Washington Learns…about school size
Or, when you’re in the same state as Bill Gates, you gotta drink his kool-aid.
It seems odd to me that Washington Learns is even spending time on school size; the research seems a bit lacking, and I think that teachers and program are far more important than the number of kids in the building. The paper recommends (page 27) that school units (that word is important) for elementary be in the 400-600 range, while secondary can be between 500 to 1000. The reason they say units is that the report comes out strongly in favor of breaking up large schools into smaller sub-schools. Under their thinking a 2000 student school would turn into 2 thousand-student schools, or 4 schools-within-schools of 500 students each. The report isn’t recommending that we replace the existing sites with smaller buildings, but suggests that future construction could take the size research into consideration.
My take: eh. There was a great article in Education Week ($) a couple of weeks ago about Manual High School in Denver, which was broken up into 3 different academies. The end result was chaos. The Gates Foundation has even expressed some regrets about throwing money at smaller schools without really checking to see if they made a difference, and I’m not sure it’s clear that they do. One of the most honored high schools in the country is Adlai E. Stevenson in Illinois, home school of PLC guru Richard DuFour, and it’s got more than 4500 students. Are we better off looking at successful large schools and copying what they do well, or spending the money to break up the larger schools and hope for the best?
It seems odd to me that Washington Learns is even spending time on school size; the research seems a bit lacking, and I think that teachers and program are far more important than the number of kids in the building. The paper recommends (page 27) that school units (that word is important) for elementary be in the 400-600 range, while secondary can be between 500 to 1000. The reason they say units is that the report comes out strongly in favor of breaking up large schools into smaller sub-schools. Under their thinking a 2000 student school would turn into 2 thousand-student schools, or 4 schools-within-schools of 500 students each. The report isn’t recommending that we replace the existing sites with smaller buildings, but suggests that future construction could take the size research into consideration.
My take: eh. There was a great article in Education Week ($) a couple of weeks ago about Manual High School in Denver, which was broken up into 3 different academies. The end result was chaos. The Gates Foundation has even expressed some regrets about throwing money at smaller schools without really checking to see if they made a difference, and I’m not sure it’s clear that they do. One of the most honored high schools in the country is Adlai E. Stevenson in Illinois, home school of PLC guru Richard DuFour, and it’s got more than 4500 students. Are we better off looking at successful large schools and copying what they do well, or spending the money to break up the larger schools and hope for the best?
posted by Ryan at 3:31 PM
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