Cotton, Kathleen, “School Size, School Climate, and Student Performance,” Close-Up Number 20 in the School Improvement Research Series, produced by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory under a contract with the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. Contact: Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory Document Reproduction Service, 101 S.W. Main Street, Suite 500, Portland, Oregon 97204; tel.: (503) 275-9519 (503) 275-9519
Funded by the Annenberg Challenge in late 1994 Philadelphia’s school district adopted the ambitious “children achieving” plan that included reorganizing its schools into neighborhood clusters and breaking every big school up into “small learning communities”. Virtually all students in comprehensive high schools were affiliated with such a unit during the 1995-1996 school year, and hundreds more were beginning in elementary
Research on the effects of school-within-a-school arrangements is less extensive and conclusive than that on the relative effects of large and small schools, Kathleen Cotton’s review from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory reveals. But it suggests that students do benefit from this form of organization, as long as the school-within-a-school is sufficiently separate, distinct, and autonomous in its vision, culture,
For both elementary and secondary students of all ability levels and in all kinds of settings, research has repeatedly found small schools to be superior to large schools on most measures and equal to them on the rest. The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland, Oregon recently made available Kathleen Cotton’s digest of 103 studies of the relationship of school
Kathleen Cotton’s comprehensive review of research for the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory distilled the chief factors to which researchers attribute the superiority of small schools: Everyone’s participation is needed to populate the school’s offices, teams, clubs, and so forth, so a far smaller percentage of students is overlooked or alienated. Adults and students in the school know and care about
Small schools do better across the board at knowing students well, keeping their work meaningful, and joining with others in collaborative communities. In the push toward higher student achievement, how can we bring their successes into the large schools most of our students attend? Straight from the bursting halls of a Sacramento, California middle school, at first Francisco Bustos did