Small Schools Get Results

By Lynne Irvine

COPYRIGHT 2009

"Recent research confirms

what parents have always known—
Children learn better in small schools

with good teachers." —President Clinton

Over the past fifteen years, research has demonstrated small schools are superior to large schools in narrowing the achievement gap, in creating a safer school environment, and in creating a more supportive school life for students. Yet, the U.S. Department of Education reports 70 percent of students attend high schools enrolling more than 1,000 students, and nearly half attend schools where enrollment tops 1,500.

Between 1940 and 1990, the number of public schools in the United States declined 69 percent despite a 70 percent increase in the nation’s population, according to education researcher Kathleen Cotton. The Annie E. Casey Foundation calls this consolidation, “One of the United States’ most widespread reform movements.” After seven decades of watching schools grow larger, more impersonal, and more violent, educators and policy makers are taking note of the good things that can happen within smaller communities of learners.

Forty Years of Research

Over the past forty years, research has shown small schools have higher academic achievement, higher levels of extracurricular participation and parent involvement, and fewer incidents of discipline and violence. According to Kathleen Cotton’s review of 31 studies on the relationship between small schools and academic achievement, students’ performance in small schools was equal to or better than students’ performance in their larger school counterparts. According to Cotton, “Students [in smaller schools] take more responsibility for their own learning; their learning activities are more individualized, experiential, and relevant to the outside world; classes are generally smaller, and scheduling is much more flexible.” The U.S. Department of Education cites important connections between small schools and teacher collegiality, personalized student-teacher relationships, and individualization, saying, “Small schools are more likely to create and sustain conditions conducive to improving student outcomes.” According to University of Oregon Education Professor, Karen Irmsher, “Small school size encourages teachers to innovate and students to participate, resulting in greater commitment from both groups.” Smaller learning environments also allow for flexible scheduling. Block Scheduling allows teachers more flexibility in their instructional activities, including: individualization and differentiation; inter-disciplinary, project-based learning; and a greater depth of study through authentic learning experiences in the real world.

Millions of Reasons

Interest in the success of small schools is high. The US Department of Education has made millions of dollars available to large high schools to create Small Learning Communities (SLCs) within the buildings they already inhabit. The Carnegie Foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Anneberg Challenge, the Joyce Foundation, the Pew charitable Trust, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and others have also contributed millions of dollars for reforms that include school downsizing.

Small Schools Less Violence

"Not surprisingly, one of the immediate results of small-school restructuring is a reduction in violent or disruptive behavior on the part of students. Small school teachers report a reduction in the number and seriousness of disciplinary infractions, which may be attributed to greater sense of ownership of school by children." -Michael and Susan Klonsky

Kathleen Cotton’s survey of the research linking school size to social behavior investigated everything from truancy and classroom disruption to vandalism, aggressive behavior, theft, substance abuse, and gang participation. Not only do small schools have lower incidences of these negative social behaviors than large schools, the impact of small schools was found to be even more positive among minority and low SES students. The Center for Adolescent Development at the University of Minnesota “learned that school connectedness is a powerful protective factor.” They found students who feel connected to school are less likely to use alcohol and illegal drugs, are less likely to engage in violent or deviant behavior, are less likely to become pregnant, and are less likely to experience emotional distress. The National Center for Education Statistics reports urban schools with less than 400 students have 29% less serious violent incidents compared to schools with over 1,000 students.

Ten Key Features

Stanford University Education Professor, Linda Darling-Hammond’s research on small schools reveals 10 key features that “have been observed in successful small schools [but] that are conspicuously absent in those that have failed.” These ten features include: personalization, continuous relationships, high standards and performance-based assessments, authentic curriculum, adaptive pedagogy, multi-cultural and anti-racist teachings, knowledgeable and skilled teachers, collaborative planning and professional development, family and community connections, and democratic decision making.

