Excellence for All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America's Public Schools

2. The Right Space: The Small Schools Movement

41 2 thE right SPAcE The Small Schools Movement In the last decades of the twentieth century, education reformers made the case that America’s urban public high schools had reached a point of intolerable failure. In an era in which higher education was being more frequently seen as a prerequisite for active economic participation, reformers bemoaned urban public schools as outdated and inadequate for the task. Achievement was down. Violence was up. Graduation rates hovered around 50 percent. And college-going rates, on which both social justice and social efficiency advocates had become fixated, were usually in the single digits. The situation looked even worse when urban schools were measured alongside the nation’s most successful high schools. Such schools graduated all their seniors each year and sent a wide cross section of them off to the Ivy League. And they did so for their tuition-paying pupils as well as for their low-income and minority students on scholarship. To the casual observer it seemed clear: some schools simply did it better. Although top schools were different in a number of distinct ways from their urban public counterparts, the most obvious and stark difference—at least in the eyes of some—was the size of the facilities. While top private schools were characterized by intimate, nurturing environments, urban public high schools looked more like factories and prisons. Further, while elite schools served students by the hundreds, urban comprehensive high schools were populated by casts of thousands. In 1994, the average New York City high school had 2,200 students.1 New York private schools Horace Mann, Dalton, and Riverdale, by contrast, had an average of roughly 600. Smaller elite New York prep schools, like Spence and Calhoun, had an average of 200. Other differences clearly mattered. Top private schools, among other things, generally worked with highly privileged populations, which no 42 ExcEllEncE for All doubt accounted for much of their superior performance. Yet a number of urban parochial schools and charter schools were experiencing success while working with students quite similar to those found in typical public schools. And, like top private schools, they were often characterized by enrollments small enough that faculty knew all their students by name. Perhaps, some thought, many of the problems of urban public education could be traced back to the nature of their facilities. The comprehensive high school, some reformers began to argue, was a vestige of a previous era and a flawed vision. Midcentury policy leaders like James Conant had pushed to create schools that would train some students vocationally, provide a general education to most, and prepare a small number for college—a once appropriate, if somewhat undemocratic, goal.2 Large high schools would promote wider course offerings, greater opportunities for specialization, and, supporters claimed, economies of scale. By the 1980s, however, educators like Deborah Meier were arguing that whatever the comprehensive high school did well, its day was over. It failed to help all children learn. The idea of creating smaller schools had a broad appeal. Liberal social justice advocates saw in small schools the potential to promote community, increase access, and advance educational equity. More conservative school critics, on the other hand, saw the chance to increase achievement and stave off the social and economic consequences of low school performance, all without resorting to contested methods like metropolitan busing. Thus, though its particular appeal differed from constituency to constituency, the small schools movement drew in supporters from both the right and the left while stirring little opposition. Among those particularly interested in the potential of small schools was a new breed of reformers whose concern for democratic equity was not separate from the goal of workforce preparation. For them, fairness and national strength demanded the same thing: that all students be prepared for twenty-first-century jobs. In small schools they saw a chance to advance that hybrid aim, believing that such settings would raise student achievement and college-going rates by expanding a model its champions argued had long promoted excellence. But small schools had an additional draw for educational entrepreneurs. Inclined to favor market-based solutions, such reformers saw small schools as antibureaucratic “start-ups” with a certain commonsense appeal. Further, they represented the sort of replicable model that scale-obsessed reform- thE right SPAcE 43 ers were looking for. Although the initial research base on small schools was relatively thin, the small schools...