New evidence that smalls schools work?
You might have forgotten about the small schools movement amid all the recent hubbub about overhauling teacher evaluations. But a study released on January 25th reminds us that only a few years ago, reducing the number of total students in a school was seen as a key weapon in the arsenal of urban school reform, and suggests that perhaps small schools shouldn’t have been so quickly abandoned as a reform strategy.
In 2010, MDRC, a nonpartisan, New York-based research group, found that New York City students who attended small high schools were more likely to graduate than their counterparts who applied to but didn’t ultimately attend small schools. A new study confirms the previous findings. A second group of students who cycled through the city’s small schools also had a greater likelihood of graduating than students at other, comparable schools.
New York City’s small schools aren’t selective, but they do have lotteries because of space constraints. The
