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By Suzie Boss

After decades of watching schools grow larger and more impersonal, educators and policymakers are taking note of the good things that can happen within smaller communities of learners. On the horizon? Smaller classes, smaller schools, and large schools that "feel" smaller.

In the Eastern Oregon ranching community of Unity, cows outnumber people. But when it comes to taking stock of educational excellence, head counts don't begin to do the job. When the state's first school report cards were released in February, Unity's Burnt River School, with about 100 students in grades K-12, was the only Oregon public school serving secondary students to earn the top rating of "exceptional."

The rating sent Principal Robert Otheim's phone ringing off the hook. "People were hunting for magic answers," he says. But he had no secrets to divulge. Only a simple math lesson. "With fewer students, we can keep in touch with every one of them. It's hard to get lost," he says, in a school with one teacher for every nine students. Of course, a school this small can't offer the wider selection of classes that students find in large comprehensive high schools. What Burnt River does provide, though, is attention. Lots of attention. "We know what's going on with every one of our kids," the principal says, "and if someone's having a problem, we address it."

In the wide world of education, there's growing respect for learning that takes place on a smaller scale. Since the 1980s, study after study has tallied up the benefits of both smaller schools and smaller class sizes. (See class size story.) Researcher Mary Anne Raywid, surveying the literature on small schools for a 1999 ERIC Digest, reports that quantitative studies have "firmly established small schools as more productive and effective than large ones." Those benefits, she adds, "we have confirmed with a clarity and at a level of confidence rare in the annals of education research." What's more, small schools appear especially powerful for helping students most at risk of not thriving in school, whether they live in big cities or rural areas.

"The jury's no longer out," says Kathleen Cotton, an associate at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL) whose 1996 research synthesis on small schools has influenced policymakers and has been widely cited by other education researchers.

Ironically, small schools have been vanishing faster than the chorus of experts can finish singing their praises. Between 1940 and 1990, Cotton recounts in School Size, School Climate, and Student Performance, the number of elementary and secondary public schools declined 69 percent—from about 200,000 to 62,037—despite a 70 percent increase in the nation's population. The loss of small schools has been pervasive, occurring everywhere from small towns to big cities, from rural places to the suburbs. In a quest for efficiency and from a belief that bigger must be better, states have consolidated small schools into larger ones. The Annie E. Casey Foundation calls consolidation "one of the United States' most widespread reform movements" of the recent past.

Most of the nation's poor, urban children of color attend large schools, according to Small Schools: Great Strides, a new report from Bank Street College of Education that describes elementary schools enrolling upward of 1,000 children and high schools topping 3,000 in many cities. Large high schools are especially common. According to the U.S. Department of Education, approximately 70 percent of American high school students attend schools enrolling more than 1,000 students, and nearly half of all high school students attend schools where enrollments top 1,500.

Although Burnt River School is even smaller than what many researchers consider ideal, the little schoolhouse in the heart of cattle country is far from being a quaint throwback to yesterday. From the inner cities of New York, Chicago, and Baltimore to the more open spaces of the Northwest, educators are looking for ways to recapture what Unity has never lost: the understanding that good schools are places where nobody's a stranger.

'PRODUCTIVE, EQUITABLE PLACES'
When enrollments are small enough so that students and teachers know one another well, schools take on a different feel. Cotton's investigation into school-size research uncovered benefits for both students and teachers in smaller learning communities. She discovered that, compared with their peers in larger schools, students in small schools (which she defines as 300 to 400 students for an elementary school and 400 to 800 for a secondary school):

• Have more positive attitudes toward school
• Behave better (as measured by truancy, discipline problems, violence, theft, substance abuse, and gang participation)
• Participate in more varied extracurricular activities
• Are less likely to drop out
• Have better attendance
• Have a greater sense of belonging

Intimacy is a big part of the appeal of smaller schools. It's easier for kids to connect and harder for them to feel anonymous or alienated in a smaller community of learners. But that's not the whole story. The very rhythms and routines of the school day are affected by school size. As Cotton reported, "Students [in smaller schools] take more of the responsibility for their own learning; their learning activities are more often individualized, experiential, and relevant to the world outside of school; classes are generally smaller, and scheduling is much more flexible."

Small isn't always beautiful, of course. "Downsizing cannot, by itself, guarantee that school transformation will unfold or that marvelous teacher and student performance will occur," cautioned Karen Irmsher in School Size, a 1997 ERIC Digest. "When a student deals with a limited number of teachers, the effect of a few bad experiences is magnified," pointed out Carleen Reck in an earlier ERIC Digest. And acknowledging that some students manage to do well in larger schools, authors of Small Schools: Great Strides concede that "not all schools should be small. Children differ so much, those that thrive in larger settings should have the opportunity to do so."

