Smaller Schools Blog

Students at Small High Schools Are More Likely to Graduate

2012-01-27T19:59:00.011-07:00

A new study published in the New York Times shows the value of smaller schools - about 100 students per grade - in big city settings. They found that these schools had a higher graduation rate. "The higher graduation rate at small schools held across the board for all students, regardless of race, family income...."

Students in these schools are also more ready for college. "Small-school students also showed more evidence of college readiness...."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/education/new-york-city-students-at-small-public-high-schools-are-more-likely-to-graduate-study-finds.html?_r=2

New York Leaps into the Middle School Trap : Education Next

2011-09-23T21:22:00.002-06:00

New York Leaps into the Middle School Trap : Education Next

"In the specific year when students move to a middle school (or to a junior high), their academic achievement, as measured by standardized tests, falls substantially in both math and English relative to that of their counterparts who continue to attend a K–8 elementary school. What’s more, their achievement continues to decline throughout middle school. This negative effect persists at least through 8th grade, the highest grade for which we could obtain test scores."

Developing Responsible Citizens

2011-09-04T17:41:00.003-06:00

Peter Levine makes the case in this article that smaller schools will do a better job of helping develop more responsible youth. He says, "If we hope to create effective, committed, and responsible citizens, huge schools have several marked disadvantages." He further says, "In a huge high school, there is little chance that any adult will try to steer a student who is on a mediocre track onto a more challenging one."

To increase "civics" in our youth, more civics classes are not the answer. We need smaller schools where the youth will find adults who are more likely to know and guide them. We also need smaller school districts and other local governments, where the youth are more likely to know someone who is an elected leader, someone who is actively participating in government. They are more likely to learn about government that way than attending many "civics" classes.

7-12 Secondary schools instead of jr. highs

2011-07-30T11:30:00.000-06:00

Jr. highs have proven to be the worst time of a student's public school experience. That's when kids are most likely to take a nose dive in either behavior or academics. Many people have just written it off to hormones! While that makes things harder, the configurations of middle schools and jr. highs play a big role too.

Elementary students typically have anywhere from 50-100 students per grade level, usually with one main teacher per class. They know their teacher and the other students well, usually of the whole grade. They can't hide in the mob. In a jr. high they typically have 200-300+ students per grade level. It takes those kind of numbers, when you only have 2-3 grades in a school, to be financially viable. In that setting students become part of the mob. Their behaviors deteriorate along with their grades.

Many districts are now experimenting with K-8 schools, which have shown much improvement. Still better, though not as prevalent, are 7-12 secondary schools. There are many advantages to this configuration, but few have really considered this option.

If you turn each jr. high and high school into a 7-12 school, they would house the same number of students, but would reduce the number of students per grade level.

By readjusting school boundaries, the schools would be closer to the homes of the students. This would lower the amount of traffic and travel times.

Students would be in the same school longer without having to transition to a new school, thus reducing the loss of learning and time of adjustment.

Students and teachers would get to know each other better. Parents would tend to be more connected with the school.

If the students had siblings near their age, they would be in the same school - family-friendly, one-stop schooling! They could look after each other better.

One study shows that students who attend 7-12 schools do better in college.

The more you look at 7-12 schools the better they look!

Ropes and Rods

2011-07-07T20:20:00.003-06:00

I've been considering how a rope compares to a rod. A rod is strong but not flexible at all. A rope is strong AND flexible, which makes it more versatile. A rope is made of many strands, each of which is made of many fibers. Together they provide strength along with a give and take that allows it to bend without breaking. If we could somehow melt all these fibers and strands into one rod, they would all be the same but without the ability to bend. There would be no flexibility, no give and take.

This is how I see the need to maintain the viability and strength of our different levels of governance, such as national, state, and local, rather than concentrating all the power to ever higher levels. Consolidating into ever bigger units undermines this flexibility. When a district grows too big, it operates more like a rod. The bureaucracy becomes inflexible. It cannot bend with needs of differing areas. Dividing into smaller, community-sized districts re-creates the right balance between teachers, schools, and districts (fibers, strands, rope).

