The interaction effect between school and district size indicates that poverty s power over achievement within large districts might be lowered by 40 percentage points by doing nothing more than reducing school size within the district. On the other hand, it might be reduced by as much as 60 percentage points by reducing both school size and district size. This kind of analysis does not reveal the causes of any statistical relationship. We can only guess about what causes the powerful patterns of relationship revealed in these data. The bottom line seems to be that small works in human institutions.
Students don t attend districts, of course.
They attend schools. But districts run schools, and big district bureaucracy is known to hamper communications and action at the school level. The structure of the schooling system the number of students in a class, the size of the school, and even the scale of the governance system in which the school functions have received less attention despite a large and growing body of research that says size matters and small works. There is a wealth of evidence that this is true for the size of a school. This study suggests that it is true for the size of a district as well.