The Great School District Debate--Is Smaller Better? : Education: Studies find less achievement in big systems. But factors other than size also influence success, many say.

The question is a beguiling one: Is smaller really better when it comes to the public school systems charged with educating the nation’s children?

To hear the impassioned voices pleading for a breakup of the enormous Los Angeles Unified School District, the answer is a resounding yes: Smaller is better for forging strong links between a community and its schools, for strengthening accountability of school administrators, and for tailoring academic instruction to fit students’ needs.

That view is bolstered by several studies indicating that academic achievement improves as district size declines.

“All of the major studies show the bigger the district the worse the achievement,” said Herbert J. Walberg, research professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

But those who oppose the dismantling of the nation’s second-largest school district point out that the studies often do not take into account other, more important factors in school success, including parental involvement, school and class size, and family socioeconomic status.

Neither can the studies measure the advantages available to a large district, such as lobbying clout and a better chance to offer a wide and varied curriculum and to attract the most talented teachers and administrators, say critics of the breakup plan.

“What is likely to happen (in a breakup of the Los Angeles district) is the kids in the city proper will no longer have the benefit of the political clout and leverage of the richer folks in the (San Fernando) Valley,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents the nation’s biggest public school systems. “The poor kids would become more isolated, with less of a tax base and less political clout.”

What experts on both sides of the debate acknowledge is that merely reducing the district’s size will not help. There are plenty of smaller districts whose disadvantaged students--especially those who are poor or recent immigrants--fare just as badly or worse than those in some of Los Angeles Unified’s crowded classrooms.

The most vivid example is the 33,000-student Compton Unified School District, where the achievement levels are among the lowest in the state. The district--with a student body that is predominantly black and Latino and increasingly immigrant--faces a possible state takeover and has become a symbol of the failure of urban school systems.

“The fear is they’ll end up with 30 Comptons,” said an official with the state Department of Education, which has recommended that Los Angeles be sliced into 30 districts of 15,000 to 25,000 students. “The fear is that breaking up the district may not help things at all.”

No one argues that improvements are not needed. The Los Angeles school district’s achievement test scores, despite rising some over the last decade, remain well below state averages, and dropout and violence rates are high.

Los Angeles Unified encompasses 708 square miles and includes all or part of 28 cities, from Gardena in the South Bay to Monterey Park in the San Gabriel Valley. Last year, the 640,000 students at its 650 campuses accounted for one-eighth of the public school enrollment in California and nearly half of the enrollment in Los Angeles County.

If Los Angeles were chiseled into seven pieces--the minimum possible under a bill introduced earlier this year by state Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys)--the new districts of about 90,000 students each would still be among the state’s largest. They would be outranked only by the 120,000-student San Diego Unified School District.

The debate turns on whether breaking up the district or taking a less drastic step, such as shifting most budget and decision-making powers from a central bureaucracy to individual schools, is the wiser course.

Big is not beautiful when it comes to student achievement, several studies indicate.

A soon-to-be-published study by Walberg at the University of Illinois shows that students from states with larger districts performed worse on a national standardized mathematics test, even after economic backgrounds and school funding levels were taken into account.

“What is clear is that bigger districts don’t do better,” said Walberg, whose study of district size in 38 states is the largest of its kind on the issue. “The larger the average district in the state--other things being equal--the worse the achievement.”

Walberg also noted that a number of other studies have demonstrated that school size rather than district size may be a more important factor; in his study, he found that the larger districts also tended to have schools with larger enrollments.

Another study that examined scores on the California Assessment Program achievement tests found that for students with low socioeconomic status, academic performance declined as district size increased.

However, Noah E. Friedkin, who conducted the 1988 CAP scores study, cautions that it did not take into account other, perhaps more important, factors affecting student achievement.

“The literature on effects of size has been inconsistent with regard to its conclusions,” said Friedkin, professor of education and sociology at UC Santa Barbara. “You can find studies that show positive relationships between size and (student) performance, some that show there’s no correlation and some studies that show there are negative associations.”

