January 2018
Freeways and Country Lanes:
A Rebirth of the Small Community
School?
“Will metro areas evolve from the
behemoths they are today into a series of smaller self-contained communities,
offering schools an opportunity to position themselves as community centers?” –
Donna Orem, NAIS[1]
I love motorcycling. (I know, it’s risky!) I had my
eye on a BMW 850 and was getting warm for a while there. Before buying a bike,
though, I thought to rent from the local shop, just to test the waters. So every
weekend, I plotted out a course or destination for a tour, went to the shop,
rented, and hopped on. After a few weeks of this I had to accept the dim truth:
Just finding the two-lane blacktops, meandering country roads, or the mountain or
hilly passes, took up half my ride. In most of Southern California, as here in
San Diego, riding means wrestling with urban crowding and 10-lane freeways more
than it means the freedom of winding through the curvies.
As California came of age, like nowhere else in the
world, freeways tore through communities to connect suburban and rural areas to
major urban centers. It was fun and romantic as it was happening, but there’s
not a lot of charm left in the “great big” LA freeway. It’s “sprawl” now, and
it seems to take over everything. It’s a good thing they couldn’t pave the
ocean.
Now that these legendary freeways are aging and the
costs of maintaining and/or rebuilding them appears staggering and protean, we
have a chance to look at their larger impact on our culture and communities—and
to
consider if there are better, more sustainable ways to live. Writing in the New York Times, Steven Kurutz[2]
describes a progressive movement in the urban planning community to “tear down highways in cities and replace them
with lower-speed streets that favor pedestrians and bicyclists and foster
greater connectivity among neighborhoods and residents.” Here in Encinitas, our
city planning commission these days is favoring two and three story buildings
downtown, so people can live upstairs and walk or bike to work.
A parallel perspective exists in education today
(even though it’s politically risky to advocate much for it): What if we resist
aging, monolithic schools and develop “lower-speed” community schools? Many of
our aging, comprehensive schools are crumbling and unsafe. The United States has
pursued relentless consolidation, meaning decades of expanding school size, district
size, and class size. We’ve created massive infrastructures and torn the hearts
out of small communities while boarding up the “American schoolhouse.”
San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway, which hugged
the city’s waterfront, was torn down after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
Peter Park, a city planner who favors removing highways in cities where
neighborhoods have been “significantly disconnected,” noted that the removal of
this highway provided a rebirth to that part of the city and greatly increased
property values. Park argues: “Not only in San Francisco but also in every case
where a highway has been removed the city has improved.”
At Grauer, where we lead the Small Schools
Coalition, we get routine pleas from community school leaders around the
country (and occasionally from overseas), expressing their dismay at large
governments shutting down their local small schools for supposedly efficient mega-
schools with so-called economies of scale. Small, micro-, and community schools
are serving kids and communities as intended, but large schools intend
different things.
Today’s mega-schools, like mega-freeways, bypass
local treasures. Large school designs leave local re-emerging values out of
their funding formulas, and they have left many communities stranded and
disconnected. Examples of gravely at-risk ways smaller schools traditionally
connect with their communities include: the central role the community school
plays in a neighborhood; the ease with which elders, parents, and volunteers
can serve in their own neighborhood schools; the connection between the local
school and library and other institutions; the ability for kids to walk or bike
to school and the freedom that gives them; the ability for parents to drop off
and pick up; the prosperity of local shopkeepers who serve the school and
community; the greater safety of the neighborhood school; and the greater
familiarity of the principal and many teachers with the school parents. Imagine
the alienating impact and time wasted on kids when we bus them millions of
miles a year.
Here at our Small Schools Coalition, a bureau of
The Grauer School, we have documented many years of research that teaches us
all of the above. The research helps many: we get distressed letters year-round from
people who are learning all that the hard way. They need our support and
information. Some of the letters we get are from people with nowhere to turn,
like this one:
I live in
Concord, North Carolina, and we are in for a fight to save the school that my
son is currently attending. This is a historic school and it sits in the middle
of a small community. Many students walk or ride bikes to school.
The superintendent has recently decided to close our … school and send our
children to a neighboring city. We are fighting for the education of our
children and for the surrounding community as property values will drop at least
30% if the school is closed.
Or this:
Here in
Northern Ireland for many years where the Department of Education has been
trying to close small schools on the basis that they are, somehow or other,
educationally weaker … any consideration of actual evidence shows this claim to
be way off the mark.
Or this, from Ontario, Canada:
I
am writing you today as a Mom, whose children's school has been recommended for
closure by the director of education in our school board, the Halton District
School Board…
And then an update:
Unfortunately our school board voted to
close 2 high schools. The one my kids attend and another one. My kids will be
moving to a school with over 2000 kids and the need for portable classrooms. We
put up a huge fight. … They cannot speak to the merits of the decision as that
appears to be untouchable. Here’s the kicker...21 days after the vote to close
these two schools, the provincial government called a moratorium on all school
closures. They admitted that their process did not serve the communities well
and needed an overhaul ... Most people that I have encountered disagree fully
with the closures of these schools.
Today’s behemoth, comprehensive school is the
natural extension of the freeway, just as the small, community school is the
natural extension of the country lane. You may find the road metaphor comes
very much alive if your school is facing closure and consolidation into a
large, distant school, as this letter we received from Nicholas County,
Kentucky, illustrates:
Since
December, we’ve been attending board meetings on the importance of saving our
schools and not consolidating with the other high school over 25 miles away on
windy mountainous roads. Unfortunately, our pleas and data fell on deaf
ears.
