Our Children Deserve Better, and Bigger Is Not Always Better

A Smaller George Wythe High School Will Result in a Higher Quality School For Our Kids

The students, parents, teachers, and staff of the George Wythe High School community will be best served by the design and construction of a 1,600 student school. The school board decided this months ago. Not only is academic research clear on the benefits of smaller schools, particularly for students of color and students dealing with poverty and other systemic issues that can negatively affect their lives, many members of the GWHS community have raised concerns over planning and constructing a school that is too large.

In discussions with me, the students, parents, teachers, and staff of GWHS have been clear about their desire for a 1,600 student school. They cite the same evidence detailed here, as well as concerns based on their daily experiences at GWHS about how an even larger school would be adequately supported, given the existing challenges the school faces with staffing levels, teacher retention, and meeting students’ needs.

Research that compares the efficacy and outcomes of consolidated, larger schools to smaller schools show that smaller schools are superior or equal on every metric, including safety, culture of connectedness, academic performance, and equity. The focus on increasing the size of GWHS comes at a time when we should be focused on how to best support our students while many are struggling both emotionally and academically. I have yet to hear any supporters of a larger GWHS explain how increasing the size of the school would address the multiple challenges and needs that ought to be the focus of our work.

In order to bring more clarity to the school board’s reasons for supporting the planning and construction of a smaller GWHS and give voice to those teachers, staff, students, and parents who are worried that speaking out will further delay the building of the school, I compiled research from a range of sources and highlighted relevant information below. As an educator, I teach my students about how to use research and studies to clarify their positions and strengthen their arguments. I expect no less of myself and other elected officials–nor should you of us.

Here are the key takeaways:

• Statistically most Black and Brown students nationwide attend large high schools (900+ students), and research shows this is more about cost efficiency and political control than about what is best for students
• Research shows English Language Learners do better in smaller environments, and GWHS has a high number of these students
• Reading scores are consistently better for students in smaller schools, and even skeptical researchers acknowledge this
• Smaller schools (like smaller classes) do better than larger ones in academic performance, teaching conditions, and safety
• Overall, students prefer smaller schools, feel safer in them, and have more positive social experiences in smaller schools
• Larger, consolidated schools make existing systemic problems worse (like poverty, racial discrimination, mental and physical health issues), while smaller schools can reduce the impacts these problems have on students
• Smaller schools allow teachers and staff to focus more deeply on students, and makes it harder for kids to fall through the cracks. This is especially important given absentee rates at GWHS.

Research On School Size:

Are Smaller Schools Better Schools? Article published by Education World

Everyone knows that there is a strong association between social class and achievement and that this association works very much to the disadvantage of economically disadvantaged students,” [Researcher Robert] Bickel told Education World. “The California research, however, had the virtue of demonstrating that this disadvantage was exaggerated as school size increased.”

When It Comes to Schooling…Small Works: School Size, Poverty, and Student Achievement by Robert Bickel and Craig B. Howley

As schools become larger, the negative effect of poverty on student achievement increases. The less affluent the community served, the smaller a school should be.

While children of all races are as likely to be affected by the relationship between school size, poverty, and achievement, minority children are often enrolled in schools that are too big to achieve top performance given the poverty levels in their communities.

States concerned about reinvesting in deteriorating school facilities should not be eager to increase school size in most instances, if higher student achievement, especially in poorer communities, is a goal.

Small Classes, Small Schools: The Time Is Now. by Patricia Wesley in Educational Leadership.

Research conducted on the validity of the assertions favoring large schools has suggested that less-advantaged students end up in the largest classes, with the least-experienced teachers and the least-engaging curriculum and instruction strategies (Oakes, 1987; Wheelock, 1992).

Teachers should be responsible for a smaller number of students so that they can get to know each student and his or her learning preferences.

Small Schools: The Edu-Reform Failure That Wasn’t by Jack Schneider in EdWeek

In the literature, we found little disagreement that small schools do better than large ones in the areas of safety, teaching conditions, and academic performance. The cases for these are overwhelming, not difficult to make. Indeed, the historical rationale for consolidated, comprehensive schools were based on other factors: (1) economies of scale, (2) social equality, and (3) increased program offerings — these presumed benefits had outweighed the other educational attributes. The alarming part of our research was that these large school benefits had virtually never been verified and, as we weighed large schools in the balance against small schools we found them — all three of them — to be either questionable or outright false.

Compared to larger schools, students in smaller schools fight less, feel safer, come to school more frequently, and report being more attached to their school. It is impossible to dismiss school size as a powerful and fundamental indicator of safety for our America’s children, and unconscionable to disregard the “costs” of this loss of safety, however difficult they are to grasp and affix.

Small Schools: The Myths, Reality, and Potential of Small Schools by Stuart Grauer and Christina Ryan

Making schools smaller was not an inherently unsound strategy. It was a poorly shepherded one. Had policy elites thought more about their plan, developed a more nuanced theory of action, set more reasonable goals, or taken a more holistic approach to measuring outcomes, the small-schools movement might have turned out differently.

There is, however, another way. Focusing on the cultivation of healthy educational ecosystems — envisioning schools not as problems to solve, but as gardens to cultivate — might encourage particular conditions that improve school communities piece by piece.

School Size and Its Relationship to Student Outcomes and School Climate: A Review and Analysis of Eight South Carolina State-wide Studies by Kenneth R. Stevenson

Howley (2001), in his continuing study of the relationship to school size to student outcomes, has concluded that one size may well not fit all. His research suggests that children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds perform better academically when served by small schools…The researchers concluded that analysis of the data supported the conclusion that students performed best in schools ranging in size from 600 to 900.

School size and student achievement: a longitudinal analysis by Anna J. Egalite and Brian Kisida in School Effectiveness and School Improvement

We find evidence that students’ academic achievement in math and reading declines as school size increases. The negative effects of large schools appear to matter most in higher grades, which is also when schools tend to be the largest.

The Role of the Perceptions of School Climate and Teacher Victimization by Students by Emily Camp, Colleen Lloyd, and Francis L. Huang in Journal of Interpersonal Violence

More consistently though, schools with higher levels of poverty, as well as schools with higher levels of minority enrollment, often reported lower levels of perceived safety and higher teacher victimization compared with schools serving a more advantaged and predominantly White student body (Casteel et al., 2007; Gottfredson et al., 2005; Robers et al., 2015). Berg and Cornell (2016) noted that both higher levels of poverty and minority enrollment were associated with higher student aggression toward teachers and lower feelings of school safety.

Relating school context to measures of psychosocial factors for students in grades 6 through 9 by Jeff Allen, Alex Casillas, and Jason D. Way in Personality & Individual Differences

School poverty concentration was negatively related to both of the school climate indicators. The school safety indicator, in particular, decreased as both poverty and grade level increased. Other research has shown that positive behaviors and attitudes tend to decrease around 8th–9th grade, before increasing again at 10th grade (e.g., Soto, John, Gosling, & Potter, 2011)…However, when there are more supportive services designed to combat poverty and provide resources to students, the negative developmental trends take a less pronounced dip (or merely flatten) and begin to increase again sooner than they would otherwise (Way, McCormick, & Kearns, 2016).