In N.Y.C., Fast-Paced
Drive for Small Schools
By Caroline Hendrie, Education Week, June 23, 2004
New York

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Racking up the F's as he drifted through 9th grade at a 2,500-student high school, Ansel Farrell seemed well on his way to becoming just another dropout from the Bronx.

Then came a fresh start as a freshman in one of this city's new generation of small public high schools. Now he is wrapping up 10th grade at Bronx High School for the Visual Arts with a portfolio that recently landed him in an expenses-paid summer program designed to prepare disadvantaged young artists for college.

"Before I came here, I had no goal in life," said the 18-year- old immigrant from Trinidad, as he leafed through his portfolio after a recent art class. "Now I go to school because I want to be an artist. I love attention. I want to be famous."

Big dreams like that are just what New York City's sweeping initiative to start new small high schools is all about. Determined to give thousands more teenagers like Mr. Farrell a reason to come to school, education leaders here are in the midst of what is arguably the nation's most ambitious drive to "scale up" scaled-down schooling.

By most accounts, the going has been tough. A long-standing space crunch, especially in the borough of the Bronx, is making it hard to accommodate all the fledgling schools. Identifying and training principals has been straining a system that has long struggled to attract and retain talented leaders. And reconciling the new schools' tendency to emphasize personalized, project-based learning with a need for solid test scores has been another big challenge.

Amid those concerns, a backlash has arisen in some of the existing large high schools that are housing many of the fast-growing corps of small schools, testing the hitherto strong support for the initiative from the city teachers' union. Some teachers are demanding a moratorium on new small schools in existing schools and are complaining that the city is simply plunging forward too quickly.

But despite the bumpy road, neither school leaders nor the outside partners who are helping to lead New York's closely watched campaign are second-guessing their decision to scale up as fast as they can.

"You're not going to learn about the problems that you get at scale until you get to scale," said Robert L. Hughes, the president of New Visions for Public Schools, a locally based nonprofit organization that is the district's lead partner in the new-schools effort. "We can't shy away from the magnitude of the challenge."

'Very Committed'
New York City is far from alone in embracing the concept of smaller, more personalized high schools committed to challenging academic standards for all students.

Thanks in part to an outpouring of philanthropic and federal funding, school districts across the country are opening new small high schools and breaking down existing ones into smaller units. The goal is not only to get more young people to the high school finish line, but also to get them there prepared for college and jobs. ("High Schools Nationwide Paring Down," June 16, 2004.)

Yet even with all that activity, the nation's largest school district stands out. The sheer scale of the effort here is unusual, as is the enthusiasm for the initiative in the upper echelons of district governance.

"We are very committed to this and doing a great deal on many fronts," Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said during a conference last month in Palo Alto, Calif., hosted by the San Francisco-based New Schools Venture Fund. "The only thing that makes it hard is we're all understandably impatient. And I keep telling my people, 'Don't lose that impatience.'"

Not content to let the city's existing small schools gradually inspire imitators, leaders of the 1.1 million-student district are making an aggressive push to open 200 new small schools in three to five years, including 50 charter schools. By this coming fall, after just two years, they expect to be more than halfway there.

While the bulk of the charter schools are expected to be at the elementary level, most of the others are to be secondary schools, concentrated mainly in high-need neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx. This past fall, 42 small high schools made their debut. For the coming school year, 41 more schools serving grades 9-12 are to open, as are another 15 serving grades 6-12.

Many of the initiative's supporters say that with a citywide graduation rate hovering at 53 percent, more time was a luxury that New York's children could not afford. Even though many of the new schools feel squeezed for space-and are putting the squeeze on the large schools with which they share buildings-holding out for new facilities was not an option, many small- schools proponents say.

"We don't have time to wait around for new schools to open," said George York, the principal of Bronx High School for the Visual Arts, one of five small schools that share a building with the 3,200-student Christopher Columbus High School. "We're losing our kids."

Setting such a brisk pace also had an important strategic value, the initiative's architects say, because it forced everyone to think systemically. Rather than focusing on how to phase out one failing high school and replace it with small schools, the idea was to require the district to figure out how to make that transition in many schools at once.

