9/28/04 -- As more school leaders embrace the small schools movement, there has been little research demonstrating that small schools have any effect on academic achievement.
A new, draft study by Christopher Berry and Martin West, however, shows that students who graduated from large high schools in past decades tended to earn lower wages than those who went to small schools.
They examined data from the massive movement during the middle of the 20th century to consolidate school districts and schools.
Between 1930 and 1970, 115,000 school districts were eliminated, 130,000 schools were closed, and the size of the average school increased fivefold, says Berry, an assistant professor at the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago.
The study looked at white men born between 1920 and 1949 and educated between 1926 and 1966, the size of schools they attended, and the amount of money they earned after graduating. They found that for each 100-student gain in school size, there was a 3.7 percent drop in earnings.
At the same time school governance transferred from informal community institutions to large bureaucracies.
West, a research fellow with Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance, cautioned against using this research to make conclusions about the current debate on school size. For one thing, the study focused on state averages, "we don't know why school size matters," he says.
Grover Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Education Department, says the current "received wisdom," drawn mostly from anecdotal evidence, is that students who attend small schools "behave better, are less likely to drop out, and do better academically."
But there are "many inconsistencies between the received wisdom and current research," he says.
In fact, one study shows that "the odds of dropping out are lowest in medium-sized schools. Small schools are no better in retaining students than large schools. Another study found that large schools have higher average SAT scores.
Whitehurst says much of the research doesn't address whether it's the structure alone that's important or "whether the structure is simply the context in which learning and instruction takes place."
"Most students attend small schools, and most of them are mediocre," says David J. Ferrero, director of research and evaluation for the Education Division at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
He says the Gates Foundation supports the creation of small schools because they are a "good entry point for promoting various reforms," such as more personalized learning and greater autonomy in management.
The foundation has provided $51 million to help create 67 new, small high schools in New York City and $11 million to transform three large high schools in San Diego into 18 smaller schools.