Big Schools are Better?

With all the talk of school consolidation in Topeka, I decided to do some research on quality of education as opposed to cost. I first got the KSHSAA list of school classifications then went to the KSDE website to get information on what schools did not make AYP last year. Private schools are not included in these statistics.

34 Districts in our state did not make AYP in 2009

There are 15 districts in 6A 7 did not make AYP or 47%

There are 20 districts in 5A 4 did not make AYP or 20%

There are 59 districts in 4A 12 did not make AYP or 21%

So 88% of the 34 districts come from our largest classifications

There were 172 individual schools that did not make AYP 146 of those came from districts of 1600 students or more which is 85%.

If quality of education matters to our legislative leaders maybe we should make schools smaller instead of larger.

I have sent this information to our legislative representatives.