Small Schools: The Edu-Reform Failure That Wasn't
What ever happened to the small-schools craze? A little over a decade ago, philanthropists and policy leaders, believing they had identified the key to student performance, threw their collective weight behind an effort to redesign the nation's large high schools. They spent over a billion dollars and transformed hundreds of large schools into smaller ones. Then, as suddenly as it began, the effort was declared a failure and brought to an abrupt end.
Now, post-mortem research indicates that small schools appear to promote several important outcomes, such as higher graduation rates.
So were small schools just another failed school improvement effort? Or do they actually work? The answer, it turns out, is not an all-or-nothing proposition.
Several years ago, I told the story of the small-schools push in a chapter of my book Excellence for All, which sought to identify the core assumptions and beliefs of contemporary school reformers. I included the small-schools movement because it seemed a perfect case in point of a modern school-change ethos guided by common sense, entrepreneurialism, and ambition. Several high-profile organizations—the Annenberg Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and, most prominently, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—along with the U.S. Department of Education, through its Smaller Learning Communities grants, spent aggressively on small schools, with little attention to the myriad other factors affecting school quality. The backers appeared to believe that by making the neediest schools look more like their high-performing counterparts, they could produce equal outcomes.
Creating smaller schools wasn't a bad idea, per se. But as a large-scale school improvement strategy, the movement was destined to fail. The theory of action—that wholesale reproduction of a particular structure would lead to equal learning outcomes—simply didn't make sense. To paraphrase the policy scholar Richard Elmore, schools are vessels "into which educators and communities" can "pour whatever content and pedagogy" they want. In other words, the size of a school building is a limited tool that Small Schools: The Edu-Reform Failure That Wasn't - Education Week:
