Tiny Bowls Make Tiny Goldfish: The Shortcomings of Small Schools

Exploring the Myth and Counterintuitive Reality

(For a video companion to this article, click here.)

Let’s take a trip down memory lane (or to the younger readers, a visit to a time that never was). It is the first day of school. You are the proud parent of a kindergarten student, and you are walking hand in hand with your soon-to-be-scholar to the local school. A tour is not necessary because this is the exact same school you attended when you were a child. You remember everything: the six large but comfortable classrooms, the old cafeteria/gym/auditorium where your best friend of 30 years got in trouble for making silly noises during the Christmas recital, and even the familiar faces like Ms. Anderson who is still teaching 2nd grade along with the 4th and 5th grade teachers and even Ron, the school custodian. The kindergarten teacher is new, in that she was hired 10 years ago, but you are friends with her cousin and knew her growing up. Of course your best friend also has a kindergarten student starting this year (it’s almost as if small communities coordinate this), so everything looks perfect and predictable. There will be the annual pumpkin festival in October, the community luncheon in November, and Breakfast with Santa in December. 

This is the powerful mythos behind the small school model. Much like small town America, small schools represent an idealized world of predictability, safety, and local control. This familiarity leads to greater parental involvement and a kind of accessibility that simply cannot be found in larger districts and campuses. In an era of high stakes testing, cyberbullying, and the looming specter of school violence, a place where everyone knows each other and has deep roots to the local community seems like the perfect antidote to the coldness of modernity and all of its potential dangers.

Before delving any further, it is first necessary to define what a small school actually is. Much like other idealized institutions such as Mayberry, Lake Wobegone, and Pleasantville (all locations with unclear borders), people’s definition of small schools is left up to interpretation. For instance, I worked at a “small school” in inner-city Tucson, AZ that boasted around 620 students. I then worked in a school in rural Vermont with 182 students. Both were widely accepted as being small even though one was nearly three times the size of the other and had 3-4 homerooms per grade while the other only had 1 (and at times even had to implement multiage classrooms due to low numbers). Many schools believe they are small, and while class sizes are objective, one’s appraisal of what is small is highly subjective and often rooted in comparisons with other, larger schools. After all, that school in Tucson was small compared to its neighbor that enrolled over 2000 students. 

Even among educators the definition remains somewhat murky, and there is no official designation of what a small school is. One common threshold for researchers is that elementary schools with populations fewer than 300 students and secondary schools with populations under 400-500 are small schools (Lawrence et al., 2002). While this number might seem small, schools can actually go much smaller. Other educators have created the classification of “single-stream” or “monograde” schools where there is exactly one teacher employed for each grade level (Little, 2008). In terms of tracking the number of schools operating out of these confines, 31% of all public schools, 44% of all charter schools, and 82% of all private schools have fewer than 300 students (Schaeffer, 2024). When narrowing this to the single-stream schools (often the ones with fewer than 100 students), this number still remains surprisingly high with about 11.1% of elementary schools (over 5,800 institutions) meeting this definition (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023). To put it more plainly, nearly one in three schools are classified as small schools, while nearly one in ten would be considered by educators as “micro-schools” with one teacher per grade level.  

Based on the common consensus among the general public, this arrangement would seem ideal if not optimal. After all, small schools, especially the single-stream ones, offer low class sizes and the kind of individualized attention that makes students thrive. Furthermore, low class sizes mean greater ability for parents to be actively engaged in their students’ education and reach out to teachers and administration more easily. The common sentiment is that in small schools, students are not a number but individuals. 

There is another, more prominent adage, however, that also applies to small schools: All that glitters is not gold. In public education, which lives in a world of paradoxes and counterintuition, there is often a profound and overlooked difference between how things should be and how things really are. Small schools are no exception to this rule. 

