Deborah Meier has argued that a small school allows all of the teachers to sit around a single table and to create a culture of shared decision-making.
"[4] According to The American Dream and the Public Schools by Jennifer L. Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick, smaller class sizes contribute to students in "early grades, and consistently challenging academic courses have been demonstrated to help disadvantaged children achieve, just as they enable middle-class children to achieve.
"[5] "Smaller, more intimate learning communities consistently deliver better results in academics and discipline when compared to their larger counterparts.
In fact, data justifying this has been available for decades; it's just that policymakers have largely ignored it, no doubt due to the costs of such programs (and, of course, the politics).
Dr. Grauer attributes this not only to economics, but to prevailing myths about American education: "Our collective memory of high school includes nostalgia such as proms, football games, exciting social lives, romance, and first cars.
In other words, many high schools have activities that everyone speaks of with pride—sacred cows like the marching band, the lacrosse team, the boosters.
According to the Neal Peirce Column of The Washington Post Writers Group, "far and away the biggest catalyst is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
"[11] Research and the growing data on small schools have provided some evidence regarding their better academic quality in comparison to their larger counterparts.
[1][12] According to Dr. Sharif Shakrani, the co-director of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University, "Recent studies suggest students in small public high schools perform better academically, have higher attendance rates, feel safer, experience fewer behavior problems and participate more frequently in extracurricular activities.
Moreover, small schools are more likely to have fewer incidents of violence and misbehavior and that, in turn, has been found to contribute to higher attendance and lower drop-out and truancy rates.