If we cap secondary school size at 1000 students, how would that affect quality ?

[Progressivism]

I understand the idea behind smaller class sizes and how that would better quality,but what about smaller schools and student numbers ? I've seen some here propose we lower student number and school size in their ideas on improving public education. The first thing I think about when I hear that proposal is course availability.My local public school had 4472 students and offers nearly every AP course except some language courses and human geography.So it seems that lowering school size may have some negatives .

[sharp_stick]

1. 1000 Students/school?

I suppose that would lead to about 50,000 different schools and pretty much zero research. Never mind the end of the "cheaper" State school.

[LWolf]

5. How do small high schools and middle schools

lead to "zero research," and the end of the "cheaper State school?"

[noamnety]

2. Not to state the obvious or anything, but

It would create a better environment for some students and a worse environment for other students.

[LWolf]

4. I'm not seeing that.

There is already a huge discrepancy between schools, as far as "better or worse environment" goes.

How would making schools smaller increase that discrepancy?

[noamnety]

6. Pros and cons to each

Large School Pros:

- less scheduling conflicts (more classes offered, more sections of each class)
- Better for sports, orchestra, drama productions - things that require a large pool of people to get a decent amount of talent grouped together

Small School Pros:

- less of a sense of alienation
- less discipline problems


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When the curriculum expands, only about 10% of the kids take advantage of the additional offerings. Most kids want to take the standard courses. If you create large factory schools, the academic needs of the gifted will be better met - there's a higher probability that AP classes will be offered, for instance.

Is it worth creating a worse environment for the other 90% in order to not leave those 10% behind? The larger environment also by necessity/human nature becomes more authoritarian, less personal in nature. The psychology behind prison studies, writ on a much smaller scale, apply to discipline as a school gets larger.

Pretty much all the studies show one of two things - either that smaller schools overall increase learning, or that they have no effect on learning. The studies showing that larger schools increase learning are pretty much nonexistent. (Some large schools have great test scores because of other variables like funding and who they serve, but as a variable itself, school size doesn't increase learning). So do we create a better learning environment for the 90% and ignore the needs of the 10%?

People become dropouts for both those reasons - frustration if classes don't move at the right speed for a student and also feeling displaced and alienated at school.

That's why some people support schools of choice (in various forms, such as magnets, or open enrollment across districts, I'm not just talking charters here).

[LWolf]

7. I keep in touch with many of my 8th graders

when they move on to high school.

One, a freshman this year, went to live with her grandmother and attend the high school in that small town 20 miles away.

Her high school has 513 students. As a freshman, she has honors math and English. Her school offers honors courses through the junior year, and AP courses in English, Biology, U.S. History and Calculus for jrs and seniors.

We (she, her parents, grandparents and I) looked into it before they made the decision to transfer her to a small high school.

[noamnety]

8. That's great for her.

I wonder what they would have done if they hadn't had grandparents in another town. I would have made the same decision if it had been my child, but I'm also aware that it's gaming the system and using a privilege many don't have - and many here wouldn't support.

We unfortunately had to cancel our AP classes. We serve primarily underprivileged kids, we're a title one school - and the honors classes were so small that it wasn't cost effective to run them. We could only run one section of each AP class, and they start conflicting with the other classes the kids need to take, with schedule conflicts added in sometimes classes were 4 or 5 students. That's an example where a magnet school would make sense to me. It would be able to pool resources from several schools or districts to make those classes available to kids who otherwise wouldn't be able to get them at their school. I don't see it as elitest so much as meeting unique needs in the most cost effective way (sometimes the only possible way due to finances).

[LWolf]

9. That's really the problem with

the "cost effective" factory model to begin with. When it comes to effective learning, smaller is better.

My school is also a Title I school. We serve a wide range of students. Most come from poor rural areas. Some of our families, working ranchers, are land rich but cash poor. The majority of our families are anti-intellectual people who don't have much education themselves. I supported this girl's move to her grandparents because they are more stable than her own parents, who have some substance abuse issues and some issues with the law.

Magnet schools where the magnet is a particular philosophical approach, or a particular topic approach (one district I worked in had a medical magnet high school,) are fine. Magnet schools that sort students by ability levels are not.

Having worked for decades at schools that utilized many creative ways to group students, I can tell you that putting all the advanced students in one place, or all the struggling students in one place, doesn't work well. Flexible clustering, yes, but homogeneous schools and classrooms don't perform as well as heterogeneous.

There ARE scheduling problems for smaller high schools. Reducing class size because research supports it would help with that. You wouldn't need so many students to make an AP course, and you'd have more teachers, and more classes, to serve the students there.

[noamnety]

10. I believe smaller is better

I just also see at our school, the AP classes didn't work. One year they cut them all mid-semester - a disaster. The teachers responded by each continuing to teach one class for free, so we could keep that running at least until the end of the year.

I wish cost-effective with all that implies wasn't an issue, but 80% of our budget is teacher salaries, we have nowhere to cut and the state funding seems to unexpectedly be cut retroactively in the middle of each school year while health insurance keeps spiraling upwards. We've had to cut back staff this year - much like your school, it seems. I don't have the ungodly number of preps you have - I only have 5 separate preps, but the catch for me is that to make our schedule more flexible, every single class I have this year is a split class - I'm trying to teach two separate classes at once in the same room. (I had one of those last year, I told the administration it was unworkable, and I guess what they heard was "more of this, please.")

