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Voices in Urban Education
Archives
Small Schools and Race
VUE Number 2, Fall 2003
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
Small Schools: From Promise to Practice
By Warren Simmons, Executive Director
Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University
> Complete bio
Audio Clips
Listen to each audio clip and read transcripts of Warren Simmons answering the following questions about small schools and race.
LISTEN
[2 minutes, 15 seconds]
How can small schools address issues of race and ethnicity more effectively?
LISTEN
[1 minute, 51 seconds]
Is there more that schools can do to engage the community more effectively?
LISTEN
[2 minutes, 24 seconds]
What will it take for small schools to effect change on a large scale?
Small schools represent a promising reform for urban education. But they will only reach their potential if advocates heed lessons from previous experiments and avoid oversimplfications, recognize that districts matter and that race and ethnicity matter, and acknowledge that success requires political as well as technical support.
The small schools movement has risen to the upper reaches of an already ambitious reform agenda in many urban school districts. In addition to efforts focused on leadership, literacy, research-based school designs, extended learning opportunities, and supports English-language learners, a growing number of urban districts have now added the development of small high schools or small learning communities within larger high schools to their crowded reform plates.
Causes for Optimism
The early experience with small schools suggests that the idea holds promise as a reform strategy in urban districts. A small but growing body of evidence indicates that small schools have higher student attendance and graduation rates, retain fewer students in grade, and have fewer disciplinary problems when compared with larger schools serving students from similar backgrounds. These findings offer compelling evidence that small schools do a better job of fostering student engagement and persistence than their larger counterparts (Wasley et al. 2000; Fruchter 1998).
However, while student engagement
is a major precondition for student
success, student achievement hasbecome the primary criterion for success
of a specific strategy. This is particularly
true now that the No Child Left
Behind Act has made student performance
on high-stakes, state-administered
standardized tests the ultimate litmus
test for schools and districts. And on
this litmus test, small schools fare less
well. At this point, the achievement
advantage for small schools is somewhat
modest and appears to be greatest
at the elementary level rather than
at the secondary level, where most of
the interest in small schools is focused.
The relative modesty of the achievement gains is understandable; the standardized tests are aligned poorly with the curricular approaches pursued in many of these schools. In contrast, greater improvements are apparent when achievement is evaluated by other measures – student grade-point averages or some forms of assessment pioneered in small schools such as assessment based on projects and exhibitions (Fine & Somerville 1998). Moreover, the small but positive achievement gains made by students in small schools compared with their counterparts in traditional schools are a notable accomplishment, given the start-up status of many small schools. These schools manage to producemodest improvements in student achievement as they struggle to acquire and adapt new facilities, recruit and develop new faculty, and develop new curricular and instructional materials.
Nevertheless, the small magnitude of these gains threatens to erode support for small schools as a reform strategy, especially given the pressure for continued improvements in standardized-test scores under No Child Left Behind. Without a means of securing support and raising achievement levels, small schools are unlikely to realize their promise for large numbers of urban children.
Moreover, the history of education reform suggests that ideas tried out in a few schools seldom do well when adopted on a large scale. Urban education is littered with "best practices" whose promise faded when faced with implementation beyond limited pockets of willing and ready participants, let alone districtwide. The challenges of educating English-language learners, students with disabilities, and students performing two or more grade levels behind in reading and mathematics are daunting, even for so-called "best practices." Tragically, these students represent a sizeable portion, if not the majority, of students attending urban schools, and they approach 50 percent of the students enrolled in a typical comprehensive urban high school. For small schools to realize their potential for large numbers of students in urban districts, their sponsors and supporters must find a way to take success to scale.
Fortunately, there are places to
look for guidance. Districts and their
partner organizations can learn from
previous efforts, such as Philadelphia's
bold attempt to transform all of its
comprehensive high schools into small
learning communities, beginning with
the work of Michelle Fine and Janis
Somerville in the early 1990s; the pioneering
work to create public school
choice in New York City's Community
District 4 under Anthony Alvarado; and
the various efforts to create small
schools in Boston, Chicago, the San
Francisco Bay Area, and New York City
under the umbrella of the Annenberg
Challenge. Several important lessons
can be gleaned from these initiatives.