"If you're only looking at one school, you're never going to start to take the steps necessary to build a system of those schools," Mr. Hughes said.

Power of Partners
Small schools designed to put disadvantaged youths on track for college have existed for decades in New York City. In the 1970s and '80s, pioneers such as the educator Deborah Meier founded schools lauded for pushing low-income and minority youngsters to unusual academic heights. Building on that work, the national Annenberg Challenge financed a five-year initiative in the 1990s that produced scores of new small schools.

Yet even some of the city's most celebrated small schools have seen their luster dim over the years, as the leadership has changed at the school and district levels. And a few are being closed, after replicating the dismal academic results of the big schools they replaced.

Determined to learn from the past, district leaders have tried to put together a scaling-up strategy aimed at producing nurturing but rigorous schools that are well supported both by the school system and the larger community. A critical feature of that strategy is collaboration with partners outside the education bureaucracy.

"I don't think you could do a scale-up that would be quick unless you partnered with organizations that are bringing knowledge, resources, and access to schools," said Michele Cahill, who oversees the new-schools initiative as Mr. Klein's senior counselor for education policy.

Each of the new, small high schools is required to have at least one "community partner" that is involved in planning the school and providing continuing support and learning opportunities once it's off the ground. Those organizations include social-service agencies, cultural organizations, museums, higher education institutions, and others.

Not all the matches between schools and their partners have been made in heaven, city officials acknowledge. But on balance, small-schools leaders say, they're working.

One showcase partnership is South Brooklyn Community High School. Targeted at chronic truants and dropouts, the 150-student school shares a custom-built, 35,000-square-foot brick facility with Good Shepherd Services, a social-services and youth-development agency based in the city. Agency counselors work with district teachers to move youngsters through an accelerated program that lets them earn credits more quickly than in traditional high schools.

Jon Camacho, a 16-year-old who had cut class constantly at his old high school, has been piling up the credits since starting classes last September in the well-equipped, 3-year-old building.

"Here, the counselor and the teacher, they get together and help you," he said.

Besides the school-level partnerships, outside "intermediary organizations," such as New Visions, and the private foundations that finance them have been integral to the scaling-up effort.

More than half of next school year's crop of new schools are being opened in partnership with New Visions through its New Century High Schools initiative, a public-private partnership launched in 2001 with money from the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the locally based Open Society Institute.

Besides nearly $40 million to New Visions, the Gates Foundation has given liberally to other organizations that are helping start new small schools in the city. Of the nearly $650 million that the Gates Foundation has spent around the country to promote new small high schools, New York City has received a bigger slice-some $79 million-than any other locale.

Officials with the city's department of education dispute the notion that the scale-up is being paid for privately, however. "The department is putting a significant amount of money into start- up costs for new schools," Ms. Cahill said. "Early on, it's a very big investment."

Still, officials say that attracting new partners to the push to improve the city's public schools was actually a central objective of the initiative.

"They bring financial capital, but also lots of human capital," said Kristen Kane, the director of the department's office of new schools.

A Focus on Leaders
Another cornerstone of the strategy is leadership. Faced with the challenge of starting dozens of schools at once, the city launched a distinct preparation program for small-schools leaders as part of a broader public-private effort to step up the professional training of principals systemwide.

"As important as getting the design right is making sure we have strong leaders," Ms. Cahill said during a recent interview at the district's headquarters in Lower Manhattan.

Shael Polakow Suransky, the principal of the 213-student Bronx International Academy, said anxiety initially inspired him to sign up to help train those preparing to lead the 60 new small schools scheduled to open in the fall. Now, he said, he's not so nervous.

"I was very worried that there were so many schools opening, and that there wouldn't be enough support," he said. "But actually I'm really impressed. It's a very strong group of people."

Another priority that has consumed a lot of energy is placing teachers in all the new schools. With heavy involvement from the city's affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, the district has developed a teacher-selection process that places major emphasis on a teacher's academic qualifications, as well as on seniority.