Nonetheless, making schools smaller creates an environment where good things can happen. Effective small schools tend to be hotbeds for the teaching practices associated with student success and school improvement. Cotton cited team teaching, integrated curriculum, multiage grouping (especially for elementary grades), cooperative learning, and performance assessments as typical classroom practices of smaller schools. Teachers on a small faculty have more chances to interact with their peers and also report higher levels of parent involvement.

What's more, teachers in smaller schools tend to feel better about their work—an important consideration at a time when many districts are struggling to recruit and retain teachers. As Irmsher reported, "Small school size encourages teachers to innovate and students to participate, resulting in greater commitment for both groups."

These benefits are so thoroughly supported by research and common sense, and so potent when it comes to helping disadvantaged students succeed, that many large districts are opening smaller schools or creating schools-within-schools as a cornerstone of reform efforts. The Department of Education is encouraging a variety of strategies to personalize high schools with $45 million in Smaller Learning Communities Program grants. (See NWREL's role in supporting smaller learning communities.)

Meanwhile, private benefactors are also lending support to small schools. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in September announced $35 million in grants to fund the creation of smaller, more personalized middle schools and secondary schools across the country, expanding on support for small schools that the Gates Foundation has already started in the Northwest. Gates funds are also helping to establish a Small Schools Center at the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education. Similarly, the Annenberg Challenge, a $500 million public-private venture to improve education, has supported development of hundreds of smaller learning communities as a reform strategy in Philadelphia and other large cities, and also has worked with 700 small communities to sustain "genuinely good, genuinely rural" schools.

Recognizing the groundswell of support, Small Schools: Great Strides describes the "small schools movement" that is gaining momentum across the country. The report focuses specifically on downsizing in Chicago, where at least 150 schools serving fewer than 350 students have opened in recent years, but implications extend well beyond that city's borders. As lead author Patricia A. Wasley, newly appointed dean of the College of Education at the University of Washington, told Education Week, "The evidence is very compelling that small schools serve students much better."

Reasons of both excellence and equity are behind the push to create smaller schools and restructure large schools so that they "feel" smaller. "Educators believe that public education is critical to a democracy but that viability requires an important shift so that adults can attend more closely to children," report the Bank Street authors. "While school size is not sufficient in and of itself, it is an essential first step in creating productive, equitable places where young people can actually flourish."

The appeal of small schools comes from their promise to address four broad concerns identified in Small Schools: Great Strides:

• To create small, intimate learning communities where students are well known and can be pushed and encouraged by adults who care for and about them
• To reduce the isolation that too often seeds alienation and violence
• To reduce the devastating discrepancies in the achievement gap that plague poorer children and, too often, children of color
• To encourage teachers to use their intelligence and their experiences to help students succeed

HOW SMALL IS SMALL?
Educators, researchers, and policymakers don't always agree on how small a school needs to be to tap small-school benefits.

Deborah Meier, founder of New York's celebrated Central Park East elementary and secondary schools, makes a case for schools of 300 to 400. As she explained in Educational Leadership, this size works best to promote seven strengths of smallness: governance, respect, simplicity, safety, parent involvement, accountability, and belonging. Not by accident, 400 students can assemble in one room for an all-school event. The teaching staff is small enough to share a potluck supper or fit around a meeting table. And the principal, Meier says, "can take the temperature of the school" at a glance.

Breaking Ranks, a critical 1996 report from the National Association of Secondary School Principals, in partnership with the Carnegie Foundation, recommended that high schools break into units of no more than 600 students as the first step toward "personalizing the high school experience for students." In addition, Breaking Ranks called for high school teachers to be responsible for no more than 90 students per term so that they could offer students more individual attention.

The Department of Education sets a goal of no more than 600 students per high school in its Smaller Learning Communities Program. The Bank Street authors, meanwhile, define small schools as those with 350 students or fewer.

Noticing the range of numbers that researchers have used to define optimum school size, Valerie E. Lee and Julia B. Smith set out to analyze the literature. Their 1997 report in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis found research-based recommendations for enrollment ranging from 300 to 900. When they correlated size with students' academic gains specifically in high school, however, they concluded that 600 to 900 students offers the right number for a secondary school to reach "an appropriate balance point." It's big enough to offer a broad curriculum, small enough to create an intimate learning environment. Lee and Smith also concluded:

• High schools should be smaller than many are—students learn more in relatively small high schools; learning is more equitable in small places
• High schools can be too small—students learn less in high schools with fewer than 600 students, as well as in very large ones
• Ideal size does not vary by the types of students who should attend
• Size is more important in some types of schools—size is especially important for the most disadvantaged students

Researchers also have been examining the potential downside of schools that are too small. In an ERIC Digest report on curriculum adequacy in small schools, Christopher Roelke pointed out that, despite the growth of large schools, approximately one in three public high school students still attends a school of 400 or fewer. Most of these smaller institutions are found in rural areas, such as the schools that serve as the heart of their communities in the Alaska bush, Montana plains, Idaho panhandle, and other sparsely populated regions of the Northwest.

