Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Looking back to 2001: Death of the Small Schools Movement

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Looking back to 2001: Death of the Small Schools Movement:

Looking back to 2001: Death of the Small Schools Movement

by Mike Klonsky

"There were two strategies going on at the same time which were diametrically opposed to each other." -- Bill Gerstein

A 2004 article by Beandrea Davis, in the Philadelphia Public School Notebook, tracked the beginning of the end of the small schools movement to the Paul Vallas era in Chicago, circa 1995-2001. By 2004, this promising reform movement, led by teachers with support among parents and community activists, had met its match -- the so-called accountability wave of top-down, test-and-punish, mayor-controlled corporate "reform."

Before he was fired by Mayor Daley, Vallas had succeeded in replacing teacher-led, highly-autonomous small schools with privately managed charter schools and school re-design with school closings. It was a trend he would take to scale as CEO of Philadelphia Public Schools and later as school boss in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Vallas

Davis quotes Vallas during a 2004 press briefing: "I really see charters as