our research shows that schools with populations of 700 or more have 10 times the incidence of serious violence compared to schools of 350 students or less. If you take schools with 1,000, 1,500 and 2,000 students, the violent incidents increase proportionately. A lot of these schools are time bombs."
"Unfortunately, if kids don't find a sense of community at school or at home, they will find it someplace else - usually in an unproductive organization, clique or gang," says Klonsky. "When kids are disengaged in school and invisible, they tend to move toward antisocial kinds of activity. Life in high schools and middle schools is often very violent. Schools are less violent now than they were 10 years ago, but the risks are much greater in bigger schools. There is safety in small numbers."
Small schools offer teachers a greater sense of community, too. "It gives teachers a way to work together as a professional community, so they can look at student work together, visit each other's classrooms and support each other with programs like peer coaching. When you have 200 to 300 teachers, it is almost impossible to have interaction and collaboration."
But just because a school is small doesn't necessarily mean it's good, cautions Klonsky. Some schools are small by design, and others are small because parents don't want to send their children there. "I don't think we should tolerate horrible small schools any more than horrible big schools."
Education experts agree that thinking small is just the beginning. Smallness must also be combined with high expectations for students, relevant curriculum that connects studies with the real world, strong interpersonal relationships between students and faculty, and a high level of parental involvement.
"Small is not a panacea; it's a strategy," says Klonsky. "But it's definitely a beginning when it comes to fixing what's wrong with our schools."
Sacramento High School students crowd into the cafeteria (right) and race to their next class (below). With smaller learning communities being established within the megaschool, it is hoped that students will no longer get lost in the crowd.
Teachers at San Francisco Community School all feel accountable to each other, says Head Teacher Tanya Friedman, shown here with Davina Brooks.
