What is it about?
School size can impact student performance, but in New York City, large schools attained higher performance-rating scores than small schools. This result has wide implications because over the last decade, the city has been reorganizing chronically failing large schools into smaller more expensive ones. Such action taken because of the smaller is better movement funded by the Bill Gates foundation and the US Department of Education.
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Why is it important?
My findings indicate that: Arbitrarily reorganizing, for example, a chronically failing 5000-student urban school into 10 smaller ones results in 10 smaller more expensive schools that concentrate poverty and failure. In this time of budgetary constraint—when No Child Left behind is demanding accountability—it is essential that school policy makers inform their decision with research. Such research would reveal smaller urban schools will be successful if they embrace socioeconomic integration, middle-class values, and the creation of magnet schools.
Perspectives
Because the demographic shift reveals Blacks and Latinos will soon constitute 2/3 of the nation's majority population, it is necessary that school leaders address malleable factors that could improve the schooling of such groups. Blacks and Latinos currently constitute the majority student groups in NYC and the nation's public schools. Historically, they are the lowest performing groups, who receive the fewest STEM degrees. Principal can change school size to address the problem. Thus, this study is timely in outlining how it can be done to elevate the performance of aforesaid and other student groups in the nation's schools.
Dr Rupert Green
Institute for Hands-on Science, Engineering, & Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: On Meeting NCLB School Improvement Mandate, SAGE Open, November 2015, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/2158244015615920.
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