Big Schools May Not Be So Bad
The New York Times recently profiled Francis Lewis High School in Queens, one of the top ranked high schools in the city, and wildly popular. Last year nearly 13,000 students applied for admission (in NYC students can apply to any school in their district). The lucky ones who get in can choose electives such as forensics, psychology, bioethics, genetics research and pre-law. The one thing the school doesn’t offer is space. Francis Lewis has more than 4,600 students enrolled, in a building designed to fit 2,000.
The cramped quarters don't seem to harm the quality of education, or the enthusiasm of the students for their school. Which makes me wonder--why do so many of us believe small schools and small classrooms are better? Does size not matter? I know many parents struggle financially in order to send their children to small, selective private schools, in part because they fear the overcrowding and large class sizes their children might encounter in public schools. The New York City Board of Education also seems to believe smaller schools are preferable. It's been setting up small charter schools throughout the five boroughs for several years in an effort to move kids out of gigantic schools, many of them failing.
Yet one of the top elementary schools in the city, PS 321 in Brooklyn, routinely has 30 children in many of its classes. Although I wanted a small middle school for my daughter, she ended up in MS 51, also in Brooklyn, which regularly wins top rankings despite encompassing 1300 students in grades 6-8, and so far is doing fine. Then there's Stuyvesant High School, one of the best and most selective schools in the nation. It has 3200 students (though they are housed in a spacious 10-story building that looks more like a college than a high school).
In the Newsweek blog NurtureShock, Po Bronson writes about a Maine study by Dr. Julie Newman Kingery that looked at whether elementary school students did better staying with their same classmates through middle school (a so-called linear model) or moving to a much larger school with students from many different elementary schools (the multifeeder model). She sampled several hundred kids from both models and the results surprised her:
Kingery fully expected the kids in the linear, single-school feeder system to be better adjusted socially and as a result to also be doing slightly better academically. Surprisingly, she found the opposite result: kids in the multifeeder middle school had adjusted better; they had improved academically and had more best friends.
I wonder why so many of us are convinced that smaller is better when it comes to schools? I'm beginning to realize, as my own daughter moves from her small elementary school to a large middle school, that it is a magical mix of great teachers, innovative administrators, involved parents and enthusiastic students that makes a school work. Getting the mix of each right is tricky, of course, and it’s probably easier to manage all the parts if the building isn’t filled to bursting.
I'd like to hear from readers: What's been your experience with school size?