Personalized Education

Linda Darling-Hammond believes social and emotional learning is a crucial part of teaching the whole child. “Schools need to be places where strong relationships can form,” she explains. According to Darling-Hammond we are still struggling to get past the factory-model schools, where “teachers stamp out kids as they pass by on a conveyor belt,” that were developed during the last century in response to the needs of our industrialized society. One hundred years later, schools remain punitive and coercive, and are designed to “control a large numbers of people being asked to do things that are not natural,” according to Darling-Hammond. She recommends redesigning schools to create more personalized environments where adults and students stay together for longer periods of time, where teams of teachers can work together with each other around the needs of the students as well as with the students directly. Block scheduling not only allows teachers more time with fewer students, it provides opportunities for interdisciplinary, in-depth studies. According to Darling-Hammond, today’s schools must prepare seventy percent of students for ‘thinking work.’ Despite this need, our public schools currently prepare only 20 to 25 percent of students for a college education.

Continuous Relationships

Research shows “that students experience much greater success in schools structured to create close, sustained relationships among students and teachers,” according to Darling-Hammond. “Sustained relationships allow teachers to take on more ambitious learning goals since learning is less fragmented and more time exists to support serious work.” Small schools designed for personalized instruction that keeps students and teachers together for longer periods of time, have fewer behavior problems and produce higher student achievement. Organizing students in ‘Advisories’ of approximately 15 students allows teachers to serve as advocates, counselors, and primary family contacts to promote a better partnership with the family and community in educating students. These Advisors work with students for multiple years to gain an in-depth of knowledge of their students to support academic success, personal growth, and college and career goals.

High Standards

Some school administrators argue in favor of large schools based on their ability to ‘offer everything’ to prepare students for college. Research disproves this argument. Students from small schools, in fact, attend college at a significantly higher rate, have higher scores on college entrance exams, and have better college grade point averages and completion rates according to Kathleen Cotton’s survey of research. “We have to invent new schools,” explains Linda Darling-Hammond, “We have to invent a way that allows us to know students well, to teach them [at] high levels, to deal with the effects of inequality in society, and [to] create something more equitable and thoughtful.”

Authentic Curriculum

Authentic curriculum is student-centered. British educator David Hawkins described one inspiration for his authentic curriculum saying, “Everyone knows the best times in teaching have always been the consequence of some little accident that happened to direct attention in some new way, to revitalize an old interest that you hadn’t any notion about how to introduce. Suddenly, there it is. The bird flies in the window, and that’s the miracle you needed.” While small schools enhance opportunities for teachers to become masters of the ‘bird in the window,’ educators complain of having too little time to allow curriculum to be shaped by the individuals and events in their classrooms because of the increase in top-down curriculum mandates and high-stakes testing. Author David Sobel compares this trend to “the homogenization of the American commercial landscape by fast-food restaurants or the decimation of traditional cultural practices with the arrival of television.”

“As the United States moves from a simpler society dominated by a manufacturing economy to a much more complex world based largely on information technologies and knowledge work, its schools are undergoing a once-in-a-century transformation. Never before has the success, and perhaps even survival, of nations been so tightly tied to their ability to learn. Authentic learning and assessment asks students to master intellectual and practical skills that are eminently transferable to real life.”

--Linda Darling-Hammond

Adaptive Pedagogy

Students vary enormously in the speed and manner in which they learn. Small schools allow teachers to engage in learning as a user-centered, adapting to the students’ learning styles, background, aptitude, motivation, personality, and interests. When teachers become more responsive to helping students understand their strengths and weaknesses, engagement and achievement rise. When teachers use a variety of instructional strategies, including interdisciplinary learning experiences, students develop lifelong learning skills. According to the National Commission on Time and Learning, “Schools will have a design flaw as long as their organization is based on the assumption that all students can learn on the same schedule.”

Multi-Cultural Teachings

As curriculum standardization escalates, the need to teach to student diversity takes on increasing importance. According to Linda Darling-Hammond, we can no longer say, “I taught it and the students didn’t learn it. That would be like saying, The operation was a success, but the patient died.” In an increasingly diverse culture, teachers must not exclude students, accidentally or intentionally, from opportunities to learn. Small schools allow teachers more opportunities to know their students and to communicate respect, fairness, and high expectation for all, regardless of their background. Teachers can take steps to insure equitable classroom participation.

