Are Small Schools Better Than Large Schools?

In a nutshell, Yes.

Now, let's expand on that. I do not believe it is because teachers in small schools are better or anything like that. Larger schools have one advantage: money. I have worked in schools ranging from medium to small and I have friends that work in large metropolitan districts. When they have a stove go out in the cafeteria, they spend $5,000 of their $100,000,000+ budget to replace it. When I have a stove go out, I spend $5,000 of my $3,000,000 budget to replace it. So my overhead is much larger. In fact, we spend about $6,000 per kid per year versus their expenditure of over $9,000 per kid per year and more of ours goes to buildings, busses, and food. In big schools, more of the per child expenditure goes to salaries meaning big schools pay teachers more. Big schools can shop around for the best deal on service, repair, etc. I have one guy that can do that and I pay whatever he charges...period. So large schools have some distinct monetary advantages.

However, a small school is superior the most important area to providing a quality education to students: Relationships. In our small school, we know every kid because many of our employees are from our small town and accept a lower pay to stay at home. We know their parents and often their grandparents. If a teacher is having trouble, odds are they went to school with that kid's parents and they just call them up and say, "Hey, Johnny just did this" and it gets taken care of. The nexus of relationships in small communities and in small schools allows districts to be flexible and proactive in helping kids be successful. Even as superintendent, I know roughly how each of our 300 kids is doing with grades, attendance, state assessment, IEP progress, family issues, etc. When I was a principal in a middle school with 600 kids, I didn't even know all of the students. You can clearly see where a small school has advantages for kids!

Larger schools are aware of these advantages and many are following the "small schools movement." These large schools break up into small neighborhood schools where kids stay in the same building through 6th or 8th grade. With each building move, achievement scores drop, so staying in the same building impacts performance positively. Because services are concentrated, these small schools can provide low-income areas better connections to social and community services as well. In the end, small schools create a "family" atmosphere for children versus an "institutional" atmosphere that is unavoidable in large schools.