Top
Lesson 1: Avoid Formulaic Oversimplifications
The small schools movement must avoid conflating the form of the strategy, on the one hand, with the means for accomplishing it and the ends the strategy should obtain. Reforms that confuse forms with means and ends often fall prey to impoverished implementation (versus design) strategies, which foster the familiar lament in education reform: "We tried that and it didn't work."
For small schools to realize their potential for large numbers of students in urban districts, their sponsors and supporters must find a way to take success to scale.
Creating small schools sounds deceptively simple, but actually it involves a complex set of strategies that requires changes in school governance, curriculum and assessment, school facilities, teacher selection and assignment, professional development, grade-level organization and promotion criteria, fiscal resource acquisition and allocation, parent and community engagement, student assignment and engagement, and information management and dissemination, among other areas. In most instances, each change at the school level requires a corresponding alteration in central office policies and practices or an exemption from these rules.
Oftentimes, districts and their partners veil the complexity involved in implementing small schools by attending to guiding principles focused more on the form of the strategy than on the means for achieving it and the ends it is intended to fulfill. For example, Philadelphia's early effort to transform its large high schools into clusters of small learning communities was guided by the following principles (Christman & Macpherson 1996, pp. 4-5):
These principles outline the form small schools and learning communities should take; they also sketch some of the means for guiding adult behavior (local decision making, inquiry) and student behavior (active learning) toward a desired student outcome (rigorous learning). But they do not specify the outcomes the reform is intended to achieve.
Moreover, the list also contains principles that could work at crosspurposes. For instance, creating small learning communities composed of people committed to shared values, purposes, and themes could and often does undermine attempts to create diverse settings with regard to race, economic circumstances, ethnicity, and culture. How reformers weigh these competing principles has important implications for how the reform plays out. In their initial phase, many reform initiatives draw on voluntary groups of teachers, administrators, and, to some extent, students – i.e., groups of highly motivated "true believers" – who often share the reform's espoused values and beliefs and possess many of the prerequisite skills and knowledge. The design of the reform might be built around this cohort. But such a design will result in a weak scaffold for educators, students, parents, and communities with divergent values and beliefs, different skill and knowledge sets, and less motivation.
Many of the original school designs nurtured by New American Schools suffered from this predicament. To a large degree, these designs were developed in settings that lacked the kinds of challenges faced by urban schools – i.e., large proportions of inexperienced teachers, English-language learners, students with disabilities, students from diverse cultural backgrounds, and students with major gaps between their current and desired levels of achievement (Berends, Bodilly & Kirby 2002). But when urban schools were encouraged to adopt their designs through resources provided by federal legislation, districts and the design groups were forced to augment what were previously described as "comprehensive" models to address "missing" design elements and inadequate supports for the kinds of educators and students present in urban schools (Hatch 2000).
In sum, clear principles and evidence-based designs are necessary but not sufficient. Clear thought must be given to the nature of implementation in contexts that differ sharply with respect to the capacity, performance, and needs of adults and students, or, as Jolley Bruce Christman and Pat Macpherson (1996, p. 86) put it:
Top
Lesson 2: Districts Matter
In developing clearer understandings and plans for both the design and implementation of small schools, reform support organizations (e.g., national and local school networks, local education funds), funders, and districts must pay more attention to the local infrastructure needed to support change across a community of schools. For public schools operating within a school district, this means examining how central ofÞce policies, structures, and practices must be altered to ensure the Þdelity and ultimately the effectiveness of small schools.
Reform support organizations, funders, and districts must pay more attention to the local infrastructure needed to support change across a community of schools.
While this may seem obvious, the bulk of education reform strategies and research has ignored the role of districts, focusing instead on the individual school as the unit of change. Districts, if they are considered at all, are thought of only as agents of compliance with regulations and as vehicles for the dissemination of comprehensive school designs. In many cases, districts are considered only impediments to reform; indeed, many national and local reform support organizations and networks choose to work around the district through agreements that exempt "their" schools from certain district policies and agreements. And, until the enactment of No Child Left Behind, districts even managed to escape the scrutiny of state accountability systems that measured school and student performance but not the performance of the district.