Vouchers: A Trojan Horse

2011-05-05T22:26:00.003-06:00

My message at the legislature was that vouchers was a Trojan Horse for private schools. It would turn them into government schools when the regulations came. This article from the conservative CATO group backs that up. Vouchers aren't the answer. Smaller districts are.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/indiana-voucher-law-a-defeat-for-educational-freedom
"In reality, the voucher program is a tactical victory for highly constrained choice won at the price of a broad strategic defeat for educational freedom."
"The likely effect is a serious loss of education freedom and diversity of options in the medium-term and a near-total loss in the long term."
"The voucher law places private schools under the supervision of the state Department of Education, making them accountable to career bureaucrats and political appointees for performance on government standards and curriculum. It is an authorization and framework of accountability to the state, rather than to parents and taxpayers directly. This is a strategic victory for opponents of educational freedom; all that's required is a downhill push for tighter control."

Deregulation of Public Education Proposal

2010-12-05T22:14:00.004-07:00

http://smallerschoolsresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/deregulation-of-public-education.html

The link listed above is a proposal made in response to a request from the Utah State Legislature in 2003. It proposes structural changes to our system of public education, changes to the infrastructure, changes in teacher training, and a simplifying of the government intrusion into local schools to more fully empower parents and teachers.

The proposal includes plans for a trial pilot. Parts of it could be implemented separately providing measurable improvement, but the total would provide more than the sum of its parts. The magic of full implementation of this deregulation plan would be in the improvement it would bring to parents and teachers, which would bring greater advances to the children than any other reformation or restructuring thus far proposed. Rather than guaranteeing government-forced success, which doesn’t work anyway, this proposal clears out weeds that are choking success, making it much more likely.

Saying smaller school results are mixed is inaccurate.

2010-11-11T21:54:00.005-07:00

Recent media articles have given a mixed message about the successes of smaller schools. The trouble is two fold. First, smaller schools were never a guarantee of success. It only made success more likely – probably more likely than any other factor changeable from outside the family. Some studies say that the only higher predictor of success than school size was socioeconomics, i.e. the family. With smaller schools, success becomes possible for people who will work to create the right setting for learning to happen. Big schools make that much more difficult.

Second, most attempts at creating smaller schools have not been truly smaller schools or they changed other things in the process. Most attempts at creating smaller schools have been what used to be called “schools within a school.” These is where students continue to come to the same big school but are grouped together by a common theme in smaller “communities” within the same school. Though it has been called creating smaller schools, it is not. It is just another way of organizing a large school.

Some have even reorganized a community of schools so that, for instance, all of the sixth grade students go to one building with other grades also similarly grouped. This is also NOT creating small schools, because the magic of smaller schools is in lowering the grade level size. Smaller grade levels make it possible for all students of varying interests, at the same age to know each other well, and makes real collaboration between teachers less difficult and cumbersome.

A school of 600 6th graders would be a huge school because the grade level size is so big. A school of the same number of students grades K-6 would be a moderately sized school, because there would be somewhat less than 100 students per grade. If a school was a K-12 school with that same number of students, it would truly be a small school, again, because of the number of students per grade level rather than per building.

Conclusions that smaller schools have mixed results are not accurate, because they aren’t judging real smaller schools. They are evaluating reorganized large schools. Schools within a school are what have mixed results – not smaller schools.

Real smaller schools work. Pretending to create them confuses people. The research is already there. When will we listen and act accordingly?!

Partner Websites

2010-08-25T21:56:00.014-06:00

Principals

2010-07-31T13:58:00.004-06:00

In a big district, principals have little say in district policy or direction. District administrators that form the superintendent's cabinet make those decisions. In a community-sized district principals ARE the cabinet of the superintendent!

All is not as it seems

2010-03-06T13:58:00.002-07:00

Deseret News has done a poll showing over 3/4 of Salt Lake Valley residents feel that the Jordan District division and creation of Canyons School District was unfair. The poll result is not surprising when that's all the public has been told for the past two years by the media. If the media had done to our founding fathers what it has done to these modern day pioneers, George Washington, etc., would never have been able to split from Great Britain.

District administrators have also not been above arousing and inflaming the natural antagonism of one region against another to defeat any creation of a new school district. When it was proposed that Lehi split from the Alpine S.D., we were told Lehi would need a 40% tax hike while Orem would be able to lower their taxes. When Orem proposed dividing a couple years later, the district then said the opposite, that Orem would see a reduction in their funding.

Among many other things the public hasn't been told is that Jordan S.D. has MORE tax base per student than Alpine, Cache, Davis, Nebo, and Weber School Districts WITHOUT any extra! These districts are facing the same problems of growth with cuts in funding. Jordan administrators are using the current economic shortage to blame and scare people against dividing our huge Wasatch Front school districts, which would be the best thing we could do for education.