Small Schools IV: There's a right way, and then there's this way

This is the final post in my series (prelude, part I, part II, part III), 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, further evidence that MPS comprehensive high school pegs are being squeezed into holes of the exact wrong shape.

In my last post, I alluded to an essay from that issue of Rethinking Schools by Craig Gordon, called "My Small School Journey." Gordon is a high school teacher in Oakland, and a couple of years back, he found himself in the exact same position as I am in now. And I think the subtitle of his article kind of says it all: "An Oakland teacher experiences the negative effects of small school reform in the midst of a budget crisis."

After setting the stage with depressing stats about his high school, Fremont, Gordon explains his reaction to the news that his school would become a multiplex of small schools (my emphasis):

I doubted that "small" would solve Fremont's problems, especially since small schools don't necessarily mean small classes. I had long been inspired by the ideas of the small schools movement and had chosen to transfer several years earlier to a small learning community within Fremont High. As a history and TV production teacher in Fremont's Media Academy, I appreciated its focus on learning-by-doing and the opportunity to get to know a relatively small community of students and teachers. I felt the collegiality of a small learning community made me a better teacher.

On the other hand, I did not see large high schools as the root cause of my school's many problems. I believe addressing the gap in educational achievement requires supplying the resources needed to address profound social and economic inequality. Genuine progress means multiplying education budgets several-fold to cut class sizes and upgrade facilities. The promised investment in small school reform did not appear to address any of these needs.

And it didn't get any better for him, despite the news that his school would be working with the local affiliate of the Coalition of Essential Schools; CES are the Good Guys in educational reform. The grant money to do this, of course, came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (Rethinking Schools has a great piece on the Gates money here, but I don't have time to get into it.) He describes the problems as they multiply:

One of our first discoveries was that the "offer" to break up our school wasn't an offer at all, but a superintendent's decree. Our principal revealed that the superintendent had already decided to break Fremont into small schools and had placed the principal at Fremont the previous year to lead that change. I felt this approach contradicted CES principles developed through years of experience that successful small schools "should model democratic practices that involve all who are directly affected by the school" and that "change efforts fail without the support of all key stakeholders from the start," according to the CES website [. . .].

Instead of grassroots reform, some teachers saw administrators chasing the latest gush of green while trying to outrun increasingly harsh state and federal mandates for underperforming schools. As they ran, they shouted orders to teachers: Immediately form design teams with whomever you can, brainstorm, research and write proposals and be ready to open up brand-new, high-performing schools by next September. Oh, and don't forget to teach your current students and boost those high-stakes test scores.

In case we didn't feel the heat, our principal filled our mailboxes with news of [private-school company] Edison's takeover of Philadelphia Public Schools and other examples of the fire just beyond our frying pan.

This same scene has been played out across the Milwaukee Public Schools in the past two years--and perhaps it will be in my school this fall. This just isn't the way to do reform; as we learned in a previous post in this series, the successful small schools are bottom-up and designed not in pursuit of money but in pursuit of community goals not otherwise being met. And in this kind of top-down enforced reform, teachers are left powerless, but with a myriad of questions that administrators would prefer not to answer:

Our administrators trumpeted this as "educational entrepreneurship," reflecting an assumption that public schools should become more like private businesses. Meanwhile, they seemed unable or unwilling to answer many questions staff raised at union site meetings: Will the new schools try to run without counselors? How will small schools offer music, drama, foreign languages, sports programs? How is the process structured for us to have some say in the change? Where is the time to do this mandated forming of small schools? Will small autonomous schools with small autonomous budgets turn seniority upside down, favoring cheap new teachers over expensive old ones? Is this a union-busting technique? How could small high school faculties offer full programs while respecting our contractual right to teach no more than two subjects? Is this grant-driven reform a kind of school privatization?

I have written before about my dislike of TALC, the Milwaukee organization founded by a newly-elected school board member and largest single beneficiary of the Gates money here in town. A couple of years ago at a meeting of my school's department chairs, a TALC representative and the lead small-school guy from the district met with us. We peppered these two with questions such as those above, and at every turn we were met with, "That's a good question. We'll have to figure that out when we get there." And by we, he meant us out on the limb and trying to burn a dozen candles at all 24 ends. Good luck talking us into that.

Gordon goes on to lay some blame firmly at the feet of his union, which--like some other unions I can, unfortunately, name--didn't do enough to stop the bureaucratic movement to small schools, which leads to balkanization and ultimately a weakening of the union.

