Critiquing arguments from the "small school" movement in cities such as New York and Chicago, this paper provides a basis for making sense of the apparent divergence in policies governing schooling structures in rural and urban places. Its interpretation examines the way the urban small schools movement works to valorize (and hence draw support from) the prevailing political consensus, which favors charter schools and standards-based reform. Small rural schools, by contrast, tend to represent traditional arrangements, both in political and pedagogical terms; and reformers tend to see such schools as "backward" and corrupt. These judgments, based primarily on political and ideological grounds, attend little to the empirical findings about school size, which tend to show that small schools confer advantages in all locales to all but the highest-SES students.