Small schools tend to pay staff members less than larger ones, especially in rural areas, making recruitment and retention of teachers a challenge. The Montana Office of Public Instruction reports that low salaries and rural isolation are two of the top three reasons many rural districts struggle to fill openings. What's more, teachers typically have to cover more subjects in small schools. "We're expected to teach six preps and coach, too," says one longtime rural educator. Some teachers see that as a challenge that keeps them fresh and staves off boredom. However, the Rural School and Community Trust, in Why Rural Matters, released in August 2000, cited out-of-field teaching as a particular concern in rural schools.

To make the most of lean staffs and slender resources, some small schools are pursuing a "less is more" philosophy, Roelke reports, aligning course offerings with national education goals. Although they can't afford to hire specialists or match the curricular breadth of larger schools, small schools can use a variety of strategies to expand options for their students. Among the promising approaches Roelke describes are interdisciplinary courses that reduce the number of separate subjects; innovative scheduling, including longer block periods to accommodate integrated curricula; and distance learning via online classes, video conferences, and other applications of technology. In the Northwest region, some geographically large districts with high transportation costs are also finding success with the four-day school week.

NOT BRICKS AND MORTAR
In Seattle, where students and their families are offered a choice of schools, Nathan Hale High hasn't always been a top draw. Today, though, it's one of the urban district's most sought-after high schools. The increased popularity isn't the result of bricks-and-mortar improvements, but rather comes from restructuring the 1,100-student, comprehensive high school into smaller, more cohesive units.

The first step toward whole school reform at Nathan Hale, in 1998-99, was to organize academies for ninth-graders, with six teachers assigned to groups of 250 students. Setting up academies enabled the school to lower the student-teacher ratio, decrease the number of students individual teachers see daily, and allow time for block scheduling. The results—including better attendance and greater academic success—were so strong that, the next year, Nathan Hale moved forward with interdisciplinary academies for 10th-graders, as well. And when the Gates Foundation announced its grants for smaller high schools in September, a spokesman singled out Nathan Hale "as an example of the success of small schools," reported the Seattle Times.

As Nathan Hale has demonstrated, creating smaller learning communities doesn't have to mean investing in expensive new facilities. Nationwide, educators are using a variety of models and strategies for creating smaller schools—or, at least, schools that feel smaller—within existing space.

Through its Smaller Learning Communities Program, the Department of Education supports strategies for creating schools within schools, career academies, restructuring the school day, instituting personal adult advocates, developing teacher advisory systems, and other innovations to create a more personalized high school experience for students and improve student achievement and performance.

Some definitions and examples:
Freestanding schools typically are self-contained institutions, with their own physical plant, budget, and principal. As an alternative, freestanding schools also can be housed in a multiplex, where two or more schools share a building but operate independently. This approach has led to the creation of dozens of new small schools in New York City, beginning with Central Park East Elementary in 1974.

In the school-within-a-school model, a smaller school is located within a larger host school. The smaller school is typically subject to the budget and leadership of the host building principal, but may have its own personnel, budget, and program. Schools-within-schools typically serve multiple ages and may divide by grade levels, themes, or curricular focus. Seattle's Nathan Hale, for instance, operates an academy for ninth-graders to ease their transition into high school.

Key High School Reform Strategies, a 1999 overview published by the U.S. Department of Education, explains that students enrolled in a school-within-a-school tend to take most of their classes together from teachers affiliated with the smaller school. Variations on the school-within-a-school theme include:

• Career academies, in which schools organize their curriculum around one or more careers or occupations
• Houses, in which students across grades are assigned to smaller units within a larger school; each house typically has its own discipline policies, student activities, student government, and social activities

Other strategies for making large schools more personalized, according to the Department of Education, include advisory systems, in which administrators and teachers are assigned a small number of students for whom they remain responsible throughout high school; magnet schools, which have a core focus and usually draw students from the entire district; and block scheduling, in which 50-minute classes are extended to blocks of 80 or 90 minutes, allowing for more individual attention, interdisciplinary lessons, and a greater variety of learning activities.

Although high schools are most likely to use these approaches to restructuring, some elementary and middle schools are reorganizing into smaller learning communities, as well. A recent article in Principal magazine, published by the National Association of Elementary School Principals, describes how a failing Philadelphia elementary school reduced behavior problems and improved school climate and student achievement by dividing its 700 students into three communities, each with a collaborative team of 12 to 17 teachers. The surrounding neighborhood continues to struggle with issues related to poverty, but the school has blossomed "like a rose in a thorn bush," school administrator Naomi Booker told Principal.

