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Size is certainly a factor, but in response to John Clement below, I always
wondered whether the "large schools are bad" correlation, so often quoted,
might not be hiding some other truism. How well did the original study
account for population demographics between schools? Would not a 'large
school' tend to correlate with cities and smaller tend to correlate with
towns, for example? If so, are we getting a demographics effect rather
than a size effect?
Again, citing the anecdotal case of my own mixed urban/suburban district,
cohort class size in the district has been about 1000 students for as long
as I can remember. Indeed, in 1965, the year I graduated, there were
something like 745 graduates - and LOTS of dropouts. And again, one could
easily find numbers to suggest our schools were 'poor', but the reality was
that the programs were, in fact, excellent. We simply couldn't overcome
the the handicaps all of the district's children.
One advantage that a large school has is the ability to offer advanced
classes. There are always enough children to justify the classes.
On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 12:00 AM, Anthony Lapinski <Anthony_Lapinski@pds.org
wrote:
To me, I would think class size is important, at least as far as learning_______________________________________________
goes. I'm in a private school, and we average about 12-14 kids per class.
I'm sure it's much higher in public schools, making it more difficult for
teachers to manage the students, give more individual attention, grading,
etc. Our typical graduating class is around 90 students.
Phys-L@Phys-L.org writes:
But the number of students who attend private schools is below 10%. This
is
because private schools tend to be smaller than public schools. In TX
public schools are enormous, and studies have shown that when you get over
150 students per cohort that the problems increase quite a lot. So the
size
of public schools may one one factor in the misbehavior problem. If you
divided them into smaller schools they may work a lot better. The ideal
size would have only 150 students in the graduating class. This research
was done in the '70s and nobody seems to pay much attention to it. But
the
middle school my children atteded subdivided the school in separate
sections
of 150 students, while the HS is a huge open campus run almost like a
college.
John M. Clement
Houston, TX
Forum for Physics Educators
Phys-l@mail.phys-l.org
http://www.phys-l.org/mailman/listinfo/phys-l