Left unresolved, tensions around race, ethnicity, and class seep into and distort discussions about factors central to the creation of small schools and their support by central offices and external partners.
These trends are harmful. The work done by the Annenberg Institute's School Communities that Work: A National Task Force on the Future of Urban Districts; by the Council of the Great City Schools (Snipes, Doolittle & Herlihy 2002); and by researchers affiliated with the evaluation of Annenberg Challenge projects (Annenberg Institute 2003) suggests that large-scale, equitable results require the support that a district can provide. Avoiding or ignoring districts results in a weak lever for change.
In addition, district policies and practices now create obstacles that make it more difficult for reformers to succeed, and attempting to bypass districts is far more costly than confronting these obstacles head on. For example, central office policies and contractual agreements that foster high rates of teacher and administrator mobility and that place inexperienced teachers in classrooms with students who have the greatest needs are obvious threats to the creation of small schools and learning communities grounded in trust and mutual respect and whose staff share values and practices (MacIver & Balfanz 1999).
Similarly, districts that continue to allocate resources to schools based on average rather than actual costs for teacher salaries and in categories that restrict local decision making will undermine the ability of small schools and learning communities to adapt their human, material, and fiscal resources to fit their approach to teaching and learning.
As frustrating as these obstacles can be, advocates for small schools need to confront them if they expect the reform to succeed beyond a few favored or maverick schools. This means working with districts to modify and reinvent human resource and fiscal operations to enable schools to choose appropriate staffs and receive the resources they need.
At the same time, district planners must also address how professional development, information management, curriculum and assessment, research and evaluation, and categorical programs (bilingual /ESOL programs, special education, vocational programs) and special programs (advanced placement, magnet schools, exam schools, etc.) must be modified to exist alongside or within small schools and learning communities or be replaced by them. In short, districts must develop a plan for central office units, working in collaboration with external partners such as colleges and universities and reform support organizations, to support a portfolio of schools. To help districts in this endeavor, the Annenberg Institute's School Communities that Work task force has outlined the elements of a new "smart district" (School Communities that Work 2002: Portfolio for District Redesign), and work is under way in several communities to develop and implement incremental and radical plans of action.
Top
Lesson 3: Race and Ethnicity Matter
Urban school reform occurs in school
and community settings where racial
and ethnic conflicts simmer beneath a
surface layer of "acceptable discord"
around jobs, contracts, seniority, leadership,
and control over schools. The
deferred, episodic, and unresolved
nature of conversations about race,
ethnicity, and other social and cultural
forces undermines efforts to create
communities of trust, common values,
and respectful relations within schools,
among schools, and between schools
and the broader communities they
serve (Payne & Kaba, forthcoming;
Fine & Powell 2001). Left unresolved,
tensions around race, ethnicity, and
class seep into and distort discussions
about teaching and learning, leadership,
governance, professional development,
student engagement, resource
allocation, teacher selection, and other
factors central to the creation of small
schools and their support by central
ofÞces and external partners.
In the face of continuing conflicts concerning race, ethnicity, and class, the shift toward local decision making and the creation of small schools can easily be construed as a threat to some group's notion of equity, rather than a remedy. Whatever the stated intentions of the founders of the small schools, communities of color might view with suspicion a reform started and led by whites who appear reluctant to place issues of race and ethnicity on the table. These communities may fear that reforms that do not explicitly address issues of race and culture are doomed to replicate existing resource inequities and patterns of ability grouping and segregation by race, income, ethnicity, and neighborhood. To avoid this, schools need some guidance, supports, and interventions beyond the school or small learning community to ensure results and equity across a community of schools. Moreover, these actions must be informed by direct conversations about historical, current, and future challenges and opportunities presented by the racial, ethnic, and social-class dynamics at work in schools and their surrounding communities.
