Effects of High-School Size on Student Outcomes:Response to Howley and Howley

I take issue with several points in the Howleys' reanalysis (Vol. 12 No. 52 of this journal) of "High School Size: Which Works Best and for Whom?" (Lee & Smith, 1997). That the original sample of NELS schools might have underrepresented small rural public schools would not bias results, as they claim. Their assertion that our conclusions about an ideal high-school size privileged excellence over equity ignores the fact that our multilevel analyses explored the two outcomes simultaneously. Neither do I agree that our claim about "ideal size" (600-900) was too narrow, as our paper was clear that our focus was on achievement and its equitable distribution. Perhaps the most important area of disagreement concerns non-linear relationships between school size and achievement gains. Ignoring the skewed distribution of school size, without either transforming or categorizing the variable produces findings that spuriously favor the smallest schools. Our recent involvement as expert witnesses on opposite sides in a court case may have motivated the Howleys' attempt to discredit our work. Finally, I argue that research attempting to establish a direct link between school size and student outcomes may be misguided. Rather, school size influences student outcomes only indirectly, through the academic and social organization of schools. Considerable evidence links these organizational factors to student outcomes (especially learning and its equitable distribution).

High School Size: Which Works Best and for Whom?

The study described in this article investigates the relationship between high school size and student learning. We used three waves of data from NELS:88 and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) methods to examine how students’ achievement growth in two subjects (reading and mathematics) over the high school years is influenced by the size of the high school they attend. Three research questions guided the study: (a) Which size high school is most effective for students’ learning?, (b) In which size high school is learning most equitably distributed?, and (c) Are size effects consistent across high schools defined by their social compositions? Results suggest that the ideal high school, defined in terms of effectiveness (i.e., learning), enrolls between 600 and 900 students. In schools smaller than this, students learn less; those in large high schools (especially over 2,100) learn considerably less. Learning is more equitable in very small schools, with equity defined by the relationship between learning and student socioeconomic status (SES). An important finding from the study is that the influence of school size on learning is different in schools that enroll students of varying SES and in schools with differing proportions of minorities. Enrollment size has a stronger effect on learning in schools with lower-SES students and also in schools with high concentrations of minority students. Implications for educational policy are discussed.