School Size and Program Comprehensiveness: Evidence From High School and Beyond

The demand for school improvement has increased concern over the ability of small high schools to offer comprehensive programs and has raised anew the pressure for consolidation. However, although large schools clearly offer more courses than do small ones, it is less clear that they offer more comprehensive programs. In this study we use the High School and Beyond data to address three questions, (a) Are the math, science, and foreign language programs of large schools more comprehensive than those of small ones? (b) For any given school size, are these programs equally comprehensive? (c) Is there some point on the school size continuum beyond which comprehensiveness shows little change? We find that although large schools offer more comprehensive programs than do small ones, there is substantial variation in comprehensiveness among the three programs at any given school size, and there is no common point where the programs of smaller schools approximate the comprehensiveness of larger ones.