Just as smaller cities and towns are at
the mercy of corporate “global headquarter” cities where decisions are made
about where to open or close plants or retail operations, smaller schools and
school districts are at the mercy of state, federal and corporate powers who both
profit and call the main shots—rather than using school parents or site leaders
as the primary influencers.
These are billion dollar accusations, and those
challenging big-school stakeholders will not be given hearings easily or
listened to dispassionately. But the data on the power of small, community
schools is thickening: they’re safer, higher performance, and more connected in
and among all stakeholder groups. The monolithic school model and its many entrenched
myths, such as equating the value of a school with the strength of its football
team, or with the number of grants it receives, or with the number of
prize-winning test takers, are at last being examined.
“If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called
myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the
same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge,” noted Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions.
It’s
ironic and all too often tragic that the large, consolidated school movement
has been fueled by simplistic assumptions or myths about how “bigger is
cheaper.”
As cities, highway systems, and
schools have grown in infrastructure, writes author Michael Hobbes for the Huffington Post, “the
cost of every prerequisite of a secure existence — education, housing and
healthcare — has inflated into the stratosphere.”
In the past year, Washington Post photographers set
out to explore what unites Americans in 102 conversations, two in each of the
50 states and Washington, D.C., they asked people to contemplate what it means
to be American. They found seven unifying themes reflected, most prominently:
community and empathy (Jan. 17, 2018).
Various emergent trends could at last help us see
the school consolidation movement in a new more realistic light, help restore
or preserve the simpler and ultimately cheaper neighborhood school, and begin
removing children from gigantic, impersonal, unsafe, consolidated schools. Donna
Orem, President of NAIS, asks: “Are microschools one way independent schools
could become part of emerging neighborhoods?”
These trends are nascent, inconvenient to those
with vested interests in bigness, and easy to ignore, but they are there. For
instance, at The Grauer School in
Encinitas, California, a small, secondary, community school of 160 enrollment,
students show off-the-charts, real, human “engagement” in rising millennial
priorities like “treating people with respect,” “building positive
relationships with students of different backgrounds,” and with “learning what
life is like for other people in your community outside of school” (High School
Survey of Student Engagement, 2017, Indiana University). Weren’t those the very
values that the large, consolidated schools were created for?
These findings are not
entirely surprising except to those who never look at the actual research on
small schools. As Kuhn noted, “And even when the apparatus exists, novelty
ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should
expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong.” Daniel Reisman
coined the term “the lonely crowd” in 1950, almost 70 years ago! At that time, in
1950, most kids lived within walking distance to their schools. Today, with secondary
school size in America averaging around 800 students, busses move more than
half of them far from their homes and neighborhoods, often against their will—enduring
rides where they often feel isolated, for nearly an hour a day that would
otherwise be spent in activities.
It is relatively common
to be lonely in a large, consolidated school and rare to be so in a small
school. Small schools like Grauer excel in precisely the things large,
consolidated schools promised to deliver but never have well. As reported in “School
Size and its Relationship to Achievement and Behavior” by the Public Schools of
North Carolina State Board of Education (2000) and found also by a great many
other studies:
Studies of student behavior indicate
that smaller schools are associated with more positive outcomes for students.
Larger schools are reported to have higher dropout and expulsion rates than
smaller schools. Larger schools also have been shown to have more problems with
most major behavioral issues including truancy, disorderliness, physical
conflicts among students, robbery, vandalism, alcohol use, drug use, sale of
drugs on school grounds, tobacco use, trespassing, verbal abuse of teachers,
teacher absenteeism, and gangs. There is also a substantial body of research
which indicates that students in smaller schools are more likely to be involved
in extracurricular activities.
In
2010, in “Advancing Student Achievement,” Herbert
J. Walberg, University of
Illinois at Chicago and a Distinguished Visiting
Fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University wrote:
A huge amount of research,
including my own, in more than 25 states shows that other things being equal,
smaller schools produce higher academic achievement than larger schools.
Could things ever change? We now have a couple generations of widely
disregarded research, but the new millennium has at last brought about visions
of paradigm shifts in many areas. Millennials are elevating personalization,
innovation, and the development of a strong moral character as core values in
schools and these are values where small schools excel (“2017 The Ride to
Independent Schools,” Enrollment Management Association).
Quite a few medium and long-range potential trends (I think of them as
dreams) could help create a re-emergence of our communities and their schools. For
instance, self-driving cars could ease commuting enabling more people to live
in suburban and rural areas again. Alternatively, revitalization of city
centers re-creating neighborhood communities could encourage community and
micro-schools. Also, remote access to more resources should help small
community schools connect to resources formerly available to only very large
schools. These three trends could give small, community schools a leg up. Small
schools are anchors in their communities.
I hope our Small Schools Coalition research will contribute to the
reimagining of the small, safe, connected school, as well, though I don’t
expect to have great, nearby motorcycling in my lifetime. Nevertheless, I don’t
want to travel always on the freeway and, any chance I get, I turn onto what
remaining two-lane winders I discover, roads never levelled flat by civil
engineers, forever hugging the natural landscape of the county where I live,
the landscape nature intended and that no economy can transcend.
We are watching a fundamental human drama play out. Corporations,
bureaucracies, and governments tend to grow larger, more complex, and more
systematized—we’ve been watching this happen in schools for over a century—until
they fragment like so many freeways cutting through downtown LA. Healthy humans,
however, will seek real connection, personalization, safety, community
engagement, agile lifestyles, and whatever remaining backcountry we can find
through the curvies, less constrained by high speed systems and vested bureaucracies,
where they can still find the small school, if only they can know that kind of
life is even possible.
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