More Research Showing Small Schools Work, Gates Remains Silent
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Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society (Positions: Education, Politics, and Culture) [Paperback] |
With the support of the Gates Foundation, New York City created 150 small schools of choice between 2002 and 2008. Five previous rigorous studies of this program and other small school initiatives have demonstrated significant benefits for students. Now we have a sixth study from the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative at MIT.
The authors, Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Weiwei Hu, and Parag Pathak, are economists at Duke and MIT. They take advantage of lotteries to gain admission to these non-selective small schools of choice to conduct a random assignment experiment. The full study can be read here, but it does not allow me to cut and paste text to summarize the results. According to the press release:
According to the press release:
The study follows cohorts of rising 9th graders for five application years from 2003-04 through 2007-08. For these students, small schools boost performance across all five major Regents exams: Math, English, Living Environment, Global History, and US History. Students randomly offered a seat at a small school accumulate 1.4 more credits per year, attend school for 4 more days each year, and are 9% more likely to receive a high school diploma.As the cohorts have aged, it is now possible to measure the effects of small schools on college enrollment and choice, outcomes that have never been examined before. Compared to the college enrollment rate of 37% for those not offered, students at small schools are 7% more likely to attend college and 6% more likely to attend a four-year college. Most of these gains come at four-year public institutions. There is a marked 7% increase in the fraction of students who enroll in the CUNY system. Small schools cause students to clear CUNY