Skilled Teachers

Using data from a 50-state policy survey conducted by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, the impact of teacher qualification on the quality of education was examined. Teacher effectiveness was found to be a strong determinant of differences in student learning. Students assigned to ineffective teachers for several years in a row were found to have significantly lower levels of achievement than those assigned to highly effective teachers. These effects were found to be cumulative. Linda Darling-Hammond’s research shows successful schools have teachers who have solid academic backgrounds and are certified for teaching. These teachers create a strong, coherent curriculum by having time in their schedules to collaborate with other teachers, and to pursue ongoing professional development. In smaller schools, practices like team-teaching, integrated curriculum, multi-age grouping, cooperative learning, project learning, mentorships, parent involvement, and authentic curriculum and assessments are more manageable.

Collaborative Planning

One of the major goals for education in the 21st Century is to teach students how to work well in groups to solve difficult problems that require creative solutions. Project-based, experiential learning requires students to plan collaboratively, and to solve real problems in the real world. Project learning requires students demonstrate their understanding through performances and exhibitions, while developing their social, emotional, and academic intelligences. Collaborative planning requires students learn how to divide tasks, how to solve problems, how to react when they reach a dead end, and how to select the best solutions in moving forward.

Family and Community Connections

Manageable school size allows teachers to focus more effectively on students and to collaborate with parents to improve student outcomes. According to Kathleen Cotton, "The higher rates of parent involvement in smaller schools is frequently cited as a major positive influence on student achievement and attitudes." The National Network of Partnership Schools outlines Six Types of Parental Involvement that enhance student outcomes:

1) Assisting with parenting skills,
2) Communicating about student progress,
3) Involving families as volunteers,
4) Involving families with learning at home,
5) Sharing decision making with families, and

6) Collaborating with the community.

At the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (MET), in Providence, Rhode Island, parents help plan their child’s individual Learning Through Internship, help assess student exhibitions three times yearly, and assist new parents in understanding school practices. Many serve as workplace mentors. From their experiences, Elayne Walker of the Big Picture Company, has developed Ten Principles of Parent Engagement:

1) Assume the parents are caring and concerned about their child’s education and welfare,

2) Acknowledge and use as a resource the fact that parents are the child’s first teacher, and encourage that dynamic in their education at school and at home,

3) Recruit families to enroll in your school and involve other family members in student work,
4) Make a commitment on both sides that school personnel and parents will work with each other at set intervals,
5) Vary the opportunities to involve families, and communicate a menu of opportunities,
6) Accept suggestions for parent-driven ideas and activities, and support them whether they happen or not,
7) Develop a database that lets you know the profile of all your families, individually

and collectively,

8) Allow parents to create a presence in the school,

9) Make clear the principal’s expectations in regard to family engagement, and

10) At the end of the school year, introduce the concepts for family engagement for

the following year.

Democratic Decision Making

Students at the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU) have joined the Youth United for Change to lead a campaign to re-envision and transform their high school. They propose developing small schools, characterized not only by their size, but also by a rigorous education, an increased sense of community, and democratic decision-making. “My vision for small schools is a new environment – not just a new building but a new education,” explains PSU 9th grader, Tiffany Vogel. For these students, an improved education includes an improved relationship with their teachers. “In small schools, the teachers and the students get to know each other better,” comments Mary Wells, PSU Senior. Wells envisions a school where members of the school community become part of the shared school governance process. The goal of democratic decision-making in small schools is to engage the entire community.

"It's an inspiration to see young people so involved in bettering their education system," says Rev. Rodney Rogers, "not just for the betterment of themselves, but also for others."

Parents Leading Small School Reform

There are over 4,600 charter schools across the country educating 1.4 million children, where parents have joined with teachers and community partners to create the benefits of smaller learning communities for their children. Charter school parents are more involved in school performances, as classroom volunteers, and as committee members than parents in traditional schools. Charter school teachers are far more supportive of parental involvement, and community outreach.