Small Schools: Is Smaller Better for High Schools
Valerie Lee and her research into the "optimal" learning environments
When Bill Gates spends $600 million to create “right-sized” schools,
the media pick up the story as a new aspect of reform. But a member of the
SOE faculty has been examining the relationship between school size and educational
outcomes for over a decade, providing foundational research on ways to personalize
education for high school students.
Valerie E. Lee, Professor of Education, has been a leading figure in the research on school organization, size and its relationship to student learning, curriculum and social relations. Her research is cited by the Gates Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, The Small Schools Workshop and other initiatives involving school size. She is the author of Restructuring High Schools for Equity and Excellence: What Works?, and numerous journal articles on issues of educational equity, specifically identifying characteristics of schools that make them both excellent and equitable. Lee said her research “shows that some restructuring efforts are quite successful in terms of student learning and its equitable distribution.” Changing school size is one of those efforts.
The U.S. Department of Education considers
school reform initiatives that have proven effective during the past several
decades to include New York City’s
Small
Schools Network, the Small Schools
Workshop based at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and the Coalition
of Essential Schools (CES). Small size is a definitional concept for the
first two networks, and is at the heart of the Coalition
of Essential Schools. Many
more reform efforts have embraced this concept of creating small learning environments
within larger schools, including California’s career academies,
the multistate charter schools movement, and urban reform efforts in New York,
Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities.
According to the Small Schools
Project, which provides support and assistance
to schools that have received grants from the Gates Foundation, the attention
on school size derives from the federal government’s interest in small
schools in the aftermath of the Columbine tragedy. The subsequent Federal
Smaller Learning Communities grants provided by the U.S. Department of Education have
provided legitimacy as well as funding. Additionally, the commitment of philanthropic
resources, like the Gates Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation’s commitment
of $500 million to reform urban high schools, and the Carnegie
Foundation’s
desire “to create small communities for learning” has called attention
to a steadily accumulating body of research on the benefits of small schools.
Federal Initiatives
The U.S. Department of Education’s Small Learning Communities grant (SLC) program, which in 2004 distributed almost $174 million, helps large districts and schools personalize the high school experience. This program supports strategies that result in smaller, safer learning environments at the high school level. The competitive grants are awarded to help local education agencies (LEAs) create smaller, more supportive learning communities as a foundation for their broader school improvement strategies.
Lee is currently a member of the technical advisory committee evaluating the federal SLC grant program. She said several high schools in Michigan have grants from the SLC program. She has recently done consulting in Benton Harbor and Lakeland high schools. “Benton Harbor recently received a planning grant from the federal SLC program, so they are just starting a process to begin restructuring,” Lee said. “Lakeland High School has had an SLC planning grant, already moved in the SLC direction, and has applied for an implementation grant.”
Quality vs. Equality Studies indicating that school size plays an important part in student learning, especially in urban school districts with large numbers of minority students and students in poverty, have come to the fore as districts struggle to meet higher achievement standards set at the national level. Much of Lee’s research is oriented to public policies that relate to educational equity, where equity is defined, “in terms of outcomes — particularly (but not exclusively) test scores,” she said. In a 1997 study, Lee and Julia B. Smith, of Oakland University, examined which size high school works best with respect to learning and its equitable distribution. Their results suggested that the ideal size of a high school, defined in terms of effectiveness (i.e., learning), enrolls between 600 and 900 students. In schools smaller than this, students learn less, while those in large high schools (especially over 2,100) learn considerably less. In terms of the equitable distribution of learning, where equity is defined by the relationship between learning and student socioeconomic status, the study concluded that learning was more equitably distributed in smaller schools. Although enrollment size has a stronger effect on learning in schools with lower socioeconomic status students and also in schools with high concentrations of minority students, the same “ideal size”–600-900 students—applies to schools with varied enrollments of students based on race and social class.
Lee said she thinks policy makers and school people involved in school restructuring want to maximize a more equitable learning environment and an environment where more learning occurs, which means that mostly high schools should be smaller than they are, but not too small.
