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Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Small Schools II: Small is Good; Big is, Too

This is the second in a continuing series (prelude, part I), in which I am looking at the small high school trend, using the current experience here in the Milwaukee Public Schools (where I see the oncoming train) and the Summer issue of Rethinking Schools, wherein the best school-reform magazine on the planet tackles the subject. Today, I offer a defense of the comprehensive high school.

[Repeated note: I can praise Rethinking Schools up and down and back and forth, but the fact is that they are a non-profit and can't pay their employees with my kind words. You can download the full .pdf of the issue in question for a mere $5, or you can subscribe (at the same link) for $18, $30, or $40 for one, two, or three years. If you care at all about school reform, you simply must subscribe.]

In that issue of Rethinking Schools, they reprint an essay from small-schools pioneer Deborah Meier (founder of many small schools, including famed Mission Hill). Sadly, the essay is an excerpt from her book The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons from a Small School in Harlem (review here), so it is not available online. But in this essay, she paints a near-unbelievable picture of what it's like to work in the havens her small schools have become:
The kinds of change required by today's agenda can only be the work of thoughtful teachers. Either we acknowledge and create conditions based on this fact, conditions for teachers to work collectively and collaboratively and openly, or we create conditions that encourage resistance, secrecy, and sabotage. [. . .] Thoughtfulness is time-consuming. Collaboration is time-consuming. The time they both consume can't be private time, late-at-night at-home time. To find time for thoughtful discussion we need to create schools in which consensus is easy to arrive at while argument is encouraged (even fostered) and focused on those issues of teaching and learning close to teacher and student experiences [. . .].

In a small school we can dare to experiment without feeling we are treating kids like guinea pigs. After all, what doesn't work isn't irreversible. We can reschedule one afternoon and put a new agenda into practice the next morning. We can undo them just a s fast. changes don't require Herculean coordination or time-consuming bureaucratic arranging. In short, smallness makes democracy feasible, and without democracy we won't be able to create the kind of profound thinking the times demand.
Meier makes a persuasive case, and when I read about her and other small-urban-school gods in those heady days of college when I was sure my teacher-certification program was preparing me to change the world one classroom at a time, I was fairly well persuaded. I thought for sure that if I could find a district that would let me do exactly what Meier describes, I could turn around even the most intransigent of students.

But I didn't end up at that district; I ended up in the Milwaukee Public Schools, after a detour through the suburbs--but that's another post. I ended up at a comprehensive high school, the kind of school that has been mocked in the educational press as a "Shopping Mall High School." When I was in college, I hated that high school, always trying to be all things to all people and failing miserably. It never crossed my mind that I was a product of such a high school, a school that consistently scored near the top in Ohio (and kicked butt in Division I football!). My high school had a diverse student body, in race and socioeconomics. But it was also very, very rich, with some pretty hefty corporate giants headquartered in the district, allowing it to keep classes small and keep teachers top-notch.

So there I was, in this comprehensive high school that lacked the kind of funding I had seen in my own youth, and, frankly, a little bit lost. Luckily, the school was in the process of applying to become an affiliate of the International Baccalaureate, a program I myself had graduated from. In a very real way, my getting involved in the program was an attempt to create that small-school atmosphere; only a select few students and a select few teachers would participate, I thought, since the IB is not easy or for everybody. Yet the veterans also involved in the application process quickly disabused me of that notion: We have to be democratic about it, they said, egalitarian. Any teacher who wants to participate should be trained and allowed to teach in the program; any student who wants to give it a shot should be given that shot.

What's that? I asked myself. Here was Deborah Meier's democratic sensibility among old-fart big-school teachers and administrators. How can we do democratic, I wondered, if we're not small?

It turns out it was easy: If you have a good idea, and a good framework of a plan, you can get other committed folks to buy in. Small-d democracy is shockingly easy to market. And so the IB program at my school was born, and has expanded. We also offer other programs that appeal to the college-bound and not-college-bound alike, and many teachers (not to mention students!) have their thumbs in multiple small-program pies. And it is in this sense of overlap and community that we have, I believe, our greatest strength. Sure, it's a shopping mall, but a weird kind of mall where the employees work at multiple kiosks and the shoppers have many favorite stores. (Okay, that was really labored, but I think you get the point.)

Now, I do not want to paint an overly rosy picture. Anybody with a handle on Google can dig up test scores, graduation and attendance data, and other measures on my school to question the efficacy of our approach. Sure, we're a "school in need of improvement," but we are far from the worst within MPS, and showed gains everywhere except math in the last round of testing (one of these days, I'll do a full-on testing rant), following pretty steady improvement in years prior. I'm reminded here of that old chestnut, the perfect is the enemy of the good: If you expect us only to be perfect, you dismiss all the good we do.

And remember why we suspect that our school may be slated for small-schoolinization in the first place (see the prelude): Our superintendent doesn't much care for our outgoing principal. Imperfect scores or not, vindictiveness hardly seems like a sound pedagogical rationale.

Anyway, what would happen to us if we went to small schools, if we "multiplexed"? First of all, teachers and students with allegiance to multiple programs within the building would have to choose. All those interconnected ties we have been building for the past seven or eight years will be severed. This hardly seems democratic to me. Second, the more expensive of our programs will be jeopardized: The IB, for example, is not cheap (but, given the results, it would be a bargain at twice the price), nor is the health services program we have, which features CNA certifications courses. Electronics? Forget about it, too.

Worse is the third problem: If those programs survive, and I hope they would, they would likely be in their own, separate small schools. This would create a tremendous tracking problem, with elite students and teachers in some of the small schools and everyone else lumped into the others. This is certainly not egalitarian or democratic. Even now, as the coordinator of the IB and a teacher of several of those classes, I still get a share of the regular classes (fewer now that I'm also department chair), special education students, NCLB testing, and all.

Finally, given that the "multiplex" is being forced primarily on schools with high percentages of African American students, what kind of message does it send our black students? You can't handle a "regular" school? What does that say about our opinion of their chances in college?

So, this is my case for the comprehensive high school: We can be democratic. We can be successful. Give us the chance.

Tomorrow: More from Rethinking Schools on some of the issues I raised here, and more.

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