School size and student achievement: a longitudinal analysis

ABSTRACT

Numerous initiatives by private philanthropies and the US government have supported school size reduction policies as an educational reform intended to improve student outcomes. Empirical evidence to support these claims, however, is underdeveloped. In this article, we draw on information from a longitudinal dataset provided by the Northwest Evaluation Association covering more than 1 million students in 4 US states. Employing a student fixed effects strategy, we estimate how a student’s achievement changes as (s)he moves between schools of different sizes. We find evidence that students’ academic achievement in math and reading declines as school size increases. The negative effects of large schools appear to matter most in higher grades, which is also when schools tend to be the largest.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic achievement
• school size
• student fixed effects

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Nathan Jensen and the staff at the Kingsbury Center at the Northwest Evaluation Association who provided the data for this project. Helpful comments and discussion were also provided by participants at the Association for Education Finance and Policy conference, March 2013.

Notes

1. In our second model, however, we mostly remove this potential bias by coding school size as a series of categorical quintiles instead of treating school size as a continuous variable. As a result, variations in school size for a particular student are estimated when a student changes to a school in a different quintile, but not when a single school changes size.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna J. Egalite

Anna J. Egalite is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development in the College of Education at North Carolina State University. She holds a PhD in Education Policy from the University of Arkansas and an MEd from the University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship in the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the evaluation of education policies and programs intended to close racial and economic achievement gaps.

Brian Kisida

Brian Kisida is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Economics and the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri. He holds a PhD in Education Policy and an MA in Political Science, both from the University of Arkansas. His academic work emphasizes rigorous methodologies and includes studies of school governance, school partnerships with community organizations, school integration, and art and music education.