Definitions matter. Especially in debates of controversial topics such as school consolidation. Just as an advocate for small schools derided what he called “the bigger is better” attitude, his “smaller is better” mantra lacks context.

Marty Strange, policy director for the Rural School and Community Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based group, may well be right that “small” schools have higher graduation rates and more parental involvement. But the national data Mr. Strange presented to small-school advocates in Maine last week could be misunderstood because what is considered a small school nationally is actually a large school by Maine standards.

Maine schools tend to be much smaller partly because it has no large urban areas and, therefore, no high schools with thousands of students. The average American school is 80 percent larger than the average Maine school, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Therefore, the majority of “large” schools in Maine are considered “small” in the national research.

Craig Howley, an education researcher at Ohio University, acknowledges this problem and tries to define large and small schools through his many journal articles. The next question becomes what is too large and too small. Professor Howley reviews many studies of the subject and recommends that 1,000 students be the upper limit for high schools and 500 students for K-8 schools. He says there is no such thing as a school that is too small, although funding very small schools often becomes a problem.

Using Professor Howley’s rough definition, only 13 of Maine’s 209 secondary schools are “too big.” Only five high schools in Maine have more than 1,100 students, with the two largest being Bangor High School, with 1,499 students in the fall of 2003, and Lewiston High School with 1,416, according to enrollment data from the Maine Department of Education. The same data shows that about 50 schools that include high school students have fewer than 300 students. A 1997 study by Valerie Lee, a professor of education at the University of Michigan, found that students in high schools with fewer than 300 students performed worse than their peers in schools with between 600 and 1,200 students.

Beyond all these numbers, the debate over the success of small schools in Maine is misplaced, according to Robert Cobb, dean of the College of Education at the University of Maine, because there is no appreciable difference in student performance in the state’s large, medium and small schools. A new report of the Task Force on Increasing Efficiency and Equity in the Use of K-12 Education Resources includes a chart showing that students in the state’s largest school districts had slightly higher MEA scores than their peers in small districts. School districts are a proxy for schools since large districts tend to have the largest schools.

According to the group’s report, students in districts with more than 2,500 pupils scored an average of 532.4 on the test, while students in districts with between 125 and 500 pupils scored 530.7. Based, in part, on these findings, the task force, of which Dean Cobb was a member, called for financial incentives to encourage the consolidation of school districts.

While numbers don’t tell the whole story, with an issue as complicated as school consolidation it is important that the decision-makers are at least talking about the same number. Loosely using words like large and small, without quantifying what they mean, does not help the debate.