Before moving into a deeper discussion of the drawbacks to small schools, it is first important to address one of the most pervasive myths in public education: the idea that the smaller the class size, the greater the learning. Although the prevailing view has been that smaller classrooms represent an optimal learning environment, the research has been surprisingly mixed. While class sizes can certainly have ceilings where learning is negatively impacted, reducing class sizes yields only minor improvements in education that are “remarkably small” (Hattie, 2009, p. 89). This is largely because class size alone does not significantly impact education unless classroom instruction adjusts to optimize smaller class sizes; furthermore, for class size reductions to truly impact education, sizes must be closer to 15-18 students per class, which many districts are likely to find unfeasible (Schanzenbach, 2014, p. 4). It should also be noted that there is a point where classes can become too small, which is discussed later in this article. 

Thus, although heavily idealized by the general public, it is important to establish that small schools rarely deliver on the nearly mythological promises and benefits with which many have come to associate them. Furthermore, there are several key drawbacks that have been negatively impacting generations of students, including limited resources and programming, student social-emotional development, and increased operational and financial burdens. When paired with the minimal results that smaller class sizes have been shown to yield, it becomes increasingly apparent that the specter of school consolidation might be less of a threat and more of an opportunity for schools to better serve their students. 

When the Fishbowl Is Too Small

One of the more pervasive issues with attending small schools, particularly micro-schools, is that students often experience significant limitations on the education programming they receive. This is particularly true when it comes to what courses are offered. Schools often need a specific number of students in order to diversify its program offerings for arts, sports, specialty classes (including AP and advanced classes), and even wraparound supports; however, due to their low student body sizes, small schools often are unable to provide the robust range of classes and programs that their larger counterparts can, leading to students being unable to pursue their academic interests and needs, including foreign language, advanced courses, and CTE and vocational pathways (Keystone Policy Center, 2026, p. 4). This often leads to fewer options and a far more homogenized curriculum that attempts to meet a large range of skills and interests, yet ultimately ends up offering little to no opportunities for specialization. For those students attending small schools, they end up graduating having not experienced the richness and differentiation that students at larger schools were able to access. This directly undermines the notion that lower populations mean more individualized specialization for students.

As mentioned previously, not only do small schools and micro-schools offer fewer academic opportunities in terms of advanced placement and special-topic courses, but they also do not offer the same level of support for the most vulnerable populations of students, including those who have disabilities, are from low socio-economic backgrounds, are English learners, or come from historically marginalized populations. The Keystone Policy Center (2026) notes that small schools are often less likely to offer full-time supports for students outside of the classroom such as social workers, nurses, and counselors, and even when they do, schools have to share these professionals with other campuses (p. 4). Students dependent on these services must settle for receiving them only a few days a week, which poses a notable disadvantage for English learners and students with social-emotional needs that require consistent services to fully access their learning. Furthermore, the Keystone Policy Center (2026) notes in the same study that the professionals splitting their time between different campuses are further hampered by having to become familiar with numerous procedures and student bodies (p. 4). Essentially, the most vulnerable populations attending small schools must settle for less effective interventions and services administered more inconsistently than their peers in larger campuses.

In addition to simply being able to find the necessary number of students to sustain specialized classes and services, small schools also often struggle to hire qualified staffing. Because most small schools serve physically remote areas, the pool of qualified applicants for instructional and administrative positions is considerably smaller. Even when schools are able to hire highly qualified candidates, they offer far fewer opportunities for professional growth. Teachers in small schools are often the only ones in their grade-level or content area, limiting their opportunities for collaboration and participating in professional learning communities; further compounding this issue is the fact that administrative teams at such schools are typically far leaner meaning fewer people to help offer coaching, feedback, and instructional support (Keystone Policy Center, 2026, p. 5). These shortages manifest themselves in additional ways that negatively impact instructional quality. The smaller administrative teams, both at the school and district level, are often strained to offer the same level of robust in-house professional development sessions, and even when receiving PD, teachers then return to their buildings where they are isolated and have no grade-level or shared-content peers to serve as thought partners where they can put what they are learning into practice.

