The Canajoharie and Fort Plain school districts continue to push the concept that a larger school will somehow be better. Five previous “Is Bigger Better” posts present volumes of educational research showing the opposite: smaller schools, even the smallest schools, produce consistently better results. Here are more studies showing the same results. Smaller is better!

In 2000, the research arm of the Bank Street College of Education published a series of papers under the title of Small Schools. An overview of that publication was covered in Is Bigger Better? (Three). I am beginning this post with details from one of those papers, which focuses on the policy implications of reducing school size. (1) The paper begins by making the case for smaller schools: “there is now a broad professional and community consensus for small schools; major policy moves within urban, suburban, and rural communities are being advanced to create and maintain small schools, and substantial social science evidence documents the efficiency and equity potential of small schools. Indeed, small schools could be designed as a systemic reform strategy.” (p5)

From there, the authors summarize previous educational research: “Social scientists have documented the educational achievement and “productivity” of small schools (Fine, 1995; Fine &Somerville, 1998), the heightened safety factor (Gladden, 1998; Zane, 1995), the fiscal efficiency (when one divides costs by graduates; see Fruchter et al., 1998), and the equity power of small schools to reduce the gaps that proliferate between social classes and racial/ethnic groups (Bryk et al., 1998)” (p6). They then contrast the research-based characteristics of large and small schools. “Large schools enabled numbers of students to pass through or drop out anonymously. In large schools, students and faculty, as well as parents, report high levels of alienation and bureaucratic policies (Gladden, 1998). Violence and drug use plague higher numbers of students in large schools than in small schools. Moreover, the impersonal and alienating environment of larger schools seems both to encourage high levels of school disorder and to make it difficult to effectively combat existing problems (Bryk & Driscoll, 1988; Gottfredson, 1985; Pittman & Houghwout, 1987; Zane, 1994).” (p14)

“Small schools are characteristically and consciously distinctive, compelling, and coherent. Small, intimate, nested communities of adults and children set out to produce an intellectual context in which what is taught, who is taught, who is teaching, and how this is assessed are aligned, meaningful, and locally generated.” (p21)

Research published in 2016 directly confirms and expands on these findings. The 2016 paper begins with a literature review in which the authors summarize: “School size reduction has been broadly supported by politicians, academics, foundations, educators, and parents as a potentially promising reform for American public schools (Barker & Gump, 1964). In particular, organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Pew Charitable Trusts have argued that small schools could improve student outcomes through a variety of mediators, such as community building and increased accountability.” (2) (p 406)

The authors then analyse a large dataset to compare large and small schools based on student achievement outcomes. They state that the data “contains observable characteristics for over one million students in 2,679 unique schools from 2007 through 2011. Data came from four diverse states representing different regions of the United States: the Pacific Northwest, New England, the Rocky Mountains, and the Southeast.” (p408)

Their results: “We find consistent evidence that larger schools have small negative effects on student math outcomes in aggregate models that examine outcomes across all grade levels. These generally small effects are consistent with earlier meta-analyses (Luyten et al., 2014). The results for higher grades in our sample in particular – Grades 6 through 10 – are larger and potentially policy relevant. Two key takeaways are apparent for policymakers deliberating over the efficacy of school size reforms. The first is that, conditional on average achievement and time-invariant characteristics of students, math outcomes are significantly related to the size of a school a student attends. The second key takeaway is that school size matters most in the oldest grades, where schools tend to be larger.” (p414)

Once again, experience and research produce clear results. The “opportunities” that merger proponents claim a merger will produce don’t actually produce positive outcomes. The theoretical opportunities fail to materialize based on both the friendlier, more family-like atmosphere of a smaller school, and on simple math. If you add 5 “opportunities” and 500 students, you have actually drastically reduced the number of real opportunities available to each individual student. And regardless of how you work the arithmetic, smaller is proven to be friendlier, happier, and more effective. Mergers increase (double) school size. You do the math.