On the facilities front, district leaders are scrambling particularly hard for solutions as they catch flak for what critics call a failure to plan adequately, especially in the Bronx.

Early on, the decision was made that numerous low-performing high schools in that high-poverty borough would be a prime source of space for new small schools. The idea was that the big schools would be phased out, ideally a year at a time by not taking in any new 9th graders, as clusters of new schools gradually grew to full size in the buildings.

In some schools, that blueprint has been followed, leading to relatively smooth transitions. But in others, such as Columbus High School, the district has had to keep sending new 9th graders to the large high school-making life difficult for all concerned.

A complicating factor, officials say, has been growing enrollment in the borough fueled by immigration. In September, city officials expect 1,600 more students to enter high school in the Bronx than last year, when about 1,000 more entered than the year before.

"We're in a demographic bulge," Ms. Cahill said.

Buying and leasing new space and creating off-site programs for overage students who are behind in their credits are some of the ways the district is trying to ease the pressure on the large high schools. Small- schools advocates also have been agitating for more capital funding from the state to address what they see as a long history of neglecting the facilities needs of poor neighborhoods, especially in the Bronx.

'Daily Struggle'
Meanwhile, for principals such as Columbus High's Lisa Maffei- Fuentes, the situation feels a little like being put on death row without a date set for execution.

Overcrowding exacerbated by the loss of classrooms to the building's five new small schools has forced the school onto a 14- period, double-session schedule, making the school's efforts to tackle its attendance and achievement problems that much harder.

"It's a very hard place to be," Ms. Maffei-Fuentes said. "There are a lot of unhappy people at this time, and trying to get them to buy into the new vision is a daily struggle."

Among those people is Peter Lamphere, a math teacher who started at Columbus High last fall. Mr. Lamphere is helping organize an ongoing effort to draw attention to the problems of large high schools in the Bronx that are sharing space with small schools.

Teachers from two of those schools, including Columbus, recently presented the United Federation of Teachers, the city's AFT affiliate, with a petition demanding a moratorium on putting new small schools in larger ones. Bearing about 500 staff members' signatures, the petition called on the union to withdraw its support for the city's small-high- schools initiative. So far, the union is continuing to back the initiative, despite what leaders say are concerns about its implementation.

Mr. Lamphere acknowledges that the small schools also have legitimate complaints about their cramped conditions in the building. But he said that Columbus High teachers nonetheless see it as unfair that the small schools can run on a normal schedule with smaller class sizes. The situation has been especially hard on the school's veteran teachers, he added.

"It's been heartbreaking to see these older educators being told that everything they've poured their hearts and souls into is being thrown away, including the kids," he said.

Ms. Maffei-Fuentes said many of Columbus High's most talented staff members have taken jobs in new small schools, including the ones in the building, and she is encouraging more to follow. She's been warned to expect new freshmen in the fall, but she doesn't yet know how many. She's also been told that her last class of incoming 9th graders will be in 2006, but she is prepared for that date to change.

Amid the uncertainty, Ms. Maffei-Fuentes gets high marks from others in the building for making the best of difficult circumstances. Jane Aronoff, a former Columbus High assistant principal who now runs Pelham Preparatory Academy, a 200-student school in the building, said the cooperation among all six of the principals is made easier by Ms. Maffei-Fuentes' attitude.

"We have been most fortunate in the support we have gotten," Ms. Aronoff said. In many other buildings, she added, small- schools principals have not been so lucky.

Mr. York, whose 157-student school for the visual arts shares a floor of the Columbus High building with Ms. Aronoff's, said critics need to keep in mind youngsters like Ansel Farrell when they start complaining about the new small high schools.

"I've been working for 35 years in education, and this is the most exciting thing I've ever been involved in," he said. "There's lots of complaints, but you know, I can't listen to the complaints. This work is too important."

June 16, 2004

High Schools Nationwide
Paring Down


By Caroline Hendrie
Education Week


As a strategy for reforming secondary education in America, small schools have gotten big.