Top
Lesson 4: Sustained Progress Requires Political As Well As Technical Support
Like the vast majority of the research, the bulk of the discussion about small schools has focused on the technical side of school reform. Yet, many reform efforts come undone, not because of technical flaws, but because of political ones. The political landscape in a district can foster change, or it can undermine it, through changes in leadership, fiscal resources, contractual agreements, and governance. The politics of race, ethnicity, class, region, and other forces, in particular, have as much to do with the struggles of reform in urban areas as do the clarity and capacity of particular approaches.
The leadership of the small schools movement must do a better job of engaging poor communities and communities of color as active participants in the reform rather than groups in need of conversion.
As the small schools movement moves beyond the committed to the wary, it must cultivate a leadership (teachers, students, administrators, network directors) and an approach that can speak directly to the concerns of historically disadvantaged groups (the poor, African Americans, Latinos) and of privileged ones as well (affluent parents, political elites, business leaders, etc.). In essence, the configuration of policies and practices in urban school districts is the result of agreements and compromises made over the course of decades in response to demands from various constituencies. Altering one part of this web sends signals throughout that can activate opposition and support from unforeseen quarters of the community.
One example shows the strong effect of politics on school policies. Under David Hornbeck's leadership, the School District of Philadelphia sought to reconstitute three high schools with a very long and public track record of failure. To the district's surprise, the proposal sparked heated opposition from the local community, including alumni, students in successful programs, local religious leaders, and community leaders, who saw the change as a threat to the ability of these schools to serve as a source of social and political capital for their neighborhoods. Similar racially and ethnically tinged conflicts over school reform erupted in Baltimore, Atlanta, and other urban environments (Stone et al. 2001; Orr 1999).
Viewed through a lens colored by racial, ethnic, and class struggle, dividing large schools into small autonomous schools or learning communities could fragment and thereby weaken the voice of minorities and the disadvantaged, particularly if schools attended by the affluent and well connected remain unchanged. To address these concerns, the leadership of the small schools movement must do a better job of engaging poor communities and communities of color as active participants in the reform rather than groups in need of conversion.
There are good examples of how this process can work, as long as all the participants are willing to engage in self-reflection and accommodation. The work of the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools, for example, exemplifies how a reform effort grounded in the tenets of John Dewey,Ted Sizer, and other white progressives can resonate with communities of color when they are engaged as partners and when their values and beliefs are reflected in the work. Similar interactions are at work in the New Century High School design work in the Bronx and Brooklyn, in New York City.By creating small schools in partnership with communitybased organizations, the movement has expanded and diversified its constituency as well as its approach to small schools. This expanded and engaged constituency will be an important voice in the forthcoming political skirmishes and battles that will inevitably occur as the expansion of small schools threatens existing norms, values, and agreements.
Top
Lesson 5: We Need More Knowledge about Community Engagement for School Reform
For the most part, those involved in community engagement and those involved in school reform have had little to do with one another. As a result, there is a dearth of information and knowledge about the interface between the two and about what outcomes we can expect when these strategies are intertwined. This is beginning to change; the Schools for a New Society initiative, launched by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, integrates community engagement in its education reform design. But the evaluations of this and similar initiatives will do more to advance our knowledge about outcomes than the means by which they were accomplished. All too often, documenting the processes, tools, and intermediate outcomes involved in linking engagement with reform design and implementation falls between the cracks that exist between the work of those doing the reform on a daily basis and the evaluators who stop by periodically and at an appropriate distance to examine its outcomes.
Organizations that blur the line between researchers and practitioners, such as the Institute for Education and Social Policy at New York University, the Consortium on Chicago School Research, Education Matters in Boston, and Research for Action in Philadelphia, are among the best sources of information about the nature and role of community engagement and its growing role in the small schools movement. However, far more work needs to be done and new partnerships and funding streams need to be created to support knowledge development in this arena.
Including Urban Voices to Make School Reform Work
In the last decade, governors, chief state school officers, business leaders, and federal education officials have coalesced around standards-based reform. They have done so with a view of the role of education as an instrument for strengthening the economy and families through workforce preparation. Education reform has suffered from the absence of the urban voice – a voice that would emphasize social justice alongside economic development, and one that would make equity an equal partner with excellence.
