Dan McFarland's recent study is referenced in this Washington Post article on cliques in large and small schools and memories of high schools.
My high school clique in suburban San Mateo, Calif., included Danny, Lee, Francis and Jon. We were the tennis team nerds. We did our homework. We played poker for pennies on Saturday nights. We did not include girls, but were obsessed with British actress Hayley Mills, then 15 years old.
Our class had about 400 students. The school offered many electives and activities, just the sort of medium-to-large campus that is “more likely to be rank-ordered, cliquish and segregated by race, age, gender and social status,” according to a Stanford University summary of new research by Graduate School of Education professor Daniel A. McFarland and four other researchers.
“By contrast, pecking orders, cliques and self-segregation are less prevalent in schools and classrooms that limit social choices and prescribe formats of interaction,” the summary said. “Smaller schools inherently offer a small choice of potential friends, so the ‘cost’ of excluding people from a social group is higher. In addition, structured classrooms guide student interactions in prescribed routes and encourage students to interact on the basis of schoolwork rather than on the basis of their external social lives.”
This is, to me, rather startling. I have been studying high schools for 30 years. I thought cliques were common to all of them. Forming little peer groups is what adolescents do. But the American Sociological Review paper, “Network Ecology and Adolescent Social Structure,” shows that small high schools, like the private schools and public charters in the Washington region, inspire different kinds of cliques than the large public high schools that most area children attend.
Read the full story in the Washington Post.
Daniel McFarland is a professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
