The Dark Side of Smallness

Small schools, for all their many advantages in terms of intimacy and every student being known, are especially vulnerable to Tversky and Kahneman's Law of Small Numbers (LSN).  The LSN describes a particularly appealing judgmental error that occurs when people make sweeping extrapolations based on very small datasets; in short, they run the risk of assuming that the exception is the rule.  A corollary we see to the LSN is that in the very small school, everything takes on magnified significance since it occurs against a limited backdrop of events; e.g., the tempest in one grade galvanizes an entire school because it is so visible against a total enrollment of 185 students.

Governing boards are, in our experience, incredibly vulnerable to the phenomenon Tversky and Kahneman describe when they eschew data-driven governance for what we call "governance by anecdote."  Even unfortunate, but normal, events can take on out-sized importance to a board when it fails to consider the total context of schools as human institutions and families as dynamic systems.