Small schools are not a panacea, or a pot of gold, and they will not prove effective for large numbers of students without a lot of hard work. But the powerful ideas underlying the small schools movement have the potential to galvanize and unify urban school reform in a way that hasn't happened before. By heeding lessons from previous reform attempts, reformers, working in concert with community organizations, can redesign schools in ways that offer real opportunities for urban children. If the small schools movement meets its challenges, the urban voice could join the reform choir.
Archives
Small Schools and Race
VUE Number 2, Fall 2003
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
Small Schools: From Promise to Practice
By Warren Simmons, Executive Director
Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University
> Complete bio
Audio Clips
Listen to each audio clip and read transcripts of Warren Simmons answering the following questions about small schools and race.
LISTEN
[2 minutes, 15 seconds]
How can small schools address issues of race and ethnicity more effectively?
LISTEN
[1 minute, 51 seconds]
Is there more that schools can do to engage the community more effectively?
LISTEN
[2 minutes, 24 seconds]
What will it take for small schools to effect change on a large scale?
Small schools represent a promising reform for urban education. But they will only reach their potential if advocates heed lessons from previous experiments and avoid oversimplfications, recognize that districts matter and that race and ethnicity matter, and acknowledge that success requires political as well as technical support.
The small schools movement has risen to the upper reaches of an already ambitious reform agenda in many urban school districts. In addition to efforts focused on leadership, literacy, research-based school designs, extended learning opportunities, and supports English-language learners, a growing number of urban districts have now added the development of small high schools or small learning communities within larger high schools to their crowded reform plates.
Causes for Optimism
The early experience with small schools suggests that the idea holds promise as a reform strategy in urban districts. A small but growing body of evidence indicates that small schools have higher student attendance and graduation rates, retain fewer students in grade, and have fewer disciplinary problems when compared with larger schools serving students from similar backgrounds. These findings offer compelling evidence that small schools do a better job of fostering student engagement and persistence than their larger counterparts (Wasley et al. 2000; Fruchter 1998).
However, while student engagement
is a major precondition for student
success, student achievement hasbecome the primary criterion for success
of a specific strategy. This is particularly
true now that the No Child Left
Behind Act has made student performance
on high-stakes, state-administered
standardized tests the ultimate litmus
test for schools and districts. And on
this litmus test, small schools fare less
well. At this point, the achievement
advantage for small schools is somewhat
modest and appears to be greatest
at the elementary level rather than
at the secondary level, where most of
the interest in small schools is focused.
The relative modesty of the achievement gains is understandable; the standardized tests are aligned poorly with the curricular approaches pursued in many of these schools. In contrast, greater improvements are apparent when achievement is evaluated by other measures – student grade-point averages or some forms of assessment pioneered in small schools such as assessment based on projects and exhibitions (Fine & Somerville 1998). Moreover, the small but positive achievement gains made by students in small schools compared with their counterparts in traditional schools are a notable accomplishment, given the start-up status of many small schools. These schools manage to producemodest improvements in student achievement as they struggle to acquire and adapt new facilities, recruit and develop new faculty, and develop new curricular and instructional materials.
Nevertheless, the small magnitude of these gains threatens to erode support for small schools as a reform strategy, especially given the pressure for continued improvements in standardized-test scores under No Child Left Behind. Without a means of securing support and raising achievement levels, small schools are unlikely to realize their promise for large numbers of urban children.
Moreover, the history of education reform suggests that ideas tried out in a few schools seldom do well when adopted on a large scale. Urban education is littered with "best practices" whose promise faded when faced with implementation beyond limited pockets of willing and ready participants, let alone districtwide. The challenges of educating English-language learners, students with disabilities, and students performing two or more grade levels behind in reading and mathematics are daunting, even for so-called "best practices." Tragically, these students represent a sizeable portion, if not the majority, of students attending urban schools, and they approach 50 percent of the students enrolled in a typical comprehensive urban high school. For small schools to realize their potential for large numbers of students in urban districts, their sponsors and supporters must find a way to take success to scale.