Smaller districts tend to lend themselves to change more readily than big ones, say some superintendents who have worked in both. Paul M. Possemato, who heads the 2,500-student Laguna Beach Unified School District, said he tried in vain for years while he was a top official in Los Angeles Unified to add a requirement that students complete some community service. In his new district, it took just a few months to get such a policy approved and implemented.

The Lennox School District, a 5,800-student system located in a poor, immigrant community near Los Angeles International Airport, often is cited as an example of a small urban district that works.

Ninety-three percent of its students are Latino, and more than 82% speak little or no English. But state achievement test scores are steadily improving, and nearly every parent participates in conferences, back-to-school nights and other activities. About 70% of the staff speaks English and Spanish, and its bilingual education programs have brought national acclaim. Its superintendent, Kenneth L. Moffett, recently won an award from the Assn. of California School Administrators.

“I think size is a factor to a certain point, especially when money gets tight,” Moffett said. “We’re small enough that we know how hard everybody (in the district) is working. It’s not so easy to point fingers” as it often is in bigger districts, where the role of each employee is not always clear, he said.

But Moffett, like breakup opponents, contends that many of Lennox’s successes could be achieved in a larger district, especially if individual schools, staffed with well-trained principals and teachers, are given more autonomy.

Even among those who believe smaller districts are better, there is no consensus on optimum size. Some, for example, contend that more than 15,000 students is too large; others say it takes from 20,000 to 40,000 students to yield a sufficient tax base and provide a comprehensive, well-taught curriculum.

“What’s magical about any one size of governance structure?” asked Norm Miller of School Services of California, a Sacramento-based consulting firm that advises school districts. “It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”

Efforts to divvy up the Los Angeles system represent a reversal of the thinking that has guided education governance for decades.

Taking a cue from the country’s rapid industrialization, educators in the first half of the century began organizing school systems according to the principle of mass production.

They believed that by combining smaller school districts, school officials could maximize efficiency and cut costs. Bigger districts would also provide a superior education through expanded course offerings, a more experienced and talented pool of teachers and, indirectly, through greater strength in the political arena.

These arguments fueled the school district “consolidation movement” of the past 50 years--a drive so dramatic in scope that one scholar has billed it “one of the most awesome and least publicized governmental changes to occur in this nation during the 20th Century.”

Between 1930 and 1972 the number of school systems in the country plummeted from 128,000 to 17,000, despite the millions of baby boomers who swelled the ranks of public education. Average district enrollment shot up 1,500%, and the average elementary school--with about 550 students--became twice the size of what in 1930 would have been an average district.

Los Angeles Unified was formed in 1961 by combining the city’s elementary and high school systems.

With increased size, however, often came a sense that school officials were harder to reach and that parents had less say over how their children were taught. The seven-member Los Angeles Board of Education represents 4.2 million people--a potent statistic in the hands of breakup proponents.

Roberti, aware of complaints that his legislation could hurt minority students, seized on findings by a University of Wisconsin researcher that smaller districts afford a better chance for minority representation on school boards. Increased representation “sets in motion a whole set of factors that improve the educational quality that the kids get,” said the researcher, political science professor Kenneth J. Meier.

Small districts began to find ways to offset some of the advantages of their bigger neighbors. They banded together to get price breaks by buying supplies in bulk, for example, and formed associations to hire lobbyists to watch out for their common interests in state capitals.

Still, they cannot compete with such giants as Los Angeles, which has its own full-time lobbyist in Sacramento and is represented by a powerful delegation of 29 lawmakers.

“The Legislature often thinks in terms of San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego,” complained Don Brann, superintendent of the 1,900-student Mother Lode Union Elementary School District in Placerville and a co-founder of California’s Small School Districts’ Assn. “They don’t seem to think of the small school districts that don’t make the 6 o’clock news or front-page headlines.”

Some believe the fight over school district size detracts from the real problem dogging public education: money. Budget crunches, precipitated by cuts in funding from the recession-plagued state and aggravated by rapidly growing enrollments, are hitting nearly every district in California, regardless of size.