Prodded by an outpouring of philanthropic and federal largess, school districts and even some states are downsizing public high schools to combat high dropout rates and low levels of student achievement, especially in big- city school systems. For longtime proponents of small schools, the upswell in support for their ideas is making for heady times.

See Also...

See an accompanying table, "Major Gates Foundation Grants to Support Small High Schools."
Read a related story from this issue, "Personal Touches."



Despite the concept's unprecedented popularity, however, evidence is mounting that "scaling up" scaled-down schooling is extraordinarily complex. A sometimes confusing array of approaches is unfolding under the banner of small high schools, contributing to concerns that much of the flurry of activity may be destined for disappointing results.

"It's very, very difficult to do this well," said Tom Vander Ark, who heads the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's mammoth initiative to create small high schools. "Small is not a panacea. It's a platform that helps you do the things you need to do to help kids succeed."

Whether that platform becomes a springboard to higher student achievement on a broad scale and for a sustained period remains an open question. Even in places where small schools have won strong support, educators are being hard pressed to take what has been essentially a succession of experiments and move them to the mainstream.

"Whenever you have a reform that has been successful in some places and then it's scaled up quickly, with a lot of people who only understand it superficially, there's a lot of danger that some people will do it poorly and that the idea will go down in flames," said Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University who is an expert in small-school design.


'Culture Change'
Well aware of that risk, advocates of scaled-down schooling have been working overtime to put supports in place for educators to combat a host of emerging challenges. At the same time, they are scrambling to put their ideas into practice before the interest and money run out.

"We're talking about a culture change, not just an institution change," said Deborah Meier, the progressive educator and author who has founded small public schools in New York City and Boston. "The trick is how to sustain interest in a reform that requires a generation to complete."

For the moment, that interest is running high.

During the past few years, calls have intensified for reinventing what many education leaders see as an outmoded institution: comprehensive high schools that do a better job of sorting students into academic tracks than of educating all students to the levels needed in today's knowledge-driven economy.

Pressure to act on those calls has mounted as new demands for higher graduation rates and test-score gains have kicked in, thanks to the federal No Child Left Behind Act and state accountability systems. School safety concerns, heightened by the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, have contributed to a sense that the contemporary high school is in crisis.

Against this backdrop, more educators are buying into the notion that less may be more. Private foundations and the federal government are offering aid to spur the downsizing of public high schools. Across the country, educators are taking the bait.

In the 1.1 million- student New York City school system, city leaders have launched a major initiative to phase out the lowest-performing high schools and replace them with small schools. Poised to open 60 more small schools this year on top of the 42 that opened last fall, officials see those new schools as central to a broader push to ratchet up performance systemwide.

Statewide efforts are taking root from Maine and Rhode Island to Oregon and Washington state. Some districts, such as Houston, Kansas City, Kan., and Sacramento, Calif., have committed to districtwide strategies of small high schools and learning communities. In many others, including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, San Diego, and Oakland, Calif., district leaders are in the midst of major efforts to start new small high schools and restructure existing ones.


Influx of Funding
In some places, early indications are that efforts to rapidly scale up smaller, more personalized learning environments are meeting with success. In others, though, ambitions for widespread change seem to be outstripping results. And that reality has some small-school proponents asking themselves questions:

Is the movement growing too fast? Are people jumping on the small-schools bandwagon for the wrong reasons? Was it wise to pour so many resources into scaling up small schools before a consensus emerged on how to do it right?

Two major funders, often working with local and regional foundations, have been helping to spread the small-schools approach over the past four years at the national level: the federal government's Smaller Learning Communities Program and the Seattle-based Gates Foundation.

Since 2000, the foundation started by the Microsoft founder and his wife has pumped nearly $650 million into efforts to establish small high schools that embody a set of attributes it believes are conducive to high achievement. (See chart below.) The foundation stresses that small size is necessary, but not sufficient, to create such schools, and that structural innovations must be accompanied by instructional ones. To serve students well, foundation officials say, small high schools must offer what they call the new "three R's": rigor, relevance, and relationships.

