School+Size,+School+Climate,+and+Student+Performance

// If restructuring truly is an aim of school reform, then the scale of schooling is a major structural issue. // —Craig Howley, 1994 // Is it possible to get people to pay attention to the virtues of smallness as well as the virtues of scale? // —Kent McGuire, 1989 // There is a natural predilection in American education toward enormity, and it does not serve schools well. // —William J. Fowler, Jr., 1992 Schools keep getting bigger and bigger. 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 the U.S. population (Walberg 1992; Howley 1994). Consequently, the average school enrollment rose more than five times—from 127 to 653. In today's urban and suburban settings, high school enrollments of 2,000 and 3,000 are commonplace, and New York City has many schools with enrollments nearing 5,000 (Henderson and Raywid 1994). School districts, too, have decreased in number and increased in size during this time period. The 117,108 school districts that existed in 1940 have experienced dramatic consolidation; they have decreased by 87 percent—to 15,367 (Walberg 1992). Not surprisingly, the largest schools can generally be found within the largest districts (Williams 1990). Smith and DeYoung (1988) identify several factors driving this long-term consolidation trend. One has been the desire of school administrators to "demonstrate their commitment to the forces of science, progress, and modernization" by seeking to make schooling "'efficient,' a notion importantly borrowed from the private sector" (3). Smith and DeYoung also cite the 1957 launching of the Soviet space satellite Sputnik and the contemporary belief that catching up with the Soviet Union required bigger schools that could produce more scientists. Furthermore, they note that compliance with the school desegregation and special entitlement programs originating in the 1960s have resulted in additional school mergers. Smith and DeYoung and many others note that James Conant's 1959 book, The American High School Today, greatly accelerated the momentum of the school consolidation movement (Pittman and Haughwout 1987; Stockard and Mayberry 1992; Walberg 1992; Williams 1990). Conant argued that, in order to be cost effective and to offer a sufficiently large and varied curriculum, a secondary school had to have at least 100 students in its graduating class. Conant claimed that the small high school was the number-one problem in education, and that its elimination should be a top priority (37-38). 1 The push for school and district consolidation continues into the present (Schoggen and Schoggen 1988). That is unfortunate because, as the balance of this report documents, research has repeatedly found small schools to be superior to large schools on most measures and equal to them on the rest. This holds true for both elementary and secondary students of all ability levels and in all kinds of settings.
 * Introduction **

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