“What’s making education really tough for us in this state (are) the cuts in the education budget,” said Rudy M. Castruita, superintendent of the 47,000-student Santa Ana Unified School District. Castruita heads the Assn. of California Urban School Districts, a consortium of the state’s 20 largest school systems. The cuts affect the schools’ ability to deal with a large immigrant population, a lack of health care and other social issues.

But some education experts argue that funding and other problems are likely to be more severe in big districts.

Henry M. Levin, a Stanford University education and economics professor who has worked to improve low-achieving schools across the country, said the bureaucracies inherent in big districts reduce the chances of timely, meaningful reform.

“My own feeling is that size does get in the way,” said Levin, who was a consultant to the Legislature on an earlier effort to split the district.

“Big districts tend to get too complex, too involved with organization, and they lose sight of children. They are too big for much face-to-face communication, so they begin to govern by directive, by memo, by compliance, and the decision-making gets too far removed from the children and the people who work with them,” Levin added. “Conditions (for reform) are more favorable in smaller districts and in smaller schools.”

Breakup opponents, however, argue that there other ways to help schools meet students’ needs without sacrificing the advantages of district size. They cite such innovations as charter schools, a method of granting individual schools nearly complete freedom to try new methods so long as they produce results. And they argue that the ideas of a business- and community-backed decentralization attempt known as LEARN (Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now) should be given a chance.

Michael Kirst, another Stanford professor and a co-director of policy analysis for California Education, a university-based think tank, makes an argument for that view.

“The sense of breaking up the district is breaking up the interest groups and ending the gridlock. It’s like electing President Clinton and letting him work with a Democratic Congress,” Kirst said, outlining the first-blush appeal of smaller, more homogeneous districts no longer held hostage to feuds among powerful employee unions and factions on the board. But, he cautioned, giving more authority to each school could accomplish that without what is sure to be a long, complicated fight over district political boundaries and assets.

A Chicago-style reform effort, in which schools are given the resources and authority to turn themselves around, could be just as fruitful and a lot less messy, Kirst said, adding:

“Why not just connect with the schools?”

About This Series

This series examines the movement to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District:

* Sunday: Political flip-flops and sea changes in the district’s makeup shaped the tangled history of attempts to split up the district.

* Monday: Peeling paint and hot classrooms are among the problems that have made some parents favor a breakup.

* Tuesday: Remembering desegregation and other tough battles, many blacks and Latinos are suspicious of the movement to dismantle the school system.

* Today: Experts tackle the question of whether smaller districts provide better educations than large ones.

A Giant District

Los Angeles Unified is the nation’s second-largest school district, with 641,206 students. It encompasses 708 square miles and includes all or part of 27 cities besides Los Angeles. Largest is New York, with 995,000 students; third is Chicago, with 411,582. The Los Angeles district is five times the size of California’s next-largest school system, San Diego Unified, and 450 times the median district size of about 1,400. Here are some other figures on the mammoth school system:

* Buses to transport students: 2,160. The fleet travels 250,000 miles each day--enough to reach the moon.

* Lunches served: 370,000 free, reduced-price or full-price lunches each day.

* Breakfasts served: 223,000 free, reduced-price or full-price breakfasts each day.

* Custodians, gardeners and plant managers: 3,100

* Languages spoken by students at home: 90

* Administrators: 1,950, including 1,450 principals and assistant principals.

* Teachers: 26,000 in kindergarten through 12th grade--13,500 in elementary grades, 4,600 in middle schools, 5,000 in high schools, 1,200 in special education schools and 1,700 others serving as nurses, librarians or teacher-advisers in charge of special programs.

* Supplies ordered from district warehouse in 1991-92: 5.9 million crayons, 3 million No. 2 pencils, 754,000 Pink Pearl erasers, 1.4 million sticks of chalk, 88,000 rulers.

Source: Los Angeles Unified School District’s Office of Communications

Compiled by researcher Tracy Thomas