Schools Historical Perspectives on Small Schools

Abstract

The new consensus with regard to the merits of small scale reminds us that significant change in public education is possible, Mr. Hampel notes. Not everything stays the same from one generation to the next. SMALL SCHOOLS today strike many educators and policy makers as a potential cure for what ails American schools. This enthusiasm for small schools needs historical perspective. The criticism of large schools as inhumane, inefficient, and unsafe seems so reasonable that one wonders how educators could ever have held other views. But they did. Until the 1970s, the small was seen as the problem, not the solution. Before then, if large schools were questioned, it was only the behemoths - urban high schools with more than 3,000 students and elementary schools with more than 1,000 - that were considered worrisome, and they were rare. It was the other end of the spectrum, the very small school, that drew much more concern and criticism than the very large school. The tiny schools were everywhere. Although their count fell steadily as student enrollments rose, they persisted for a long time in most parts of the country. As late as 1940, there were 114,000 one-room schools, mostly elementary. Fewer than 10% of all rural schools in 1940 had either six or more teachers or 200+ students.1 The rate of change accelerated thereafter. From 114,000 in 1940 to 60,000 in 1950, with an even steeper rate of decline in the next two decades (20,000 in 1960 and 2,000 by 1970), the one-room almost vanished. The number of districts also plummeted as consolidation picked up speed. In 1957, when former Harvard president James Conant began a series of studies of American education, there were 50,446 districts, with 58% serving fewer than 50 students (several thousand relics lacked any students).2 Thirty years later, two-thirds of those districts were gone. The size of schools in the cities and suburbs seemed less objectionable than that of schools in rural America. Minute urban schools were just about extinct by 1900, and they rarely reappeared. The expansion of scale (especially in the suburbs) was not in massive elementary schools or in the handful of huge high schools; those were never very common. The ideal of the neighborhood elementary school capped the size of elementary schools in many communities, and the mammoth high with a thousand or so students per grade required too much urban space. The expansion of scale took place by redefining a large high as a typical high school. A big high before World War II enrolled from 500 to 2,500 students. Only 14% of the country's high schools were that large; 75% served fewer than 200 students, and only 7% had more than 1,000 students. Fifty years later, 53% of American high schools were in the 500-to-2,500 range, enrolling 84% of the nation's students.3 There was no single argument set forth to justify and celebrate large schools. In this article I will look at five beliefs, each firmly held for a long time by most educators. These beliefs became articles of faith rather than issues to explore, and the advocates of small schools were usually dismissed as ignorant, cranky laypeople unaware of their own best interests. Differences Matter More Than Similarities Nothing was more troubling about small schools than their ungraded organization. Having students of widely different ages and aptitudes in the same room precluded good teaching, most educators believed. How could one teacher provide coherent instruction to students far apart in academic preparation? Clever teachers might devise stopgap measures and improvise admirably, but they faced a fundamentally impossible task when there was so much diversity in one room. What the students shared - similar neighborhoods, common relatives, comparable experiences on the farm - mattered less than their differences. Students should be separated by age. …