Size Matters

In recent Governing profiles about big-city school superintendents, I noted that both Philadelphia's Paul Vallas and Boston's Tom Payzant have made a big push to shrink high schools. Vallas, in high-school-locker-1.jpg particular, went on and on in our interview about the importance of breaking up "behemoth" high schools into smaller campuses.

No one likes 3000-student schools any more. The worry is that those thousands can't possibly receive any sort of personalized attention and could end up in a state of Columbine-style alienation. That's why smaller high schools are such the fashion among superintendents. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has offered lots of money to encourage this trend.

Now Diane Ravitch, a veteran of various educational wars, has weighed in with a skeptical column in the Washington Post. Super-sized urban schools don't work, she concedes, but she fears that the trend might go too far. Citing an academic study, Ravitch worries that making high schools too small could deprive kids of a full range of academic and extracurricular choices.

When everyone agrees that a move in a particular direction is smart, it's good to hear a voice with an alternative point of view. As Ravitch suggests, there's simply not enough data to answer the Goldilocks question of when exactly high schools are too big and when they would be too small.