Michael L. Hays
Think New Mexico (TNM), a Santa Fe think tank with a prestigious board of directors and a smart staff, is urging the state to impose a one-size-fits-all legislative mandate on local school districts to build high schools the way TNM wants them built – small – or forego state construction funds. Yet small high schools for all locales in New Mexico neither suit the demographic and geographic realities of state public education, most certainly those realities outside the Albuquerque area-Santa Fe-Los Alamos axis, nor address the problems of public education, particularly dropouts.
Although I am a small financial contributor and a supporter of many of TNM’s causes, I am alarmed by this crusade, all the more so because the next governor shows so little understanding of education. Her campaign reliance on clichés and nostrums of trendy educational thinking suggests a likely gubernatorial reliance on politics, bad advice and fads. The small-school movement, a-growing for over three decades, is one bad fad.
Educational fads are hard to resist, whether one works in education, politics or a think tank. Lacking in-house expertise in education – no TNM member appears to have any public-school experience except as a student – TNM is more susceptible than most to the allure of this fad because of its smaller-is-better, less-is-more appeal to TNM’s pro-environmental proclivities.
Some no more knowledgeable about public education may be inclined to accept uncritically what TNM advances with bias aforethought.
A rhetoric of misrepresentation
TNM’s position appears in its pamphlet “Small Schools: Tackling the Dropout Crisis While Saving Taxpayer Dollars” (fall 2008). TNM’s usually sensible publications do not square with this less-than-honest presentation of the issue. Its discussion is riddled with pejorative language (larger high schools are “dropout factories”); extreme instances (Columbine High School); casual, context-free, or unclear comparisons; best-case instances presented as if typical; and thus biased analyses. A case as strong as TNM pretends its case to be would not rely on a deceptive rhetoric to mislead the public and public officials.
TNM fails to provide a balanced discussion of the issues. It knows that the small-school fad is controversial, for it cursorily raises the arguments against the fad only to curtly dismiss them in a final few paragraphs. But neither in this discussion nor in the references does the pamphlet cite a single policy or research article or book critical of small schools, so far as I can tell. Thus, it denies information to any citizen or official wishing to study the cons as well as the pros.
The reader is left with an argument based entirely on, and references to, one-sided research rationalizing a foregone conclusion. The TNM pamphlet distills and blends ideology-driven political and social thinking, trendy educational theory, and tendentious claims of cost savings. A starting point to learning about this and some other current issues in pubic education is Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010).
The pamphlet title defines the problem as dropouts, the solution as smaller schools, and an additional benefit as lower costs. TNM claims that its solution is not a “silver bullet,” but as it expounds its position, small schools become many silver bullets to many problems.
A proposal with no trade-offs, only advantages and no disadvantages, is not credible. Although much else in the pamphlet deserves attention and rebuttal, I have space to address only the topics in its title: dropouts, small schools, and savings.
The problem of dropouts: no solution, and too little, too late
TNM claims that small high schools can address the dropout problem. But its claim reflects ignorance of the most common reason why students drop out of school: their refusal to suffer frustration and failure because of their inability to do high school work. Most dropouts leave school just before or during the ninth grade. Most of them failed to achieve proficiency in reading and math in eighth grade and, before that, in both subjects in fourth grade.
TNM implies that smaller high schools can prevent students from dropping out by providing greater familiarity between teacher and student, and thereby reduce anomie and apathy. Getting warm and fuzzy may comfort and encourage prospective dropouts, but it will not remediate long-term, deep-seated deficiencies in reading and math while these students are taking courses requiring proficiency in reading and math.
Ironically, greater familiarity may work against effective teaching. Because teachers want to be liked (as parents want to be loved), students can manipulate them, the best-intentioned, warmest and fuzziest, perhaps most, and their parents can still pressure principals. Because the state gives higher priority to equality than to education – diplomas for all, regardless – high schools of all sizes will continue current practices of little work, inflated grades, social promotion, and automatic graduation rather than address deficiencies in K-8 education.
Small schools: promises impossible and impoverished opportunities
Thus, ironically and inappropriately, the small-school movement focuses on the size of high schools, rarely middle schools, never elementary schools. Most existing high schools are large ones, with student populations upwards from 1,000, commonly between 1,500 and 2,500 students. TNM wants all future high schools built for a maximum of about 900 students.
It admits that its proposal would apply mainly to the Albuquerque area because of the relatively slow population growth in other, much smaller communities. If so, a statewide mandate is unnecessary.
TNM’s pamphlet muddles its comparisons of different-sized high schools. It usually compares small charter, rarely small public, high schools, to large public high schools. In doing so, it not only compares apples to oranges, but also cherrypicks the outstanding charter schools. What TNM does not report is that, compared to all public high schools, twice as many charter schools do worse than better. So smaller is not necessarily better.
TNM also does not report that many large high schools do well or that those doing poorly can improve if principals and good teachers take the lead in reform. “Big School Turn-Around” (New York Times, Sept. 27) reports the dramatic recovery of a 4,100-student high school. In this case, the problem was not school size but, among others, school staff. Such facts make clear that school size has little to do with student academic performance or dropout rates.
TNM admits that smaller high schools lack many academic and athletic facilities (auditoriums, gymnasiums, laboratories, libraries, swimming pools, etc.) in larger high schools. It answers that smaller schools can use public facilities. But even in Albuquerque, such public facilities are unlikely to accommodate the needs of more than one or two such schools. Elsewhere, smaller communities usually lack such facilities. If they have such facilities, they usually have them in large high schools, which may or may not open them to the general public.
TNM’s push to mandate small high schools even in these smaller communities denies local authorities the option to build a large high school to serve dual clienteles, namely, their communities as well as their students. (And good football teams often matter greatly in small communities.)
TNM fails to acknowledge educational losses altogether. Diseconomies of scale mean that smaller schools usually provide fewer elective courses to meet both pre-career and pre-college needs, in addition to the general education requirements. In particular, they usually provide fewer foreign language and advanced placement courses.
Thus, TNM offers not only a small-size-fits-all approach to building schools, but also a pinching-size-fits-all approach to student education. TNM talks spending less on schools without talking about getting much less in education.
Saving taxpayer dollars: sophistical bookkeeping for smaller buildings
TNM claims that smaller high schools have lower costs than larger ones. Its claim rests on rigged comparisons of per-student construction costs: small schools without, and of large schools with, auditoriums, gymnasiums, laboratories, libraries, swimming pools, etc. Omit these facilities from one large school, and its per-student construction costs are less than those of two or three small schools; include them in two or three smaller schools, and their per-student construction costs are much more than those of one large school.
Staffing costs vary inversely with school size. One large school has one principal and a staff sized to serve required functions; two or three small schools have two or three principles and two or three smaller staffs, larger in the aggregate, to serve the same array of functions. Thus, personnel costs at one large school are less than those at two or three small schools.
As a result, people can still trust their intuitions about economies of scale and find the claims of small-school costs savings dubious and unreliable as a guide to the prudent future investment of millions of dollars of public funds.
TNM is too dedicated to its unrelated agenda and associated ideology to be an honest broker in advocating changes in school construction. Its argument exploits an unrelated problem of general concern that it does not understand in order to win support for a solution that cannot address it.
Michael L. Hays (Ph.D., English) is a retired consultant in defense, energy and environment; former high school and college teacher; and continuing civic activist. His bi-monthly Saturday column appears in the Las Cruces Sun-News; his bi-monthly blog, First Impressions & Second Thoughts, appears on the intervening Saturdays at firstimpressionssecondthoughts.blogspot.com.