Small Schools III: Bureaucracy + Privatizers = Danger

This is the third in a continuing series (prelude, part I, part II), in which I am looking at the small high school trend, using the current experience here in the Milwaukee Public Schools and the Summer issue of Rethinking Schools, wherein the best school-reform magazine on the planet tackles the subject. Today, a reckoning of how MPS is ruining a good thing, in more ways than one.

The lead article from this issue of Rethinking Schools is Michelle Fine's "Not in Our Name." With a title like that, you can bet that Fine is displeased with the current runaway train of small schools. Now, Fine has been involved in school reform for decades, and has a good sense of what the original small-school pioneers were doing, and what about their work has been successful. In the new small-school movement, she sees red flags everywhere, starting, in fact, with the ignorance of those jumping on the bandwagon: "Maybe we weren't clear," she writes. Personally, I think it's not that Fine and others weren't clear; it's all about the density of those co-opting their ideas. She continues,

The small schools movement was never simply about size.

When committed educators and community activists in New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Oakland, Boston, and Cincinnati launched the movement, they were desperately seeking alternatives to the failures of big city high schools. They fashioned a vibrant, gutsy social movement for creating democratic, warm, and intellectually provocative schools, particularly for poor and working-class youth of color.

That's right: What's important in a small school is not the small, but the gutsy democratic provocativeness. But note the introduction the superintendent of the MIlwaukee Public Schools gave his small schools proposal:

Andrekopoulos' argument for the initiative focuses on these three R's:

Relationships: The idea is that in a school of 300 or so students, everyone (both teachers and students) gets to know each other better than in a school of 1,500. People bond more, the kids feel more connected to the school and, encouraged by these things, the kids come to school more and put more effort into their work.

Relevance: [. . .] Kids could pick something that pushes a button with them, that connects their thinking to their future. In general, the smaller setting and warmer relationships would give kids more reason to think school is relevant.

Rigor: The idea is that when teachers have better relationships with students, when they're showing up for school more regularly, then teachers can ask more of them. They will be expected to do better work and, most important, to graduate.

I don't see anything about vibrant and gutsy. I don't see anything about democracy. It is here where the new small-school pushers are primarily unclear on the concept. Yes, many small schools produce great results; that doesn't mean, though, that cookie-cuttering the process will spread the success. Fine says that position can't be more wrong:

[T]oday, across urban America, we are witnessing a new phase in the small schools movement. Despite many of its profoundly bottom-up ancestors, this new small schools movement is top-down and privately subsidized. It's branded as "systemic reform" but doesn't reform the system. There is an industry afoot to mass produce and export "small" across urban zip codes, without much thinking about how to create a just system of quality schools for urban youth.

This rapid proliferation of mass-produced small schools initiated from the top with private funds--and usually imposed on urban communities and educators--is cause for much concern. Bureaucrats and private funders are undertaking reforms without the wisdom and social justice concerns of the early small schools educators.

Now, you and I both now that bureauucrats + privatizers always = perfection. But Fine doesn't.

Okay, okay, I really don't either. In fact, you have to pretty much be an idiot not to see that top-down bureaucrat-inspired change is pretty much the opposite of meaningful reform. And that's a great deal of what I was trying to say yesterday; when a school's staff recognizes the need for reform, they can take the lead. After all, the school's staff--with parents, students, and the immediate community--know best both what is needed and what best will fill those needs. The staff at my school, deeply resistant to the idea of being split into a "multiplex" of small schools, has spent a lot of time figuring out where we go wrong and how to fix it. We have bought in to that; we're not buying in to small schools. And forcing "reform" on people is not democracy.

The cynical among us see the top-down reform not only as undemocratic, but as a further tool of those determined to destroy public schools. Not satisfied with the poison pill that is No Child Left Behind, and the creeping cancer of vouchers, privateers have seized upon small schools as another way to undermine the strengths of large public school districts. Fine laments,

It breaks my heart to see the small schools movement commodified, ripped from its participatory and radical roots, and used to facilitate union busting, privatization, faith-based public education, and gentrification. To be sure, public education has always been a contested space; educational reforms have always blended elements that were potentially oppressive and subversively liberatory. But educational reforms, of late, have been systematically transformed into political efforts to undermine our most inclusive and democratic institutions in the service of privatization and perpetual inequality. And the small schools movement is no exception. Before "small" becomes the vehicle by which top-down, neoliberal reform dismantles the common good of public education, I say--for so many of us--not in our name.

Um, ditto.

Finally, Michelle Fine notes something that I have been saying for years: The problems in urban public high schools cannot be solely blamed on the size of the school. Craig Gordon, a high school teacher from Oakland, writes later in the magazine that he saw solutions in "supplying the resources needed to address profound social and economic inequality." Yeah, yeah, throwing money at a problem won't always fix it. But neither will any other one-size-fits all bastardization of whatever train everyone else thinks is popular. Fine:

Small schools are not a quick fix, an easy strategy, a silver bullet. As a simple idea alone, they are certainly not sufficient to transform a whole district. Sitting beneath "small" lays a set of inextricably connected commitments about curriculum, pedagogy, equity, sustainability, teaching, and learning. Taken together, these elements can help provide answers to the devastating failures of large, comprehensive high schools in urban America.

Bingo--give me the funds to hire the best and brightest young teachers, keep them for five years, and train the hell out of them in the process, and then check up on how the school is doing. Beyond that, provide the funds for large-scale investment in the community rocked by poverty and unemployment, mobility and uncertainty, illiteracy and segregation, and, again, check on the schools.

Can small be better? You bet. But when done undemocratically, and without addressing the social justice issues pervading the district, small becomes just . . . small.

[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.]