Class size, school size and the size of the school network

Abstract

In many transition countries, including Ukraine, decreases in population and fertility have led to substantial falls in the number of school-aged children. As a consequence, these countries now have school networks that consist of many small schools, leading many countries to consider reorganizing their school networks by closing smaller schools and reallocating students. Using a rich dataset of almost the entire population of Ukrainian secondary schools, we estimate the effect of school size and class size on the performance of secondary schools on Ukraine's Independent External Test. We find that larger schools tend to have somewhat better performance, both in terms of test scores and in terms of test participation. The size of this effect is relatively small, however, especially in rural areas for which the estimates are likely to be less biased. Class size is found to be insignificant in most specifications and, if significant, of negligible size. The importance of this finding for the 'rationalization' of the large school networks in Eastern Europe are discussed.

Why is education performance so different across Latvian schools?

“…Both these factors are highly significant regardless of whether a school sample covers the full dataset (652 schools; except vocational, evening and extramural schools) or excludes gymnasiums and middle schools (see Table ). The positive link between school size and pupil performance (see also Figure ) is in line with the literature (Burney et al., ; Coupe et al.,; Essid et al., ; Huguenin, ; Pereira & Moreira, ).…”

“…Fourth, we follow Coupe et al. () when trying to control for the likely impact of socio‐economic factors on pupil performance by including the registered unemployment rate in the municipality (per cent; in February 2015 ) and the average net wage in the municipality (euro; 2014) . These data were extracted from the databases of the State Employment Agency and CSB, respectively.…”

“…We regard nine cities as big ones; the biggest city in this group is capital city Riga with 676 thousand inhabitants, while the smallest city is Jekabpils with 23 thousand inhabitants. Fourth, we follow Coupe et al (2015) when trying to control for the likely impact of socio-economic factors on pupil performance 2 by including the registered unemployment rate in the municipality 3 (per cent; in February 2015 4 ) and the average net wage in the municipality (euro; 2014) 5 . These data were extracted from the databases of the State Employment Agency and CSB, respectively.…”

“…There is also enough international evidence on the positive scale effect. The impact of school size on pupil performance was found to be positive, for instance, by Burney, Johnes, Al-Enezi, and Al-Mussalam (2013) for Kuwait, Huguenin (2015) for Switzerland, Coupe et al (2015) for Ukraine, Essid, Ouellette, and Vigeant (2013) for Tunisia as well as Pereira and Moreira (2007) for Portugal.…”

Strategies to support foreign language learning in large classes: a systematic literature review

“…Tom and Alonso (2015) propose that class size does not have a considerable impact on students' outcome; if they do, it will be in neglectable numbers. However, they also found that there are significant correlations between the number of students at schools and the number of teachers at schools.…”