How is "getting a good education" a negative effect? It is the opposite. If smart people do the things they need to do to become even smarter, everyone benefits.
Smaller schools have less educational diversity. Suppose you want a gifted and talented education, but also want to play baseball. At tiny schools that may not be an option, but at a larger school you can have upper tier classes and a wider range of clubs.
EX: My high school had a swim team and a chess club. We had almost every AP class, lot's of general ed, even some handicapped students. When they split the school a lot of that was lost.
IMO, it's the disruptive students that need to go not the gifted. Unless your talking boarding schools even NYC does not really have enough exceptionally gifted students for their own high school.
You're also assuming that such a shift must play in the current model. There's no reason that sports couldn't be separated into community activities totally separate from the educational aspects of multiple smaller schools.
I can't find the link, but I've heard strong arguments for models where school days are 4 hours long and kids go to community centers afterwards where they do homework, play sports, games, club activities, hikes, music lessons and just hangout. As a bonus, the people in these areas DON'T need a masters degree to do their job as we separate educational aspects of schools from social aspects.
Dozens of small schools could easily work together in a community under this model with changes in the classroom schools having no impact on the activity centers. You could even go to certain schools on different days for areas of specialization/interest being taught.
There are a whole world of possible options that open up if we don't lock in the model that we have today. IMO, it's not about defunding the schools. It's about WANTING to fund them.
You would need the same number of teachers if the day was 4h long unless you had some students start with community centers and then swap. Now, if population density was high enough your model might work, but you are going to sacrifice a lot of time busing people around in the middle of the day.
Unless, these are simply different building right next to each other. Which is fine, but you could do the same thing in one building.