I emphasized above the lines from Gordon which indicated that a better way to address schools' performance problems would be an analysis of and effort to resolve deep-seeded issues of class and race in America's urban centers. That kind of effort is sorely needed in Milwaukee, given that we are, depending on what study you look at, either the most or second-most segregated metro area in the country. But at least people in Oakland, where Gordon teaches, tried to step up to the plate a little bit:

[Oakland Education Association] took the position that real reform is inseparable from a campaign for full educational funding. It argued that small schools can be an important part of this reform as long as they are sustainable. OEA's high school caucus statement said this means "schools with the resources to offer full programs and to provide educators with respect, reasonable workloads, small classes, and adequate support, materials, facilities, and time to plan lessons and to run the school. Teacher teams will be empowered only [if they have] enough time during the workday to discuss and make wise policies."

Critics of these demands said that's unrealistic, "There's no money for that." But there is money, even in a "poor" city like Oakland. OEA commissioned a study by a local nonprofit research group showing that Oakland has the 18th largest gross metropolitan product in the United States (more than $100 billion), and Forbes Magazine ranked Oakland as the eighth best city for business in the United States. In 2002, Oakland-based Clorox Corporation paid its CEO $31 million, enough to pay for about 600 new teachers or 400 highly qualified veterans (including health benefits, which the district is currently trying to cap). Instead Clorox has claimed the mantle of benevolent corporate citizen by contributing $500,000 over the course of eight years, about 1/500 of its profit in a single year (2002).

OEA launched a campaign to redistribute corporate wealth to fund schools, youth centers, and libraries, which have all suffered from cutbacks and closures. Redistribution could come via taxation or direct agreements with big businesses won through grassroots organizing. The union has worked to put these issues on the public agenda with demonstrations targeting major corporate headquarters and by widely distributing information from its corporate wealth study.

There is no comparable effort underway in Milwaukee, whether headed by the union or not. We have the Milwaukee Partnership Academy, which has brought together typically opposed forces, such as business and the teachers' union. But no one anywhere in the city is really talking about adequate school funding. In fact, there is a debate going on right now at the state level, wherein the legislature's Joint Finance Committee is at odds with the governor over how much to fund schools, with Republicans insisting that four years in a row of lower-than-promised funds to schools is not a big deal, and Democrats (and superintendents, parents, teachers, school boards, and students) saying that, yeah, actually it is. (Apparently, Republicans can find $40 million for pork projects but not for MPS.)

In either case, MPS is not seeing the kind of funds it needs to maintain what it has, let alone create dozens of small schools, each of which will require its own layers of bureaucracy and which, ultimately, will cost the district more per-pupil. Given that the Gates money is already gone, essentially, and MPS is cutting staff and programs left and right, I don't see how we can afford to build new programs. I have also written before how, in the last few years, my school has seen a very minor--like 40 students minor--fall in enrollment. At the same time, we have lost eighteen teaching positions. That averages one teacher cut for every drop of two students in enrollment. This is not right. And if the Joint Finance Committee doesn't come through with 2/3 funding of schools--as the governor wants to do and as MPS has budgeted for--we are likely to lose one or two more. (Aside: You would have to be an idiot to believe that health insurance costs are responsible for a cut of more than 20% of our staff; costs have not gone up that much in three years.)

Gordon recognizes the budget problems in Oakland, and describes how the state imposed an awful administrator to deal with the issues. MPS is not in danger of state takeover, and thank goodness, since it sounds like it was murder in Oakland. But Gordon ties threads together in a very cogent point near the end:

Despite the misuse of reform in Oakland, many of us don't think the problems we've seen here are inherent in small schools or in the small schools movement. But they are inherent in the wildly mistaken belief that small schools or any other reform will go very far for very long without adequate resources and in the unexamined belief that austerity in the midst of plenty is a natural event. These assumptions set up educators to make damaging trade offs, such as cutting electives, counselors or libraries, or choosing to further overcrowd classrooms or overload teachers with unsustainable courseloads.

When school reform is done on the cheap it can become a string of broken promises to teachers, students, and communities. It can also complicate and compromise the position of organizations like [the Coalition of Essential Schools]. Such groups may set out to make valuable contributions to district and school reform processes by providing information and strategies and some of the public pressure that bureaucratized school systems often need to open up any space at all for reform. However, they can also become instruments of policies that undermine their own expressed goals and guiding principles.

And this is what I fear will become of Milwaukee's high schools. At my school, we are already looking at ninth- and tenth-grade classes of 45 students. We are looking at a cut from four counselors this year to 2.5. We are looking at severe cuts in foreign language and the elimination of our technology coordinator position. And these are not uncommon across MPS. If the Joint Finance Committee drops the ball again; if Milwaukee as a whole refuses to commit resources to its public (as opposed to private voucher) schools; if this press for small schools continues without adequate consideration for long-term funding, segregation and tracking issues, effects on No Child Left Behind measures, and more; if we continue to treat urban schools as laboratories and urban (read: poor and minority) children as experimental rats; then we will certainly continue to lose ground to the suburbs and to the world.

I started this series with the Rethinking Schools editors' assertion that "the small-schools train has left the station." I, for one, want off of this train.

[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.]