Last year, newspapers across the country carried a story about a Dayton, Ohio, school's response to crowding and crime: The lockers are being bolted shut, and backpacks are being banned next month at Wilson Junior High School.... Instead of having to haul around textbooks, students will be given a set to keep at home, and classrooms will contain another set.... [The principal] hopes the plan will lessen congestion during class changes; cut tardiness; reduce hiding places for guns, drugs, and other contraband; eliminate locker thefts; decrease the number of lost books; and help forgetful students (Associated Press 1994). The school board's decision “to plunk down an additional $25,000 in local tax money to pay for duplicate books” came at an unfortunate time, the article noted, in that the state was short $100 million to buy updated textbooks.
In San Antonio, one school district copes with discipline problems by requiring junior and senior high school students to carry only transparent backpacks and book bags so that contents are visible. Other school districts in the area have taken a high-tech approach, installing video cameras in 60 buses. According to a local paper, “The videotapes will be reviewed regularly, and can be used as evidence in student disciplinary actions” (Martinez 1994, p. 5b).
Imagine the reaction if these were the banner newspaper stories when we went to school. Yet in this age of school district police forces and metal detectors, such articles hardly raise eyebrows. Harsher times call for more desperate measures. But does it have to be this way? Perhaps in addressing problems of discipline (and learning as well) we should pay more attention to another aspect of schools: the way we organize them and build them (Sergiovanni, In press).
Learning Communities
Recently, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching proposed a new model for the elementary school that “connects people to people to build community; connects elements of the curriculum to achieve coherence; and connects learning to life to build character.” A good school, the report concludes, should be small enough for everyone to know one another by name (Boyer 1995).
Of course, no single solution will make all students eager learners and caring members of their school. But there is a growing consensus that whatever else is done, schools must also become places where it is easier for students and teachers to know one another well and for students to connect to the school and its purposes. Schools, in other words, must become caring and learning communities, and community building is easier in small schools.
Communities are, in essence, places where members are bonded to one another by mutual commitments and special relationships, where they share a set of ideas and values that they feel compelled to follow. People belong and feel responsible for themselves and for others.
As school superintendent Joanne Yatvin says, The framework of operation must be small, physically close to children, and flexible.... We need small schools or schools that are divided into small community units; classroom time, space, and organization that allows personal relationships to flourish (1994). Yatvin believes that educators must become today's “catchers in the rye,” to use a metaphor from J.D. Salinger's novel of that name, and that it is only in small-scale schools that educators can “catch children who stray too close to the edge”: Where schools are failing, it is not because they don't have enough projects and programs, but because they have lost the human touch. Children mired in the morass of family and community decay can't benefit from red ribbons, higher standards, or instructional technology; they need caring adults to pull them out of the muck and set them on solid ground one at a time (1994).
Not a Matter of Form
In defining schools as small collections of people who are committed to one another and who share similar values and ideas, we may have to abandon the traditional brick-and-mortar conception of a school. Small schools can take many forms. Some can be housed in their own buildings, designed or remodeled to handle fewer students. Or, several independent schools with different purposes could function side by side in the same building.
This latter arrangement raises important questions, of course. How will such schools be managed? How will they share resources? What do we do about the football team, the band, and other sports and activities? Who will be responsible for the cafeteria? To which school will the librarian be assigned? Who reports to whom? And how will we decide which students and teachers go where?
One model worth thinking about is the office building. Here, a detective agency may share the first floor with a dentist's office; while an insurance agency occupies the second floor; a real estate agency, the third; and two more dentists' offices, the fourth. The lower level may be vacant, but available for rent. These enterprises share the same parking lot, maintenance staff, elevator service, security, and cafeteria; and they must follow the same health and safety codes and civil rights laws. But they set their own calendar and hours; hire, evaluate, and develop their own employees; and have their own dress codes and ways of doing things.
I doubt a school district would have problems working things out if it rented that lower level for a small elementary school that serves downtown commuters. So why would it be different if that district rented or owned the whole building, and put a different school on each floor? As with the dentists and their patients, students and their parents, together with teachers, could decide for themselves where to go.
