Many panels and experts have endorsed small schools as educationally effective, often adding the parenthetical remark that smaller size is especially beneficial for impoverished students. This Digest reviews recent thinking about small school size, describes the aim of the Matthew Project studies, and summarizes findings.
Discussion concludes with a brief section on implications.
Since the mid-1990s, there have been efforts to summarize key findings of recent research on school size. Both Irmsher's and Raywid's research reviews, by contrast, summarized the influence on a wider range of outcomes, with each author concluding that a preponderance of evidence favored smaller size nearly universally. The Matthew Project Schools grew dramatically larger during the course of the twentieth century, and a huge professional literature that addresses school size now exists. But a surprisingly small proportion of this literature constitutes the research base on school size, and comparatively few studies address the interaction of school size and poverty as a major concern. Within this literature, however, the studies related to the Matthew Project are the only ones that pursue the issue systematically across multiple replications.