The Battle Over Size

It is 8:45 on a raw spring morning in a hardscrabble section of the Bronx. Principal Charles Osewalt, the head of the Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies (MACS), one of the city's new small high schools, is standing at attention behind his cluttered desk, a telephone clamped to his ear, muttering about a chronically tardy senior. "Is Marcus there?" he says, speaking sweetly. There is a moment of silence, his face turns red, and then Osewalt starts to bellow into the receiver in tropes familiar to any parent of a teen. "Marcus! What are you still doing home? I called you 45 minutes ago and told you to get to school right now! Why are you still there?" There is a brief pause. Osewalt, 53, is accepting no excuses. "Get in here. It's 8:45! That means school starts in 15 minutes." There is another pause. "Marcus, turn off the TV. Stop listening to the radio. Hang up the phone and walk out your door." Pause. "The first stop when you arrive at school is my office." He slams down the phone and sags into his seat. Then he looks up, a smile breaking through his scowl. Another senior, herself struggling with chronic tardiness, has arrived at MACS, notebook in hand, with a full 10 minutes to spare before her first class. Osewalt jumps up. "Great to see you!" he says, pulling her into a bear hug. "Great job!"

Small, intense, academically focused and emotionally connected. It's a new—and exhausting—way of running a high school. But Osewalt, his 29 teachers and the 430 students say they wouldn't have it any other way. They're at the vanguard of the biggest wave of school reform to hit that classic American institution, the comprehensive high school, in 30 years. In the last 15 years state legislators and the federal No Child Left Behind laws have been swiftly remaking elementary education with the single-minded goal of getting more kids to their grade level in reading and math. But high schools, long plagued by low achievement and high dropout rates, have been subject to a host of reforms that have flickered and faded. Mayors in cities like New York, Chicago, Milwaukee and San Diego aren't waiting for a state or federal plan. For the last six years, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they've been replacing their large dysfunctional inner-city high schools with smaller ones that are specially designed to keep students from falling through the cracks. Although the results of the new small high schools movement have been mixed—attendance and graduate rates are up, while test scores have remained about the same—finding a way to get kids to stay in school, proponents say, is half the battle.

Critics say that creating small high schools out of large ones merely masks the real problem: coming up with a national consensus on what children should be learning in high school and making sure they learn it. "The size of the school matters less than the quality of the curriculum," argues Brookings Institution scholar Diane Ravitch, an educational historian. Although small high schools may be moderately beneficial for the most impoverished kids, who do better in a more personal environment, real improvement in high school won't begin "until we come up with a universal curriculum." But for many kids the advantages seem clear. "The teachers and administrators treat you like family," says MACS senior Anthony Delarosa. "They know when to hug you and when to put the hammer down."

No one thinks small schools are a panacea. Closing and reopening schools can be disruptive to the children who attend them—and often shunt the hardest-to-teach kids to other schools. The start-up costs are high, and small high schools cost about 5 percent more per student to operate. By some accounting students get less for the money. Small high schools offer fewer courses and foreign language options, and extracurriculars like a school newspaper, a marching band or a sports team are limited. U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings says she's not convinced small high schools are the answer. As the economy becomes more global, says Spellings, "the pressure has never been greater for high schools to turn out a more highly skilled work force. I'm not sure we have a good solution, but I know we need them to do a better job than they're doing now."

Supporters, though, say small high schools are a crucial step in reducing the yawning achievement gap between middle-class whites and poor black and Hispanic kids. At their best, small high schools can become close-knit learning communities that help kids stay motivated. For underserved kids in high-needs communities, says Joel Klein, schools chancellor of New York City, which has been on the forefront of the small high schools movement, "converting big high schools into small ones creates a personal scale to schools. And that is critical for learning." But will this latest wave of high school reform make a meaningful difference in the lives of America's poor children, or will it end up on the scrap heap like so many other big ideas, enthusiastically embraced and quickly forgotten? And as small high schools become the norm, rather than the exception, will they be able to sustain the slender gains they've made? And if they do, will that be enough to keep pace with the requirements of a rapidly changing world?

Change has been a long time in coming. Twenty-five years ago a special federal education panel appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan issued a report called "A Nation at Risk" that warned that a "rising tide of mediocrity" was destroying our schools—in particular high schools—and threatening the American way of life. What had gone wrong? Mostly, our schools were doing what they'd done since the turn of the century. Since the 1930s high schools had served as a kind of sorting machine: a small group of kids was educated to attend college; the rest were taught business skills and got a smattering of vocational training so they could take their place behind a cash register or on a factory line. Back then most educators believed that large high schools were the answer. They were more effective, reformers argued, because they offered kids a wider variety of courses. They were economical, too. By grouping thousands of kids under one roof, schools could educate more kids with a relatively small budget and keep local taxes low. Large high schools were also considered more democratic, since children of blue collar workers and white collar workers learned in the same building. Small high schools, wrote former Harvard University president James Conant in his best-selling 1959 book, "The American High School Today," represents "one of the serious obstacles to good secondary education."

But by 1983, when the panel sat down to write "A Nation at Risk," it was clear the world was changing. The manufacturing sector, which relied on low-skilled workers, was shrinking. At the same time that business began clamoring for more highly skilled workers, inner-city high schools—most of which by that time enrolled a thousand or more kids—stopped promoting the college preparatory track and began offering more "relevant" and "student-centered" electives, like banking, health and consumer education. While more kids—and especially more black and Hispanic ones—were getting high school diplomas, the skills they were bringing into the workplace were weaker. By the end of the 1970s only 20 percent of high school seniors could write a persuasive essay. Only a third could solve a math problem that required several steps. "A Nation at Risk" warned the country that communities and local legislators, who had historically run schools, were botching the job. The authors of "A Nation at Risk" recommended that states and the federal government step in to help high schools prepare an adequate work force for the future.