Finding economies in small school size

Conventional wisdom is that small schools serving just a few hundred students, while they may be supportive and effective learning environments, are more expensive than larger schools to build and operate.

But a report profiling a group of 25 successful public schools across the country serving diverse populations found that on average these schools spent almost 17 percent less per student than the per-pupil spending in their school districts.

The new KnowledgeWorks Foundation report, Dollars & Sense II: Lessons from Good, Cost-Effective Small Schools, is a sequel to a 2002 study that also presented evidence that small schools can be cost-effective as well as effective academically.

An analysis of the budgets of 3,000 school construction projects included in the new report found that “small schools are being constructed at a cost similar to or less than those that are still within the limits of reasonable size but are significantly larger.” Districts may lower construction costs by building what the report calls “mega-schools” serving more than 1,000 students, but few schools of this size educate students effectively, the authors note.

Two of the authors of the report, speaking to a November 10 gathering in Philadelphia sponsored by the Philadelphia Education Fund, emphasized the value of the report's profiles of best practices in 25 successful schools to anyone exploring the development of small schools. The profiles describe the schools' effective money-saving strategies.

The speakers, Bobbie Hill of the design firm Concordia LLC and Craig Howley of Ohio University, noted that one thing that stood out about the 25 schools of less than 400 students that they highlighted is how different they were from one another. “Their strength is in their variety,” Howley said.

A danger is that standardization will be imposed as school districts like Philadelphia move rapidly to create large numbers of new small schools, Howley added.

For a free copy of the report or to review findings, go to www.goodsmallschools.org.