The Doorbell Queen has a post up today about high school sizes and educational quality. It’s worth clicking through and reading yourself, but here’s a taste.

I’m not saying that large schools always work, or that they are appropriate in every situation, but large schools can be educationally rigorous and can, in fact, beat the pants off Loudoun County’s schools academically.

So, my dear School Board, you’re going to have to come up with something other than “educational reasons” for why you won’t even study the FEASIBILITY of expanding the size of the existing schools. Because I just gave you a total of over ten thousand reasons why that won’t fly. – Doorbell Queen

The question of school size is just one of an entire class of questions about how we do school development in Loudoun. At their core, the issues surrounding new schools in the County are issues with assumptions, rather than outcomes. For example, it is assumed that a high school must have fewer than 2000 students, and sit on 70 acres of land. It is assumed that we want to spend as little money as possible acquiring and building new schools. And it is assumed that elementary and middle schools should only be one floor.

But for many, many years, other assumptions were held that were proven to be fallacious and counterproductive. Like the assumption that kids of different races should go to different schools, for example. Or the assumption that children with special needs and their parents should fend for themselves.

It is long past time to put all of our assumptions about schools on the table and reevaluate them in the light of the needs of our community, today.For example, I’ve long been an advocate of smaller class sizes. Unfortunately, research and data aren’t necessarily showing that smaller class sizes are a solution for student achievement. The Doorbell Queen makes the case for larger high schools based on schools in New York with sterling reputations. We have excellent high schools here in Loudoun which may be able to be expanded, solving some of our problems with overcrowding and class sizes.

Similarly, Loudoun has long assumed that building schools the way we’ve built them for the past twenty years was the right way to do it for the next twenty years. It seems highly likely that is not the case.

The argument has been made, for example, that there is no longer any land available for new high schools in areas with growing student populations. However, that argument is false. Land is always available, at a price. It is one thing to say there is no land, but it is something quite different to say that we as a community do not want to spend the money necessary to acquire the optimal land.

Similarly, it is incorrect to say that we cannot have high schools with over 2000 students. It’s more accurate to say that we do not want high schools with more than 2000 students, which would allow us to have a real conversation about whether that desire ranks higher than our desire to build schools as cheaply as possible.

Far too often, issues of public policy devolve into the shouting of false absolutes. In all of these cases, policies are a question of competing interests. And we will do well to be honest with ourselves and each other by acknowledging that we each value different interests. Just because my interest, and my opinion, doesn’t win out, does not mean that my values and integrity have been sullied.

Schools and school construction are not zero-sum games. I commend the Board of Supervisors and School Board for starting to move past that idea, and I hope there will be even more progress, soon.