Policies that produce large public schools and school districts have consistently been in favor with the American public, primarily because America has been fascinated with the economies of scale and the virtues of specialization. But amid clear evidence that big schools have been counterproductive, a movement toward smallness is emerging.
What has spurred dissatisfaction with the doctrine of bigger is better? We recently participated in a high school's effort to understand a student's suicide. We were distressed to discover that the file on the student was barren of significant material. Evidently many staff members had observed the boy behaving in disturbing ways, but no one person had put the pieces together. It may well have made no difference. Still, the school's considerable preventive resources had failed utterly, in part because of communication problems that are inherent in big, complex organizations. The student had fallen between the cracks.
Large schools and school districts have larger numbers and categories of education specialists—both teachers and nonteachers. The impressions, speculations, and recollections that paint a complete picture of a student are often dispersed among too many people. State financial aid encourages this pattern because it is often coupled with requirements that additional types of certified personnel work with students. Whatever the benefits of such specialization, it also generates complex problems of coordination.
Big Hasn't Been Beautiful
- the number of school districts decline 87 percent—from 117,108 to 15,367;
- the number of schools decline 69 percent—from approximately 200,000 to 62,037;
- the average per-school enrollment increase 410 percent—from 127 to 653; and
- the average state share of local school expenses increase from 30 percent to 48 percent (Walberg 1994).
The trend toward bigger schools has been accompanied by a huge increase in overall youth misconduct, as measured by homicides and suicides, and arrest rates (Wynne and Ryan 1993). It would be foolish to attribute these trends solely to the spread of school amalgamation. It would be equally simplistic, however, to ignore the likelihood of some connections.
Further, over many of these years, pupil scores on achievement tests have declined and are now stabilized at or near their low points. Strong, statistically significant relationships have been found between higher achievement and smaller schools, smaller school districts, and lower proportions of state expenditures for schools. States with relatively little amalgamation, such as North Dakota, Nebraska, and Montana (average school size around 150), had the best child and adolescent test scores on the 1989–90 National Assessment of Education Progress. In contrast, states with many amalgamations, such as Florida, Louisiana, California, and Hawaii (average school size around 700), had the lowest test scores.
In short, measures touted as improvements were associated with lower school effectiveness, even when controlled for state demographics (such as percentage of minority students) and per-student expenditures (Bradley 1993). Again, these findings do not prove that school amalgamation is the sole cause for the unsatisfactory pupil outcomes, but there is a distressing correlation.
Consistency and Young Minds
There has been considerable research on the educational virtues of smallness and simpler organizations (see, for example, Barker and Gump 1964). The findings point to the importance of consistency among the adults who deal with students, consistency that is easier to attain in smaller organizations (Duke 1990, Anderson 1985). In elementary schools, for example, if the norm is to pay attention in class, then, ideally, all adults should enforce similar norms, tailoring them to each student's behavior. The same is true of behavior in high school study halls or test-taking situations.
All of the tactics to foster consistency are variations on a basic strategy: limit the number of school employees who relate to particular pupils and increase the length of such relationships, thereby making adult-child contacts more coherent and intense.
In many other countries, including Russia and Japan, elementary school teachers typically stay with a few classes for two or more years. Some Japanese teachers have remarked to me that “the first year is for meeting pupils; the second year is for learning.” In addition, Japanese subject area teachers follow each student for his or her full four years of high school enrollment. A math teacher, for example, will teach successively advanced levels of math.
In general, at all levels, U.S. schools are larger than those in other countries. Each year that students attend they are shifted through additional levels of teachers and other educators. Thus, it becomes more and more unlikely that any one staff member will have a clear idea of what has been happening to that pupil. Some pupils thrive on the demands generated by such incoherent supervision. Others are not happy, but adapt. And, finally, some—too many?—more vulnerable children are seriously handicapped, even though some of them may say they like it this way.
Modest Proposals
Educators have made many attempts to moderate the harmful effects of scale and specialization. They have proposed—and sometimes carried out—plans to create subschools within larger schools. They have decentralized authority to try to keep more knowledge and responsibility at the individual school level. The College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago has developed a Small Schools Workshop to help public schools in the Chicago area plan and carry out downsizing.
Some U.S. high schools assign both counseling and discipline to the same counselors; others have one counselor follow the same students over four years, although it may take several years before the counselors know the students' many teachers. A single, well-trained, adult can monitor each pupil or whole class, even for several years. That adult can easily be well-informed about the pupil's (or class's) past and present conduct, and can provide the pupil with a consistent interpretation of the school's rules and policies.
British political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797) supported systems of intimate, informal authority—“little platoons”—over larger, centralized organizations. He believed in the informal controls that persist in face-to-face relationships. Current research supports his theories.
Not all educators sympathize with the revival of intimacy and coherence in education. But it does seem that our unconditional faith in the virtues of educational bigness and amalgamation is finally being tempered by reality.