Headed by Mr. Vander Ark, the Gates initiative has fostered the start-up of a potpourri of small schools as well as the conversion of large high schools into complexes of compact campuses. The foundation has poured millions of dollars into small-schools efforts in two dozen large cities, as well as into statewide initiatives in a half-dozen states. It has also financed more than two dozen organizations that are working on building networks of schools based on existing models at a regional or even national level.

By its calculations, the foundation has so far helped support the start-up of more than 740 new small high schools- typically defined as no larger than 400 students-and the redesign of 460 existing large high schools.

"Our goal is not to create more small schools, although that has certainly been an outcome of our early grantmaking," said Mr. Vander Ark. "Our goal is to help more students graduate with the skills they need for work and citizenship."

While the Gates initiative has garnered widespread attention, the U.S. Department of Education has been quietly running a Clinton-era program that the Bush administration has consistently urged Congress to eliminate, so far without success.

With funding that climbed from $45 million annually in fiscal 2000 to $174 million this fiscal year, the Smaller Learning Communities Program has doled out 542 grants worth nearly $275 million to hundreds of districts since 2000. The program is now reviewing applications for its fourth grant cycle, which is expected to yield another 140 one-year planning grants and 144 three-year awards for implementation. The grants are targeted to high schools with at least 1,000 students.

Projects that qualify for the federal grants can fall far short of breaking up large campuses into independent or semiautonomous schools, usually the minimum degree of restructuring that is required under the Gates Foundation's grants for existing schools. Opening career academies, assigning students to advisory groups, and even revamping the schedule to allow for longer class periods are among the changes that can qualify.

Given the expansive criteria, some critics see the federal program as contributing to a fuzzy sense of just what the small-schools movement is or should be about. Mr. Vander Ark, for one, thinks the Bush administration is right to question the program's effectiveness.

"Schools need very clear guidance, quality outside assistance, sufficient multiyear resources, and a support network to draw on," he said. "The federal Small Learning Communities Program's insufficient in all four of those areas."

Still, the program has defenders, including Michael Klonsky, a co-director of the Small Schools Workshop at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mr. Klonsky, who provides technical assistance to many schools that have received the federal grants, said the program's lack of stringent criteria is preferable to the approach taken by some private funders who, in his view, seek to micromanage the change process when they "dictate a certain model-a certain degree of autonomy, a certain governance structure."

"At least the [Department of Education] grant is a public grant," he said. "It's not like 12 rich people sitting in a room and saying, 'This is how we do it in our business ... and if anybody gets in our way, we'll fire them.' "


Staying Power Questioned
Mr. Klonsky is among a group of small-schools proponents who are concerned that the boom in the approach's popularity is driven primarily by the availability of funding, particularly from the Gates Foundation.

"You really have to ask yourself whether these big districts would be doing this without the Gates money coming in," said Jon Schroeder, the coordinator of Education Evolving, a nonprofit organization based in St. Paul, Minn., that promotes new forms of schooling. "It remains to be seen how genuine this is, and whether it's really something that's emerging from the system itself ... or whether it's funder-driven and just sort of the 'in' thing to do."

Whatever the impetus, it's clear that policymakers are taking the small-schools idea seriously. A recent report synthesizing the themes to emerge from seven national conferences last fall on redesigning secondary education concludes that "the concept of smaller, more personalized high school learning environments has moved from the sidelines of high school reform to center stage."

But the report by the National High School Alliance, a partnership of more than 40 national organizations interested in high school redesign, also argues that education leaders have yet to devote enough attention to the many practical problems "of bringing innovation to scale."

Among the most pressing of those systemic challenges is finding enough principals and teachers with a deep understanding of the complex features of successful small schools. Researchers studying the Gates Foundation initiative have found, for example, that many small schools are struggling to put into place strong curricula and instructional practices, in part because their "detracked" classrooms include youngsters of widely varying skill levels.

"To really use this money wisely, we really need people who understand why small is better," said Bill Klann, who teaches 11th grade humanities at the 340-student Vanguard High School in New York. "It can't be because it's a fad. It can't be because there's money. It can't be because there's less kids to get to know in a small school. It must be to significantly change how people interact and how learning takes place."

