Education Policy Analysis Archives

Most of the recent literature on the achievement effects of school size has examined school and district performance. These studies have demonstrated substantial benefits of smaller school and district size in impoverished settings. To date, however, no work has adequately examined the relationship of size and socioeconomic status (SES) with students as the unit of analysis. One study, however, came close (Lee & 1 This research was partially supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (Grant No. 0119679) and the Rural School and Community Trust. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this report are exclusively those of the authors and as such do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the Rural School and Community Trust. School size and achievement 2 Smith, 1997), but failed to adjust its analyses or conclusions to the substantial bias toward larger schools evident in the data set used. The present study, based on the same large data set, but with size issues in the rural circumstance clearly in focus, reaches rather different conclusions, extending previous work for the first time to a more adequate examination of size effects on individual students. Findings challenge assertions about ideal and minimum size. Analyses include comparison of means and multi-level modeling. Methodologically, the study illustrates the challenge of using nationally representative data sets of students to investigate second-level contextual phenomena, such as school size. When aggregated to schools attended by nationally representative students, the result cannot be a nationally representative set of schools. Adjustment with weights to simulate such a distribution, moreover, is inadequate to overcome this threat if one is interested in investigating size relationships among the smaller half of US schools, as one must be in seeking to generalize results to the nation as a whole. The present study finds that the smallest national decile of size maximizes the achievement of the poorest quartile of students. Moreover, appropriate size is shown to vary by student socioeconomic status. Practical and scholarly interest in the relationship of school size to student achievement has one of the longest histories of any issue related to schooling, but the record of research accomplishment over that span is not impressive. Stemnock’s review of the literature (Stemnock, 1974) traces interest to the turn of the 20 century, but even as recently as 30 years ago, when that review was written, most educational researchers held that larger size was preferable. Since 1974, however, theoretical and empirical perspectives on size have gradually altered, so that scholarly judgment now generally favors smaller size. In the current view, as well, an impressive array of benefits is often claimed for smaller size, just as an impressive array was once claimed for larger size (cf. Cotton, 1996). Much, however, remains to be learned about the influence of size, and a wide range of issues remains to be addressed. Many of the claims currently made are difficult to warrant empirically. The study reported here addresses one of the many remaining issues. The urban “small schools movement,” moreover, comes inscribed with a variety of pedagogical and curricular reformist practices, and the upshot is that these pedagogical and curricular options have often been confounded, even in evaluative and research work, with the structural influence of size (e.g., Darling-Hammond, Ancess, & Ort, 2002; Fine & Somerville, 2 In fact, however, average school size is not declining in the US, and schools in rural and suburban areas probably continue to grow in size (DeYoung, Howley, & Theobald, 1995) due to consolidation efforts and the failure of policy makers to attend to rural concerns. 3 The best evidence concerns participation in co-curricular activities; dropout rates; and achievement (level, growth, equity, and achievement cost-efficiency), with a strong preponderance of evidence favoring small schools. Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 12 No. 52 3 1998; Lee & Smith 1995). Before turning to details about the present study, readers should note well the divide that exists between urban and rural concerns over size. Much of the current prescriptive literature on “small schools” (we prefer the comparative form, smaller schools) promotes administratively difficult reform initiatives to personalize huge city schools by creating “schools-within-schools” (AIR and SRI, 2003). These “small schools” are often— perhaps usually—more simulation than reality, because within-school “schools” are seldom free to behave like the (real) autonomous schools that have been studied by school size researchers (e.g., Raywid & Schmerler, 2003). Some researchers believe that size itself is merely a somewhat tangential framework for practices, and it is practices, not structures per se, that produce results. In rural areas, by contrast with the reformist intentions of urban “small schools,” the practical work centers on difficult efforts to forestall, in the various states, policies that structure wholesale closure and consolidation of actually smaller schools in which pedagogical and curricular changes are in no way tied to the issue of size per se. Some leading urban educators nonetheless have a good grasp of the differences and the commonalities of the struggles in both rural and urban settings (e.g., Klonsky, 1995; Raywid, 1999). In general, these commonalities concern the way educational systems serve students from impoverished backgrounds. More typically, however, urban educators who strive to turn a big-city disaster of 3,000 students into four units of 750 students find it difficult to entertain the possibility that such a seemingly desirable (not to say ideal) size might be too large in a rural community. This inference is understandable, and understandably attributable to ignorance about rural places. If, however, researchers responsive to the urban challenge over-generalize their findings to valorize one particular reform package (i.e., smaller schools with constructivist pedagogies), they risk doing damage in rural places.