As with any effort requiring systemic change, policy implications loom large. Lee said school size is an active policy issue in many places. “I’ve been contacted and my research has been used by many school districts to help them decide how big a new school should be,” Lee said.
In some cases Lee’s findings have been challenged by advocates of smaller schools. “However, most of those small schools are special purpose schools or schools that are not available to everyone,” she explained. “They are schools that students apply to and are admitted to, thus the issue of selectivity and school choice sometimes gets confounded with the school size issue. Although the 600 to 900 school size finding in our study included private and public schools, the overwhelming proportions of schools in every category were public.”
Going Big to Get Small
The “small school” nomenclature can be misleading. The debate over school restructuring is not always about going small. Lee’s research has focused on “optimal” school size, which for some districts can mean making schools larger. Lee has recently been involved as an expert witness in a court case in West Virginia where the state is planning to close four very small schools in one county and is building a consolidated high school (enrollment about 800) to replace them. She said, “the schools that will be closed are very small (200-300 students) and the facilities seemingly inadequate.”
The judge in the case ruled in favor of the consolidated high school plan, Lee said, but the organization representing the small schools has appealed the decision. So the case is not quite settled yet.
Schools-Within-Schools
Financial and physical plant constraints prevent many districts from converting large high schools into several stand-alone small schools. This increasingly popular restructuring initiative divides an existing school into several small learning communities or schools-within-schools (SWS). Research is as yet inconclusive about whether SWS will create the same outcomes in terms of learning and equity as stand-alone schools. As more SWS come online, more data will become available, but researchers will still be faced with interpreting the outcomes because many SWS models are built on specialty curricula that involves choice. The creation of SWS is often as complex as starting a school from scratch, as districts must address everything from allocation of resources and contractual agreements to curriculum development and assessment.
In some cases school reform efforts where large comprehensive high schools
divided into small learning communities resulted in recreating inequities and
ineffective practices. It is too soon to tell which practice — start-ups
versus breaking up existing schools — will prove more effective.
Ultimately the interest in small schools is about far more than size. Reformers hope to realize the benefits that additional research suggests are likely to occur: safer, more personalized schools, more positive social relations, increased student achievement for all students, lower probability of dropping out, higher college-going rates, and increased student, parent, and teacher engagement and satisfaction. The idea is that smaller-scale education will change basic organizational structure which will, in turn, influence student outcomes.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation National School District and Network Grants Program focuses on the SWS reform as it seeks to create a shift from large, anonymous, comprehensive schools to smaller learning communities, in which strong relationships between students and adults are combined with challenging, inquiry-based curricula.
More than 150 such new small schools opened in 2003. To date, the Foundation has invested $600 million in 1,457 high schools. In New York City $51 million in grants helped create 67 new high schools as part of an overall plan, building on models like the Frederick Douglass Academy. In North Carolina $11 million in grants support The New High School Project, a public private initiative to create 40 high schools in rural and urban areas that offer accelerated learning and tie education to workplace knowledge and skills. And in San Diego, $11 million in grant dollars is helping transform three large high schools into 18 smaller schools—building on the High Tech High model, a technology-based curriculum.
The Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University works in collaboration with education reform organizations, school districts, school improvement networks, and education funds to help urban communities build and sustain programs and policies that improve teaching and learning. Warren Simmons, the Institute’s Executive Director, wrote recently that, “Small schools represent a promising reform for urban education. But they will only reach their potential if advocates heed lessons from previous experiments and avoid oversimplifications, recognize that districts matter and that race and ethnicity matter, and acknowledge that success requires political as well as technical support.”
The “small schools movement” is one of the many reforms over the past four decades seeking to improve educational equity in America’s schools without compromising excellence. The consensus of many policy-makers and funders involved in the school restructuring debate is that small size alone is not a panacea; it is merely a platform for creating the kind of learning communities needed for high levels of achievement by all students.
by Peggy Herron
This article appears in the Fall 2004 edition of the Innovator