Fortunately, there are places to
look for guidance. Districts and their
partner organizations can learn from
previous efforts, such as Philadelphia's
bold attempt to transform all of its
comprehensive high schools into small
learning communities, beginning with
the work of Michelle Fine and Janis
Somerville in the early 1990s; the pioneering
work to create public school
choice in New York City's Community
District 4 under Anthony Alvarado; and
the various efforts to create small
schools in Boston, Chicago, the San
Francisco Bay Area, and New York City
under the umbrella of the Annenberg
Challenge. Several important lessons
can be gleaned from these initiatives.
Lesson 1: Avoid Formulaic Oversimplifications
The small schools movement must avoid conflating the form of the strategy, on the one hand, with the means for accomplishing it and the ends the strategy should obtain. Reforms that confuse forms with means and ends often fall prey to impoverished implementation (versus design) strategies, which foster the familiar lament in education reform: "We tried that and it didn't work."
For small schools to realize their potential for large numbers of students in urban districts, their sponsors and supporters must find a way to take success to scale.
Creating small schools sounds deceptively simple, but actually it involves a complex set of strategies that requires changes in school governance, curriculum and assessment, school facilities, teacher selection and assignment, professional development, grade-level organization and promotion criteria, fiscal resource acquisition and allocation, parent and community engagement, student assignment and engagement, and information management and dissemination, among other areas. In most instances, each change at the school level requires a corresponding alteration in central office policies and practices or an exemption from these rules.
Oftentimes, districts and their partners veil the complexity involved in implementing small schools by attending to guiding principles focused more on the form of the strategy than on the means for achieving it and the ends it is intended to fulfill. For example, Philadelphia's early effort to transform its large high schools into clusters of small learning communities was guided by the following principles (Christman & Macpherson 1996, pp. 4-5):
- A focus on essential skills, habits of
mind, and bodies of knowledge
needed to become a constructive
member of society.
- A personalized course of study that
is rigorous and coherent.
- Curricula that are interdisciplinary,
multicultural, and rich in applications
to issues and problems students confront
in society.
- Communities no larger than 400
students that allow teachers to know
each other and their students well.
- Active learning on the part of adults
and students, and nurturing and
respectful centers of inquiry.
- Authentic, performance-based assessments
that allow students to reveal
their competence.
- School-based decisions, with teachers
given the authority and responsibility
to govern their own practices and
control their budget.
- The voluntary commitment of students
and adults to the community.
- The full range of racial, ethnic, and
economic backgrounds that are
present in the broader district and
community.
- Input into school policies and practices by parents and the broader community.
These principles outline the form small schools and learning communities should take; they also sketch some of the means for guiding adult behavior (local decision making, inquiry) and student behavior (active learning) toward a desired student outcome (rigorous learning). But they do not specify the outcomes the reform is intended to achieve.
Moreover, the list also contains principles that could work at crosspurposes. For instance, creating small learning communities composed of people committed to shared values, purposes, and themes could and often does undermine attempts to create diverse settings with regard to race, economic circumstances, ethnicity, and culture. How reformers weigh these competing principles has important implications for how the reform plays out. In their initial phase, many reform initiatives draw on voluntary groups of teachers, administrators, and, to some extent, students – i.e., groups of highly motivated "true believers" – who often share the reform's espoused values and beliefs and possess many of the prerequisite skills and knowledge. The design of the reform might be built around this cohort. But such a design will result in a weak scaffold for educators, students, parents, and communities with divergent values and beliefs, different skill and knowledge sets, and less motivation.
Many of the original school designs nurtured by New American Schools suffered from this predicament. To a large degree, these designs were developed in settings that lacked the kinds of challenges faced by urban schools – i.e., large proportions of inexperienced teachers, English-language learners, students with disabilities, students from diverse cultural backgrounds, and students with major gaps between their current and desired levels of achievement (Berends, Bodilly & Kirby 2002). But when urban schools were encouraged to adopt their designs through resources provided by federal legislation, districts and the design groups were forced to augment what were previously described as "comprehensive" models to address "missing" design elements and inadequate supports for the kinds of educators and students present in urban schools (Hatch 2000).
