Considering a Small High School?
By Norm Fruchter
The deadline to file applications for NYC high schools is December 3rd, 2010. Current high school choice involves almost 400 schools, of which more than half are relatively small high schools (serving grades 9-12) and secondary schools (serving grades 6-12). These small schools are relatively new; the first 50 were started in the mid-1990s, and most of the rest were created since 2002. The high school choice process has always been complicated and pressured for many students and their families; the existence of so many new small high schools increases that complexity. So what do we know about these new small high schools?
The city’s small high schools have already been extensively studied. Generally, the findings show that small schools overall enroll higher percentages of Black and Latino students, higher percentages of students from poor families, and higher percentages of poorly performing students, than the city’s high schools as a whole. However, historically, the small high schools have enrolled fewer Special Education and ELL students, though