Is Smaller Better?
In A Place Called School, John Goodlad (1984) concluded that the burden of proof is on large size. Data from a study he conducted demonstrated that the smallest schools were better at solving their problems, more intellectually oriented, and had more caring teachers and greater parent and student satisfaction. “It is not impossible to have a good large school,” Goodlad observed, “it is simply more difficult” (p. 309).
As a result of his study of New Jersey high schools, W. J. Fowler reached a similar conclusion. He noted that student outcomes are more favorable in smaller public schools, and also in smaller districts (Fowler 1989).
Twenty-five years earlier, Roger Barker and Paul Gump, in Big School, Small School (1964), contended that a school should be small enough that all of its students feel needed and, in fact, are needed to make the school work. As a result, students' school lives have more sense and meaning. Barker and Gump also found that students in smaller schools were more eager to learn, and more likely to participate in school activities.
Another important advantage of small schools, according to Judith Kleinfield (1993), is that they create “undermanned settings” where there are not enough people to fit all the available leadership roles. Consequently, more is asked of everyone, and students' learning curves are steeper as new challenges must be accepted, and new ideas mastered.
How Small Is Small?
A high school serious about preparing students for college, said James Conant in The American High School Today (1959), needs no fewer than 100 students in its graduating class. This has become the rule of thumb that many use in arriving at an optimum figure of about 400 students for a high school.
Douglas Heath (1994) recommends a range of 200–350 students for a lower school and 400–500 students for a high school. He believes that when these ceilings are exceeded, students and teachers alike have fewer opportunities for sustained relationships, resulting in an impersonal and bureaucratic climate: Students see their friends less frequently, have less contact with adults other than their teachers, participate much less frequently in extracurricular activities, including athletic teams, have much less opportunity to hold leadership positions, are more aggressive and disorderly, and cheat more frequently. Parents no longer visit the school as frequently or know their children's teachers as well (p. 81).
John Goodlad (1984) spoke favorably of the 225–250 student size of the British Infant School. As he put it, Indeed, I would not want to face the challenge of justifying a senior, let alone a junior, high school of more than 500 to 600 students (unless I were willing to place arguments for a strong football team ahead of arguments for a good school, which I am not) (p. 310).
Small Change?
The conventional wisdom is that bigger schools offer economies of scale that not only increase learning but save the taxpayers money. But the evidence points in the opposite direction. It appears that large schools are actually more expensive to operate.
Recently, the New York City-based Public Education Association and the Architectural League of New York examined the feasibility of operating small schools in New York City. The schools would not be alternative schools, but mainstays of the system. The two groups issued several reports that disprove the economy-of-scale argument. In Small Schools' Operating Costs (1994), the Public Education Association reported that no research evidence supports the claim that large schools of the size found in New York City (for example, 1,500 to 4,000 or more) achieve operational cost-scale efficiencies significant enough to justify their existence or to offset size-related, educationally damaged inefficiencies.On the contrary, studies show dis-economies (penalties) of scale in large schools. Difficult to manage efficiently and safely, large schools require ... an extra layer of managers—subject supervisors, assistant principals, deans, additional secretaries....
The report concludes that building schools with as few as 400 seats is cost-competitive with large-school construction. In a joint report on Schools for New York, the association and Architectural League (1994) present drawings by 52 teams of architects and designers showing what cost-effective small schools might look like. The construction specialists note that even more money could be saved by remodeling existing buildings or adapting existing non-school buildings for school use.