THE COST OF DOWNSIZING
But aren't small schools more expensive than big ones? It's a fair question, especially since it seems like an obvious conclusion. Elite prep schools are universally small, averaging fewer than 300 students, and also are expensive, catering to children of privilege. In public education, the past several decades of school consolidation have been carried out for the sake of economies of scale.

Recently, however, researchers have used hard numbers to challenge the logic that if small is expensive then bigger must be more cost-effective.

A 1998 study looked at the efficiency of small urban schools for producing high school graduates. "It is far more expensive to allow a student to drop out than it is to invest whatever it takes to ensure that student's graduation," researchers reported in The Effects of Size of Student Body on School Costs and Performance in New York City High Schools. Similarly, Raywid concluded, "When viewed on a cost-per-student enrolled basis, they [smaller schools] are somewhat more expensive. But when examined on the basis of the number of students they graduate, they are less expensive than either medium-sized or large high schools."

Sparsely populated areas that have seen their local schools closed for the sake of the bottom line are also taking a fresh look at the cost data. A new study published by the Nebraska Alliance for Rural Education found:

• High school completion and postsecondary rates increase as school size decreases
• Annual cost differences between the smallest schools and the most "efficient" size school are cut in half when measured as cost per graduate than as the traditional cost per pupil
• Any higher school finance costs associated with small schools virtually disappear when the substantial social costs of nongraduates and the positive societal impact of college-educated citizens are considered

Increasingly, educators and policymakers also are considering harder-to-quantify factors, such as the seat time students spend on school buses when their schools are consolidated or the community connections lost when a small town shuts its only schoolhouse. School climate and safety concerns, in particular, have mounted since recent outbreaks of campus violence. After the worst incident—at Colorado's Columbine High, with an enrollment of nearly 2,000—analysts were quick to point to the tragic costs of school environments so large that troubled students can go unnoticed. Indeed, the National Center for Education Statistics reports that fighting and behavior problems get worse as schools grow larger.

Michael Klonsky of the Chicago Small Schools Workshop has pointed out the high costs of large schools, such as "deleterious effects on a host of student outcomes, including achievement, attendance, involvement in school activities, and dropout rates." What's more, he adds, "Impersonal relationships breed anonymity, making it easier for students to act out and more difficult for adults to curb adolescent tendencies to defy adult directives."

"The needs of small schools are not outrageous or luxurious," assert the Bank Street authors, "just clearer."

NO PANACEA
In a research roundup on school size for the ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management, Larry Lashaway pointed out that the school consolidation of recent decades was "achieved at the cost of anguished protests by thousand of citizens served by small schools in small districts." The resulting bigger schools were "viewed by most professional educators as a triumph for enlightened schooling," Lashaway said, but research is now suggesting "that the public's nostalgia for small schools was not misplaced."

Since at least the 1980s, researchers have been pointing out the benefits of smaller schools. Today's proponents acknowledge that smaller learning communities are hardly a radical or new idea. An American education used to be a small-school experience for almost everyone, noted Bruce Barker in a report for the ERIC Clearinghouse on Rural Education and Small Schools. He added, "It would be interesting, perhaps astonishing, to be able to identify the number of successful professionals in business, education, science, and other disciplines who received their public education in a small school."

One of those successful small-schools graduates spoke in Salem, Oregon, last summer, at the annual conference of the Oregon Small Schools Association. Stan Bunn, Oregon Superintendent of Public Instruction, spent his formative years in the little Willamette Valley communities of Lafayette and Dayton, where he graduated with a class of 40. "When I look back on my work in high school and later [including law school at the University of Maryland]," he said, "I got no better education, no better attention, than at Dayton High School. I had teachers who knew me, challenged me, pushed me. I believe in the opportunities small schools create for students."

More and more, researchers and policymakers are finding reason to believe in those opportunities, too. Even the most enthusiastic proponents, however, caution not to view small schools as a fix-all for education. "Small is not enough," write the authors of Small Schools: Great Strides. Rather, they argue that keeping school communities to a smaller scale is just the starting place for comprehensive improvement. Given the challenges many students face in large schools, they suggest inverting the ratios: "making small schools the norm, and large schools the exception."

ONLINE RESOURCES

• ERIC Clearinghouse on Rural Education and Small Schools provides access to research, online forums, grant information, and a calendar of upcoming events
• School Size, School Climate, and Student Performance, by Kathleen Cotton, is available from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory
• Small Schools: Great Strides, A Study of New Small Schools in Chicago, published by Bank Street College in June 2000, documents the benefits of integrating small schools into comprehensive school reform strategies
• Small Schools Workshop at the University of Illinois at Chicago maintains an extensive collection of resources, including research, readings, grant information, and a directory of organizations nationwide that support smaller schools
• The Smaller Learning Communities Program of the U.S. Department of Education outlines program goals and highlights research supporting smaller schools

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