On the so-called 'failure' of the small schools movement
Holy Cross prof, Jack Schneider, writing at EdWeek, makes a pretty fair assessment of the small schools movement.
In the eyes of Gates and company, the problem was with small schools as a particular policy fix rather than with the thinking behind the fix. Collective faith in silver bullets—in finding "what works" and "taking it to scale"—remained absolute. Never mind the obvious disregard for the importance of context or inescapable complexity of improving schools. The backers declared small schools a failure and moved on.But while the modern small schools movement, which began as a teacher-led movement in East Harlem, for social-justice and democratic education and met its death when it was trampled by the top-down, corporate-style reform wave of the past two decades, was never envisioned as a panacea or a technical reform for ailing schools. Rather it was seen by us early educator/activists as a way to drive change from below. Small, was about far more that the size of buildings or even school population. It was a metaphor that gave us a way to confront Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: On the so-called 'failure' of the small schools movement:
