Bigger is not always better. This holds true for utility bills, dress sizes and, it now turns out, schools.
Results of a new national study indicate that students from small schools, regardless of their racial makeup or socioeconomic status, score higher on standardized tests than students from large schools.
It isn’t news that students from small rural schools outperform their counterparts in the cities, where schools tend be larger and the student population both more ethnically diverse and less affluent. The news is the reason for the difference in scores: school size. Not race, not location, not income, not even class size.
A lot of excuses we’ve been hearing for the sad figure cut by Chicago public schools on national tests don’t ring quite so true anymore.
The study, conducted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, found that schools with fewer than 300 students recorded the best performance on the Scholastic Assessment Test. Such findings come at a time when the country as a whole is moving toward bigger, not smaller, schools, with about 90 percent of students attending schools with enrollments over 300.
Where does Chicago fit into this equation? In 1993, according to the Chicago Board of Education, average enrollment at Chicago public elementary schools was 645; high schools had, on average, 1,329 students.
The study also found that the high-scoring schools concentrate on traditional subjects, view themselves as “places of learning” not “social service agencies” and have a high degree of local control and significant parental involvement.
While none of this is particularly surprising, it provides a fresh context for assessing the problems facing Chicago public schools.
No, the system cannot simply build and staff more schools-at present, it can’t support the ones it has. But it can work toward that goal through nontraditional approaches to education-encouraging the creation of charter schools, for example-and through reallocation of resources freed by continued streamlining of a cumbersome bureaucracy that has little to do with the intellectual lives of students.
Size notwithstanding, Chicago schools will of necessity perform a “social service” role where it is not being filled by family and community. Again, it should come as no surprise that parents’ involvement is crucial-in the lives of their children and the schools they attend. As long as the school system is burdened with responsibilities abdicated by parents, education will suffer.
But it suffers less in an atmosphere where the principal knows each child’s name, where a teacher’s top priority is teaching, and where a child is encouraged to learn. Surely those goals are not beyond our reach.
