School Size

In the early years of schooling in the United States, schools tended to be very small. Starting almost immediately following the passage of laws making school attendance compulsory, however, reformers began to press for school consolidation as a way to make schools larger and more efficient. Nevertheless, until the 1930s when efforts to consolidate schools became widespread, local school boards did not heed the recommendations of these reforms. By the late 1950s the conventional wisdom of bigger is better had gained acceptance among those seeking to improve schools, including state officials, local school administrators, and educational researchers. Former Harvard University president James Bryant Conant, for example, argued for “comprehensive” high schools that would enroll no fewer than 400 students. In the several decades following the publication of Conant's influential The American High School Today, communities, especially those in cities and suburbs, began to build schools that could enroll larger and larger numbers of students. As a result of these mid-century reforms, school sizes increased almost fourfold between 1950 and 1970.

Despite the sharp upward trend in school size, variability still exists. The fierce opposition to consolidation in many rural communities and small towns contributes to this circumstance. Parents in such communities not only recognize that consolidation breaks the bond between school and community; they also believe that their children fare less well in more remote and impersonal consolidated schools.

Because variability in school size persists, researchers are able to evaluate the influence of school size on outcomes such as students' self-esteem, discipline referrals, school completion rates, participation in extracurricular activities, academic achievement, and career success. According to some commentators, this research overwhelmingly favors smaller schools. Others suggest that the pattern is less clear, particularly with respect to student achievement. A small body of qualitative research, moreover—such as studies focusing on differences in the organizational cultures of private, Catholic, and public schools—appears to support the claim that smaller schools promote healthier relationships, thereby cultivating the engagement of teachers, students, and families. Nevertheless, some studies suggest that small schools can become stagnant or replicate community inequities.

Furthermore, even the research demonstrating the advantages of small schools does not necessarily support a reform package based on the conversion of larger schools to smaller ones. Much of this research takes a structural approach to examining relationships between school size and valued outcomes. Studies in this tradition have demonstrated positive associations between small school size and (a) student attendance, (b) the achievement of students from lower socioeconomic groups, and (c) students' eventual earning. These studies speak directly to the practice of closing existing small schools, but much less directly to the practice of restructuring larger schools into smaller learning communities.

Although reformers in the contemporary small-school movement draw on the structural literature to support their recommendations, they are not convinced that structure alone has a determining influence. In fact, they tend to see smaller school size simply as a preexisting condition permitting a package of small-school reforms to take hold. Proponents of small-school reform, moreover, see this approach as an urban innovation and show little concern for the naturally small schools in rural communities that are being consolidated out of existence.

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