The Battle Over Size

The report generated yards of headlines, months of soul-searching by the education community and proposals and counterproposals for reform. But Morris High School—and many inner-city schools around the nation—continued on what had been a protracted downward slide. The reason was money. New York was being battered by a fiscal crisis, and school budgets were getting slashed and slashed again. In 1975 an idealistic young substitute teacher at Morris, Joshua Zuckerman, got laid off during the fiscal crisis. When he was rehired in 1984, he could barely believe that the fortunes of battered Morris High School had fallen so low. The neo-Gothic building was in ruins; when it rained, the roof leaked so badly that water cascaded down the center stair. The auditorium was condemned and padlocked. Teachers routinely dodged chunks of plaster that fell from the ceilings. About a fifth of the kids were now labeled "special education," a designation that barely existed in 1975, and were given such poor instruction that some of their parents successfully sued the city for failing to provide an adequate education. Classrooms were often chaotic, and students roamed the hallways. The administration and the teachers, who were controlled by the powerful teachers' union, seemed unable to make any substantial improvements in the face of so much neglect and deterioration. "Some teachers were out the door at 3 p.m.," said Zuckerman. "Others tried hard to teach the kids they could reach—and they did so in the face of incredible odds."

As the city righted itself financially, Morris was given a face-lift. But new plaster and paint couldn't make a dent in the culture of failure that had taken hold there. Current and former staffers describe a fundamental disconnect between the teachers and administrators—who defined their jobs as running a school that offered instruction to all comers—and the students, many of whom were getting promoted year after year without learning basic literacy and math skills. "The school was run well. There were plenty of administrators and plenty of teachers," says Maj. Richard Noggle, a retired military officer who has run the junior ROTC program at the school for over a decade. "But they couldn't seem to reach the kids."

In the mid-'80s influential school reformers began to conclude that Conant was wrong. Large high schools left students alienated and made both students and teachers more apathetic. Comprehensive high schools needed to be refashioned into learning communities on a more human scale. New York City school administrators tried to bring some of those new ideas to Morris, with limited success. In the early '90s the 1,600-student school was reorganized into four 400-student "houses," each with a dean, a guidance counselor and a social worker. Responding to a drum beat to reduce class size, a popular but unproven reform measure, administrators began running the school in two shifts: one that started at 8 a.m. and an even earlier shift that started at 7:30. They tried afternoon classes and Saturday classes, too. A few years later, when terms like relevance and accountability were becoming popular buzzwords in educational circles, houses were replaced by themed "academies"—freshman at Morris were assigned to sports, journalism and military academies, for instance, that were supposed to match their career interests. The academy system, says former Morris assistant principal Sharon Woody, was a disaster. "It made the kids harder, not easier, to track. You could never tell which adult was responsible for which students." Morale among the staff plummeted. On any given day, about 40 percent of the students and about 20 percent of the teachers called in sick. Even when it seemed that the fortunes of the school couldn't dip any further, they did. In 1997 a student smuggled a .25 caliber pistol past the school's metal detectors and shot a friend by accident on the fourth floor.

As the new decade dawned, the fate of Morris High school—and thousands like it—would be changed by an unlikely force: a retail executive turned school superintendent who lived 3,000 miles away in Washington State. Thomas Vander Ark, a father of two, spent five years as superintendent of the economically mixed Federal Way school district near Tacoma before being hired by what would become the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gateses were on the verge of making an investment in education. Vander Ark's job was to figure out what they should spend it on.

At that time it was no secret to school superintendents that more kids started high school than finished. But states and the federal government didn't ask for accurate numbers, and high school principals had little incentive to count exactly how many kids got lost along the way. Vander Ark knew the number was high. But it wasn't until 2000, when he attended his daughter's high school graduation, that he began to reflect on how many kids actually dropped out. He sat in the dark, listening to the scratchy refrains of "Pomp and Circumstance," counting the number of diplomas being handed out and realizing that out of the 600 kids who had started in his daughter's freshman class, only 400 were graduating. "On my watch, 200 kids in each of our four high schools—maybe 800 to 1,000 kids—had fallen out of the system," says Vander Ark. "We never thought to keep track." By 2001 educational researchers, notably Jay Greene from the Manhattan Institute, had begun to pinpoint America's staggeringly high national dropout rates: overall 30 percent of adolescents were dropping out of high school. Among poor, black and Hispanic kids, the rate was one in two.

In 2003, armed with $51 million, the first installment of what would be $136 million in Gates money, Bill Gates, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein and Vander Ark stood on the stage of Morris High School and announced that the city, which had been experimenting with small high schools for 10 years, would be making a sweeping commitment to them. Most of the large and notoriously dysfunctional high schools in New York would be replaced by smaller ones. Morris would be replaced by five brand new schools: the School for Excellence, the High School for Violin and Dance, Bronx Leadership Academy, Bronx International High School and the Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies. "For too long we have relied on an outdated model to educate our young people," said Gates from behind the refurbished podium that day. "New York City is demonstrating how we can bring our schools into the 21st century to make sure that all students, not just a select few, are prepared for college and the working world."

Klein, a small, bespectacled former Justice Department lawyer, had thrown his support behind the handful of fledgling small high schools in New York in part because their philosophy dovetailed with his own core beliefs: that high school should prepare all kids, regardless of their background, for college. Klein was convinced that small high schools could improve dropout rates by, he says, "offering them education on a human scale."