Retrofitting old buildings and securing new ones at a time of overcrowding and tight budgets pose other serious roadblocks in many places. Altering district practices to support small schools is a heavy lift. Ensuring that successful small schools will thrive after their founders and funders move on is yet another problem, particularly because of the hard time many small schools have in making ends meet on per-pupil funding allocations in some states.

Beyond those and other systemic challenges is the often-fierce resistance that arises from teachers and administrators, and sometimes from students and parents, when districts set out to convert big high schools into smaller units or separate schools.

Amid such difficulties, a split has emerged between those who see value in creating smaller learning communities within jumbo schools, and those who see such efforts as largely pointless.

"There's a big debate in the reform community on whether it's even worth the effort to try to convert large high schools as they are, or whether the only useful strategy is to go to new, small, completely autonomous schools," Ms. Darling-Hammond said. "Those are very different approaches to the change process that seem in many cases to be producing very different results."

To date, no one has conducted a major comparative study on the benefits of converting existing schools versus starting new ones, she said.

Even anecdotally, examples are scarce of large high schools that have seen dramatic learning gains after restructuring into smaller learning communities or schools-within-schools, Ms. Darling-Hammond said. That has led some veteran small-schools proponents to conclude that the approach may be misguided.

"Too many people are saying, in Wizard of Oz fashion, to a bunch of teachers, 'You are now School A, you are School B,' " said Ms. Meier. "The odds are it won't work. I think it's a waste of energy."

Bush administration officials, for their part, regard the smaller-learning- communities approach skeptically. When it comes to raising student achievement, said Susan Sclafani, the Education Department's assistant secretary for vocational and adult education, whose office oversees the Smaller Learning Communities Program, the technique of "taking a large school and turning it into small learning communities ... has almost no research behind it."

Yet other veterans see breaking down big schools as a critical element in the scaling-up equation. Questions about which approach is better are at best premature, some say.


One Best Way?
"I don't think one way is easier or better. I think there are trade-offs," said Joe Nathan, a University of Minnesota-Twin Cities professor who is helping both to start new schools and restructure large ones under a grant from the Gates Foundation.

Although he's seen efforts to break up big schools go bad, Mr. Klonsky says they can succeed, provided that the impulse for reform comes from those most affected. For that reason, he regards much of the debate among elite observers over the best way to downsize as beside the point.

"I don't think all these great ideas about small schools, including my own, are sustainable without community engagement," he said. "It's got to be rooted in people's prior experience and concrete conditions."

In Los Angeles, where top school officials are drawing up plans for smaller learning communities, Superintendent Roy Romer has yet to publicly weigh in on the debate over how downsizing should proceed. But as he reviews five-year plans for high school restructuring drafted by the heads of the system's 11 subdistricts, admonitions about community engagement are being taken to heart.

"It has to start at the school, and it has to involve the school community, because if Superintendent Romer said, 'OK everybody, we have to do this,' it wouldn't work," said Rosa Maria Hernandez, the director for small learning communities in Local District F, a subdistrict of the 775,000-student school district. With help from a federal grant, the subdistrict is planning the redesign of three large high schools, including one with more than 5,000 students.

As debate continues over whether and how to scale up scaled-down schooling, Mr. Vander Ark of the Gates Foundation urges decisionmakers to keep their eyes on the big picture.

"What we're doing today is a disaster, particularly for low- income and minority kids," he said. "We need to come to grips with that."

On the Web

Read "Making the Case for Small Schools" and "Making Every School a Small School," from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (Both reports require Adobe's Acrobat Reader.)
Learn more about the federal government's small schools program, Smaller Learning Communities.

The Small Schools Workshop at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which offers technical assistance to many schools that have received the federal grants, provides a host of resources, including a state-by-state directory of small schools.

"Think Small: Making Education More Personal," t he Winter 2000 issue of the Northwest Education Magazine, was devoted to the topic of smaller schools and class sizes.

The Small Schools Project, which provides support to schools that have received grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has developed a series of guides on designing small schools.