Tom Gregory has pointed out that the lower student-to-non-teacher ratio in smaller schools affords a key cost saving. To lower this ratio, he recommends that schools be modeled after cottage industries rather than corporations and other formal organizations. He offers this scenario: The average per-pupil expenditure in this country is now about $5,260 per year. Envision a small, highly autonomous school, given that funding level. If the school has 200 kids in it, its annual operating budget is about $1,050,000. Return 20 percent of that amount—$210,000—to a trimmed-down central administration for its reduced services, and for bus transportation.Imagine a low student-teacher ratio, say 20 to 1. Pay your 10 teachers well, say an average of $45,000 a year. Hire a head teacher, and pay him or her $60,000. Find an appropriate building and rent it for $7,000 a month plus another $3,000 for utilities. Hire a secretary, a custodian, and a cleaning person at $20,000 each. Budget $1,000 for supplies for each teacher, and $3,000 for the central office.Put aside $10,000 to buy books each year, and $20,000 for computers and A-V equipment. If the idea of [field] trips is appealing, lease three vans, each at $7,000 a year. That's probably enough to cover their maintenance, but include another $3,000 just to be sure. Put aside $12,000 to subsidize the fuel costs of trips.Now comes the fun: figuring out what to do with the $70,000 that has yet to be spent (Gregory 1992, p. 17).
Of course small schools should be valued because they are better for students and better for teachers, not simply because they save money. It just so happens, however, that as schools get better, they become, as some say, more productive. And productivity divided by cost is the classic determiner of efficiency. In fact, even if a small school did cost a little more than a large school, it would still be more efficient if it were more productive.
The Parochial Model
Catholic schools and other independent schools, which tend to be smaller than their public school counterparts, have much to teach us. True, many such schools are choosy about who they let in, preferring students from privileged families and circumstances. But there are also Catholic schools in inner-city areas serving children of the underclass, and I am impressed with how well these schools are doing with these students.
One advantage of parochial schools is that parents choose to send their children there, and nearly all Catholic schools are able to let parents know what is expected of their children and to make these expectations stick. Mary Rivera, who has experience as a principal in both public and Catholic schools, sees two other crucial advantages. Because these schools “don't follow the theory that larger is more efficient when it comes to education,” they can more easily build community. Above all, says Rivera, Parochial schools are K–8 schools (sometimes with pre-school, too) that keep families in the same place for a very, very long time. The people in them feel personal ties. The parents know all the teachers and the administrators, and those professionals know the whole family.
Rivera notes that parochial schools weren't always unique in this respect: Public schools used to be community/neighborhood-based at all grades. They were the center of neighborhood life. Everyone knew everyone. Even now, notice the uproar every time a district redistributes kids to schools, or implements some busing plan that's supposed to improve education for someone (1994).
Concrete Expression of Bureaucracy
Behind this discussion is a haunting question: If small schools and small classroom settings are good for students and good for our pocketbooks, why do we continue to operate and build large schools? Perhaps it is because committing to smaller schools would require us to rethink the theories of leadership, management, and organization that now dominate school administration. In smaller schools, there would be no need for elaborate administrative structures and hierarchies. The roles of assistant principal and middle manager would have to be re-evaluated. Counseling and social work would be more informal. In short, we would have to make some tough decisions about our present allocation of resources and personnel.
Superintendent Yatvin believes we need small schools that put “authority in the hands of frontline practitioners,” enabling them to “make exceptions to rules and change foolish ones”: I have lost faith in any and all large-scale, organized solutions to educational problems. They just put more paperwork, regulations, and job titles between children and the help they need (1994, p.37).
Small size is a tough choice, but it is also the right choice because it helps us to see the small picture better. Nancy Webster, who has taught in Miami for 25 years, believes it is the small picture that counts big for students: This really Big picture is full of problems I know but can't fix and vocabulary I understand but can't use: competency-based curriculum, authentic assessment, CORE, Total Quality Management, whole language, and a lot of other words....I've seen the vocabulary change, the classes get larger, the programs come and go, and more children fail. Meanwhile, `at-risk' children have entered our vocabulary, along with `dysfunctional families.' Schools with over 1,000 elementary students are big business.It's too bad, really, because schooling is ... small, simple, and focused, when done well (1994, p. 52).
Perhaps we can use this small, simple, and focused school as a key leverage point for alleviating the alienation of students and making them more eager learners. If we succeed, surveillance cameras and transparent backpacks will no longer be necessary.