Even when conceding these points, there are numerous community members that might argue that smaller schools or even micro-schools still offer a superior experience for students because of more personalized instruction and attention for students. Ironically, this is actually a common misconception. Because these schools serve such small populations, they often end up in a fiscal trap where they spend more money per student while also offering them less than the larger schools. Education Resource Strategies (2013) conducted a comprehensive study on school design and concluded, “Smaller-than-planned schools struggle to offer students or staff the opportunities they need…Shrinking schools are both more expensive to operate because of fixed costs (principal, facility, etc.) and less able to offer students and staff the opportunities they deserve” (p. 18). Essentially, small schools often find themselves in a logistical nightmare where they must spread their limited resources far thinner than their larger counterparts. 

Although small schools experience significant limitations on their academic programs, students at such schools experience additional disadvantages. In yet another common misconception, many advocates are prone to argue that such schools offer students a more intimate environment where they get to experience a community of familiar peers that allows them to form lasting relationships. The studies, however, consistently counter this by identifying that such environments can stifle students’ social-emotional development. Baines, Blatchford, and Chowne (2007) explain: 

Ultra-small classroom environments severely limit the student’s opportunities for social-emotional navigation. When peer numbers drop below a critical mass, children face intense, unremitting interpersonal exposure. Without a wider pool of peers to form alternative social networks, negative interpersonal dynamics, stereotyping, and micro-bullying behaviors become structurally locked in place. (p. 671)

Because students in small schools are often traveling with the same group of peers every year, their friend groups are often limited. In such an environment they are less likely to experience diverse populations and viewpoints yet are also often more likely to experience quarrels and conflicts that can evolve into bullying with no ability to form alternative friendships. They are essentially stuck in a small fishbowl where fixed viewpoints, prejudices, and quarrels become a massive echo chamber. 

Conclusion: Embracing the Consolidation Movement

The solution to the shortcomings of small schools has already been established and is actively being debated in many states across the country: school consolidation. While the motives for pushing this have been primarily financial and have consequently faced pushback by many communities who are rightfully worried about their students’ education being dramatically altered simply to lower taxes and cut spending, there is still wisdom in having such a conversation. 

While closing schools is bound to strike smaller communities as drastic at best and cynically destructive at worst, school consolidation ultimately offers students more opportunities academically, fiscally, and even socially if done well. This means letting student growth and opportunity be the drivers for deciding to combine schools as opposed to simply attempting to find a way to cut costs and staff. Ultimately, if communities are willing to make the investment towards creating larger schools with more services and academic options, school districts across the country might find themselves in a very rare situation indeed: one where everyone wins. Students will receive a higher quality of education, and both school districts and taxpayers alike will benefit from fewer overhead costs and more resources to share among students. Such opportunities rarely exist in life; communities would be wise to take advantage of them.

References

Baines, E., Blatchford, P., & Chowne, A. (2007). Improving the effectiveness of collaborative group work in primary schools. British Educational Research Journal, 33(5), 663–680. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920701582231

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.

Keystone Policy Center. (2026). Right-sizing for student success: How districts can adapt to enrollment declines with a focus on students.

Lawrence, B., Copeland, S., Hamilton, K., Jehlen, A., Loops, M., Mitchell, B., & Woodward, C. (2002). Dollars & sense: The cost effectiveness of small schools. KnowledgeWorks Foundation.

Little, A. W. (2008). Size matters for EFA [Education for All] (CREATE Pathways to Access, Research Monograph No. 26). Consortium for Research on Educational Access, Transitions and Equity.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2023). Digest of education statistics 2022 (NCES 2023-009). U.S. Department of Education. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_214.05.asp

Schaeffer, K. (2024, June 6). U.S. public, private and charter schools in 5 charts. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/06/us-public-private-and-charter-schools-in-5-charts/

Schanzenbach, D. W. (2014). Does class size matter? National Education Policy Center. Policy Education Research Unit.