Why has entrepreneur Bill Gates vowed to commit billions of dollars to the public education system? Gates is a committed advocate of small schools, and part of a growing chorus of voices calling for scaled down, safer, and more effective secondary education.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has underwritten about $2 billion worth of projects since 1994, aimed at creating small public high schools, in the 400 to 800 student range.

Business Week’s recent picks of the top 100 high schools in America lend support to Gates’s view. Top-ranked International Academy, in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., enrolls 521 students in ninth through 12th grades. The average size of a top five high school in Business Week’s list is 641 students. The range stretches from Stanton Prep, the largest at 1,461 students, to tiny Paxton High, at 170 students.

North Carolina’s Myers Park High School, in Charlotte, was ranked No. 7 in the nation. At 2,497 students, Myers Park is more than 70 percent larger than any other school in the top 10. In all, six North Carolina high schools appear among the top 100 schools in the rankings. They include Enloe, Providence, East Chapel Hill, Harding University, and East Mecklenburg high schools, in addition to Myers Park.

Increasing school and district size

For decades before the 1980s, schools and school systems were undergoing a scale transformation. Not only were individual schools getting bigger and bigger, so were the districts that served schoolchildren and their families. Kathleen Cotton reported in a 1996 study “School Size, School Climate, and Student Performance,” that “the total number of elementary and secondary public schools declined 69 percent — from about 200,000 to 62,037 — despite a 70 percent increase in population” between 1940 and 1990. According to a study by H.J. Walberg, the number of school districts across the United States shrunk by 87 percent over roughly the same period, falling from 117,108 in 1940, to 15,367 by 1992. The dominant themes almost everywhere were to become bigger and more centralized in the name of efficiency and opportunity.

By 1994, as Cotton noted, average school enrollment was five times its 1940 level. Elementary schools, which had averaged 123 students, now averaged 650 students. High schools in 1940 were closer to the 350 to 600 range, at their largest. High schools with 2,000 to 3,000 students are now commonplace in some urban and suburban areas.

Plans for new Wake County schools generally accord with Cotton’s 1996 calculations. According to the “Plan 2000 Mid-Program Update,” new Wake County elementary schools are being built for 601 to 748 students. Middle and high schools are large as well. Heritage Middle School in Wake Forest is planned for 1,293 students, and Knightdale High projects 1,604 students. Student capacity in new construction doesn’t include the trailer classrooms that are sometimes added in a school’s first year of operation.

Small schools vs. large schools

“Small” is not a precise term when it comes to school size. Researchers have arrived at a consensus, however, and refer to small high schools as ones that keep enrollment below 800. The cost savings theoretically associated with large schools have been overstated, or don’t exist at all, according to cost-effectiveness studies. Phillip McKenzie’s 1983 analysis shows that average costs “decline, reach a minimum, and then begin rising ” as enrollment increases. The optimal size is much smaller than earlier believed, McKenzie’s numbers show.

The Institute for Education and Social Policy at New York University studied costs at New York City high schools, comparing small and large institutions. The NYU study revealed that small city schools have higher per-pupil expenditures than large schools, but noticed that the small schools were graduating a significantly larger percentage of their students. As a result, the small schools incur a lower cost per graduate.

Small size, according to the Cotton survey, promotes a feeling of “belongingness” and reduces students’ sense of alienation. Small schools also have better attendance and lower dropout rates. As Cotton wrote, “Measured either as a dropout rate or graduation rate, the holding power of small schools is considerably greater than that of large schools.”

The Cotton survey reported on 49 studies that considered school size and its effect on performance, attitude, and behavior. Of these, 31 linked small size to higher achievement, 19 to better student attitudes, 17 to increased extracurricular participation, and 14 linked small size to fewer discipline problems and better social behavior.

One interesting finding from the survey documents the fact that a greater percentage of students participate in extracurricular activities at small schools. With fewer students, each is “more valuable” to the life of the school, whether in clubs or student government.
Achievement and safety are critical issues in contemporary high schools. Personal attitudes and higher interpersonal esteem play a role in school safety. Less vandalism, theft, substance abuse, and classroom disruption, among other negative behaviors were reported in 14 of the surveyed assessments. And minority students fare better, researchers found. “To put this a little differently, …researchers have found that large schools have a more negative impact on minority and low-SES [socioeconomic status] students than on students in general,” the School Size report states. Researchers have observed that low-SES student attitudes are particularly sensitive to school size.

As Robert Jewell observed while addressing questions of education equity “…we may be acting contrary to the interests of all concerned by organizing our public education system in a manner which assigns high proportions of minority youngsters to large schools within very large school districts.”

Large schools don’t generally outperform small schools academically. Half of the research comparisons showed that small schools produced as many academically advanced students as did large ones. Otherwise, small schools outperformed larger ones.

Wake County’s “Small Schools, Big Changes” study of 2000 echoes the Cotton research on school grades, test scores, and honor roll membership. It also notes that smaller schools do a better job of retaining students. “Current research still shows smaller school environments to have lower dropout rates and better student involvement in extracurricular activities,” “Small Schools, Big Changes” reiterates.

The Cotton survey states that “both personal and academic self-regard are more positive in smaller schools.” Michelle Fine, psychology professor at the City University of New York, said, “[S]mall is just a vehicle for doing other rigorous, accountable work.”

While North Carolina did well to place six schools among the top 100 nationally, its top-ranked schools are atypically large. All of the six top-100 schools in North Carolina have student populations over 1,200. New York has 30 top-100 schools on the Business Week list. Just 25 percent of those are larger than 1,000 students. Excluding the New York City metropolitan area, about one top-100 school in 10 is larger than 1,000 students.

Without some statistical tests, it’s hard to know whether North Carolina would have more top rankings with smaller high schools. But in students with large gaps in achievement, research confirms that small schools do make a big difference.

Palasek is a policy analyst at the North Carolina Education Alliance and an assistant editor at Carolina Journal.