I've never seen a school around here that had a full range of classes to push advanced learners unless they were grouped by ability. I had the option to send my kid to one of those for a half day - a magnet for science and technology that had a full robotics program that the district could never have supported for each local school. Instead we went for a school with the particular approach (arts) that isn't grouped by ability (where I now teach). The heterogeneous academic classes in English in particular were grim for my kid. She likes to devour an entire book in a night, and when she wasn't grouped by ability she was placed with kids who were barely literate. Good kids, some with a lot of talent in other areas, but they would get assigned a few pages a night because it was all the struggling readers could handle. It's like watching a movie - for 2 minutes a day, and at the end of the month, you'd have seen the whole movie but there's no joy in that, just misery and frustration.

[LWolf]

11. Obviously,

any kind of reform that would embrace smaller schools on a wider scale would also have to embrace different ways of organizing curriculum and classes to overcome that issue.

The whole problem you point out is created by the structure of traditional schools. Change the structure to deal with the issues...real reform.

[kaylynwright]

14. 10% vs. 90%

"Is it worth creating a worse environment for the other 90% in order to not leave those 10% behind?"

Well, those 10% aren't being left behind because they are already ahead and are not being challenged. Instead they are being blocked from moving ahead at the accelerated pace that they need.

I like that you mention magnet schools. Honestly though, I don't know very much about magnet schools because I don't really know of any since they aren't very common I don't think. I know they have more specific curriculum catered to particular students, which sounds like a good idea to me.

"People become dropouts for both those reasons - frustration if classes don't move at the right speed for a student and also feeling displaced and alienated at school."

This is very very true. I've known many intelligent people who were extremely frustrated and bored with high school classes and couldn't wait to start college. Then we started college, and realized that the curriculum is still pretty easy for us because of the general eds that we are required to take that are too easy.

"So do we create a better learning environment for the 90% and ignore the needs of the 10%?"
Both hopefully. It makes sense to me to get that 10% into a different type of school than the 90% and actually give them a challenge at the pace they want, but to also keep the 90% that need/want a regular pace at a regular pace.

[LWolf]

3. Smaller schools and smaller student numbers are important.

The smaller the school, the more adults on campus know each child, the harder it is to be anonymous, the easier it is to catch problems early.

1000 is still big. I'd like to see secondary schools capped at 500, myself.

I'd also like to see K-8 and K-12 schools become the norm.

Lowering school size can have a negative effect; my own contract is an example.

I teach in a K-8 school. We have one class each 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. We have 3 teachers, one for each of those classes. One Language Arts teacher, one Math teacher, one Science teacher.

We don't have a 4th teacher for humanities/social studies, so we divide that up amongst ourselves. I'm highly qualified to teach social studies, so I get history and government, with the rest shared out between my two partners.

That means I have 6 different preps every day. This year, since we lost our PE/Music teachers, we've added that to our duties, as well, giving us each 7 different preps. But no prep time during the school day.

Still, our students, by every measure we can find (test scores, grades, grad rates, student, parent, and high school teacher testimony) are readier for high school, and outperform the students coming from traditional middle schools.

In a smaller high school, students might only have one language option; teachers will teach more different classes. Of course, lowering class size along with school size means that there are more teachers per student, and can make up some of that difference. I don't see why honors classes and AP classes would have to go away.

[goddess40]

12. Gangs become a real problem at 2500

because the kids are unknown to the staff and often don't feel safe.

The class size is what's really important a large school that holds down class size seems to be to be better than a small school with classes of 30+

[kaylynwright]

13. Regarding AP classes

I went to two high schools, both of which were pretty large with around 2000 students

My first high school was in a wealthy area outside of Atlanta, GA. The AP program was a competitive one. The year prior to taking the course and before we left for summer classes, all the students had to complete a test or assignment for each AP class they wanted to be admitted into. For every AP class, students were rejected who wanted to take the course. Students were required to take the AP testing at the end of the year. One test was paid for and, if you couldn't afford more, the school would usually pay for it. I don't know of any other schools that had competition to take an AP class. This school had very little diversity in students as well. Academics were very strong, sports teams, and music, but the drama department was seriously lacking as well as the art departments.

When I transferred before my junior year, I moved into Kansas City, Kansas into a less wealthy area. Anyone could sign up for an AP class if they thought they could handle it. The school had one policy that was different and I think worked. Someone here mentioned honors courses having too few students. An AP course at this school needed 12 students to be enrolled at the beginning of the year. If less than 12 enrolled, the class would be cut for that year. There was a very wide selection of AP classes at this school too, but many were overfull. The academics were not as strong at this school (nor were the sports) but the art programs were wonderful, the drama department was wonderful, the music department was wonderful, and there were so many clubs and events to get involved in.

I don't think it's right to say that AP and honors classes only benefit 10% of students and since they online benefit the small portion, they should be cut. Those 10% of students are the ones who will be your doctors, inventors, scientists, professors, lawyers, etc.

I liked that both of the schools I attended were large. I loved the course availability. If I'd been stuck in standard classes, I would have been extremely bored. Even in advanced classes, many advanced students are still bored.