Research
fails to back gov
on school boardsLingle says smaller districts will
improve student performance, but
experts say there is little evidence
To Gov. Linda Lingle, the problem is clear, and so is the solution.
Students in the largest school districts in the country tend to do poorly on national tests, she says, so break up Hawaii's single district into seven local school boards and results should improve.
But educational researchers contend that it is not so simple. They say there is little evidence that altering district size will raise student achievement.
Policy analyst Jennifer Dounay of the nonpartisan Education Commission of the States says research points to other factors as key to improving student performance: teacher quality, small schools, small classes and a challenging curriculum.
"There's a stronger research link in those areas than there is to school district size," she said. "There are so many variables that can go into a given district that can affect student achievement. I haven't seen any research that says if your district is 1,000 or fewer students, for example, there's going to be a concurrent improvement in student achievement."
The Denver-based commission provides a national exchange of information on educational trends and research.
Hawaii's House Education and Judiciary committees are scheduled to meet tomorrow to decide on the governor's proposed constitutional amendment to set up seven school boards, among other bills. Legislators received widely divergent testimony at their Jan. 30 hearing on breaking up Hawaii's statewide school board.
"Some people have suggested that students in smaller school districts achieve at higher levels than students in larger school districts," said Randy Hitz, dean of the University of Hawaii College of Education, testifying on his own behalf. "There is no solid research to support this claim."
He added, "There is a large body of research indicating the benefits of small schools, but there is no such body of research on small school districts."
Hawaii has one of the largest districts in the country, with 182,000 students, but it also has some of the biggest schools. Hawaii's high schools average 1,468 students, compared with a national average of 752, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Some local high schools are trying to develop "schools within schools" to give students a more personal experience.
In her testimony, Lingle painted a different picture of the research on district size and test scores.
"The positive impact of school district size has been examined extensively," she told legislators. "Studies of 37 states plus the District of Columbia have all reached the same conclusion. There is a direct connection between smaller school districts and higher student achievement."
Asked later by the Star-Bulletin to identify those studies, Lingle said she was actually referring to just "one study of 37 different states."
"This is a well-known fact that the larger the district, the lower the student achievement," she said. "The existing system has proved incapable of turning around low student achievement. The obvious conclusion is to try a different structure."
The study she cited, "Losing Local Control" by Herbert J. Walberg and Herbert J. Walberg III, appeared in the June-July 1994 issue of Educational Researcher. It averaged school district sizes in each state and compared the results to the state's performance on the 1989-1990 math test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The article said the "results suggest that, other things being equal, states with larger average size schools or districts achieve significantly less well on average."
But it went on to call for more research, saying such "effects may depend on the level of education or socioeconomic status of the state," which weren't included in the analysis.
The Hawaii Educational Policy Center testified that there are various reasons why huge urban districts with more than 500,000 students tend to have lower test scores. Such districts also face more poverty, crime, substance abuse, single-parent families and ethnic minorities.
"We cannot say that mega-urban districts 'cause' low achievement any more than we can say that low achievement causes large districts," said Jim Shon, associate director of the center, at the University of Hawaii. "Statistically we have correlation, but not causation."
Lingle referred questions about the data to Laura Thielen, a member of the Board of Education who is working with the governor to promote local school boards. Thielen highlighted research by Robert Bickel and Craig Howley that measured the interaction of poverty, district and school size, and student test scores in five states.
Their study, published in the online Education Policy Analysis Archive in 2000, found that in impoverished areas, student performance was generally higher if districts and schools were small, although not in affluent districts.
"We haven't found a one-to-one effect, but using a multivariable analysis ... large schools in large districts are worse for poorer kids," Thielen said.
"I don't want to get into this huge debate over how accurate the studies are," she added. "There is a lot of data out there and research that shows that this has merit. There is some connection with student achievement."
The seven local districts proposed for Hawaii, ranging from 10,000 to 37,000 students, are not small by national standards. The average size of a U.S. school district is 3,200 students.
Dounay said the trend has been to consolidate rural districts across the United States, and Hawaii will be a rare test case if it decides to break up its district.
"It's a one-of-a-kind thing," she said. "If it does separate into different districts, it will be really interesting to watch to see if it does have an impact."
