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Listen to the Children By Anne C. Lewis Illustration © 1999 by Mario Noche

THE airport in Burlington, Vermont, was quiet when I checked in, but the ticket agent, a young woman whose oldest child will be entering school next year, felt distraught. It was the afternoon of the Columbine High School massacre. We live in Essex Junction, said the agent, and my husband and I have talked about moving to a smaller community before our child starts school.

Everything is relative. Where I come from, Essex Junction would be considered semi-rural, a small suburb of a small city. The ticket agent's sense of wanting to escape to something even more personal, however, echoes everywhere. But most parents are helpless to do anything about the depersonalization of the schools and other community institutions that touch their lives. One can run only so far to escape population density and urbanism.

The immediate anguish of the tragedy in Littleton is over, and the long process of debate about policies to prevent a repeat in some other school will occupy us for months, if not years, to come. It seems odd that among the issues seldom mentioned is the educational structure created in the last half of this century, which has had as profound an effect on students and their families as have the mass media or changes in the patterns of family life.

Once, most of our schools were like those in Essex Junction and places even smaller. At the end of World War II, this country supported more than 200,000 school districts. Certainly, there was inefficiency in our education system, but there was also a sense of ownership. Think of the thousands of people who could serve on school boards, the opportunities for students to play on sports teams, and the role the school played as the community and family center.

Fewer than 15,000 operating school districts now exist. About one-third of the K-12 students in this country are enrolled in less than 1% of the school districts. As people have moved in from rural areas and out from cities, we have created a new type of school organization: either the suburban districts that ring our cities or the consolidated high schools of rural counties. Long before urban children left their neighborhoods to board buses for desegregation purposes, rural communities had to close their schools and bus their children to larger consolidated schools, persuaded to do so by educators and county commissioners who saw the economies of scale and said that bigger is better.

It is as fruitless to keep trying to run back to the nostalgia of small-town life as it is to believe that a solution to the angst of teen life lies in re-creating the family structure of times past: the father who worked only a few minutes away, the mom who stayed at home, the extended family network that was always around, and the peers who were just like everyone else. We are a different society today. We are coming to terms with diversity and technology, we are offering ever greater opportunities, but we are creating anxieties, as well.

It is not out of line, however, to reconsider how we have organized the school life of children and to question whether the bigness, the separation from adults, and the anonymity that can so easily overwhelm young people in large high schools is really what we want for children. We can't go back, but we needn't accept what has been created as the only way to educate young people.

We must face some hard questions. Is the slavish esteem given high school sports as much a function of parent booster clubs as a reflection of what students really want? Can we expect a teacher who teaches 150 students each day to know more than a few of them well? Is the gradual decline in parent involvement as students move into middle schools and high schools a result of what students want (the usual excuse) or of the struggle parents must go through to make themselves noticed in more than superficial ways in places that don't really know their children?

The signals are growing stronger that a rejection of the depersonalization of schooling is under way. Charter schools re-create the smallness that seemed to be so much better for students; at the high school level, charter schools rarely enroll more than 200 students. The career academies created in large urban high schools represent a dual effort to build a sense of family among the students enrolled and to connect them to the adult world in purposeful, educationally sound ways through internships and mentoring.

In New York City, the Center for Collaborative Education is helping large high schools break up into smaller ones. More than 50 have been created in the last few years, usually by sharing the space of formerly huge schools, some of which enrolled as many as 5,000 students. These new schools are completely autonomous and so are much more accountable to the students and their families than are houses or teams set up within large high schools.

Large middle schools have begun to use "looping," allowing smaller groups of students to stay with the same set of teachers throughout their middle school years. In some areas, elementary schools are adding a grade a year through the eighth grade, a move that does away with the transition to another school and keeps family involvement intact.

Proponents of service learning argue that it should be part of the regular curriculum for all students, not just an elective or even a one-time service requirement that can be easily met. Giving students real opportunities to provide service to younger students or to help their communities solve problems and then having them reflect on their experiences is education, not an extracurricular activity, they contend.

Anecdotal evidence about the benefits of smaller schools is now reinforced by quantitative data showing that student achievement, attendance, and graduation rates are higher in such schools. According to Mary Ann Raywid, an expert on alternative schools, a recent compilation of more than 100 studies dealing with school size found that many of the studies documented superior student performance in small schools, while none found the reverse to be true.

Some of the most widely cited educational research on school success -- conducted by Fred Newmann and Gary Wehlage of the Center on the Organization and Restructuring of Schools at the University of Wisconsin, Madison -- concluded that smaller schools produce higher achievement. The researchers asked why this is so. One reason they found is that smaller schools allow teachers to be more flexible and to give students more individual attention. Smaller schools also make it easier for students and adults to develop close relationships. One of the major goals of current restructuring efforts is to create learning communities of teachers as well as students. However, Deborah Meier, founder of one of the most successful small urban high schools in the country, Central Park East Secondary School, points out that it is impossible to create a learning community of 40 to 50 teachers. They cannot even sit down together in the same room, she says.

In an occasional paper for the Small Schools Coalition in Chicago, Raywid cites much of the research supporting small schools, noting that smallness permits the sort of human connections that result in the formation of strong student/school bonds, such as those at Central Park East, which make an imprint on students and affect their attitudes and dispositions. Small school size appears to be essential to forming such an environment. We already know all these things about smaller school environments, either from educational research or from our own notions of what is right. What will it take to change our practice -- to bring back that environment for students?

A week after the Littleton tragedy, I walked through Feinberg Fisher Elementary School in the South Beach section of Miami, where more than 90% of the children live in poverty. This school serves its 900 students in every way possible, dividing them into two school buildings to make an even smaller environment, providing full-service health facilities, teaching them in very small classes when necessary, providing space for both day and night classes for adults, offering day-care programs, and providing a lively parent center. Feinberg Fisher Elementary has created a modern version of a small-school community.

On one wall of an open hallway were the written comments from the students about what happened in Littleton, inspired by an all-school assembly at which the principal and lead teachers served as panel members and the young students asked them questions about the tragedy. One boy advised parents: "Tell your children more often how glad you are to have kids like them." But many of the youngsters just wrote: "Don't let it happen again." We should listen to the children.

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Last updated 8 June 1999
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