School Size and Youth Violence

This paper investigates one aspect of the relationship between school size and education outcomes-- whether school size is associated with youth violence. The importance of this question is underlined by the prevalent view that large school sizes are needed to realize production scale economies. Such a consensus would need to be revisited if such cost savings were counterbalanced by students' growing frustration, higher dropout rates and student violence. Recently the effect of school size on school violence has been analyzed with data collected from U.S. schools. However, the use of school centered data may create its own "selection bias". A main goal of this paper is to retest the hypothesis on a micro-database centered on youth. Using a sample of inner city Montreal males, self-reported incidents of violent behaviour are used to see if school size has an independent effect on youth violence. Other demographic characteristics are included as controls.