In sum, clear principles and evidence-based designs are necessary but not sufficient. Clear thought must be given to the nature of implementation in contexts that differ sharply with respect to the capacity, performance, and needs of adults and students, or, as Jolley Bruce Christman and Pat Macpherson (1996, p. 86) put it:
[R]eforming education calls for learning how to manage the complex predicaments that arise from restructuring as policies, programs, and people sometimes work in concert, but often bump up against each other.
Lesson 2: Districts Matter
In developing clearer understandings and plans for both the design and implementation of small schools, reform support organizations (e.g., national and local school networks, local education funds), funders, and districts must pay more attention to the local infrastructure needed to support change across a community of schools. For public schools operating within a school district, this means examining how central ofÞce policies, structures, and practices must be altered to ensure the Þdelity and ultimately the effectiveness of small schools.
Reform support organizations, funders, and districts must pay more attention to the local infrastructure needed to support change across a community of schools.
While this may seem obvious, the bulk of education reform strategies and research has ignored the role of districts, focusing instead on the individual school as the unit of change. Districts, if they are considered at all, are thought of only as agents of compliance with regulations and as vehicles for the dissemination of comprehensive school designs. In many cases, districts are considered only impediments to reform; indeed, many national and local reform support organizations and networks choose to work around the district through agreements that exempt "their" schools from certain district policies and agreements. And, until the enactment of No Child Left Behind, districts even managed to escape the scrutiny of state accountability systems that measured school and student performance but not the performance of the district.
Left unresolved, tensions around race, ethnicity, and class seep into and distort discussions about factors central to the creation of small schools and their support by central offices and external partners.
These trends are harmful. The work done by the Annenberg Institute's School Communities that Work: A National Task Force on the Future of Urban Districts; by the Council of the Great City Schools (Snipes, Doolittle & Herlihy 2002); and by researchers affiliated with the evaluation of Annenberg Challenge projects (Annenberg Institute 2003) suggests that large-scale, equitable results require the support that a district can provide. Avoiding or ignoring districts results in a weak lever for change.
In addition, district policies and practices now create obstacles that make it more difficult for reformers to succeed, and attempting to bypass districts is far more costly than confronting these obstacles head on. For example, central office policies and contractual agreements that foster high rates of teacher and administrator mobility and that place inexperienced teachers in classrooms with students who have the greatest needs are obvious threats to the creation of small schools and learning communities grounded in trust and mutual respect and whose staff share values and practices (MacIver & Balfanz 1999).
Similarly, districts that continue to allocate resources to schools based on average rather than actual costs for teacher salaries and in categories that restrict local decision making will undermine the ability of small schools and learning communities to adapt their human, material, and fiscal resources to fit their approach to teaching and learning.
As frustrating as these obstacles can be, advocates for small schools need to confront them if they expect the reform to succeed beyond a few favored or maverick schools. This means working with districts to modify and reinvent human resource and fiscal operations to enable schools to choose appropriate staffs and receive the resources they need.
At the same time, district planners must also address how professional development, information management, curriculum and assessment, research and evaluation, and categorical programs (bilingual /ESOL programs, special education, vocational programs) and special programs (advanced placement, magnet schools, exam schools, etc.) must be modified to exist alongside or within small schools and learning communities or be replaced by them. In short, districts must develop a plan for central office units, working in collaboration with external partners such as colleges and universities and reform support organizations, to support a portfolio of schools. To help districts in this endeavor, the Annenberg Institute's School Communities that Work task force has outlined the elements of a new "smart district" (School Communities that Work 2002: Portfolio for District Redesign), and work is under way in several communities to develop and implement incremental and radical plans of action.
Lesson 3: Race and Ethnicity Matter
Urban school reform occurs in school
and community settings where racial
and ethnic conflicts simmer beneath a
surface layer of "acceptable discord"
around jobs, contracts, seniority, leadership,
and control over schools. The
deferred, episodic, and unresolved
nature of conversations about race,
ethnicity, and other social and cultural
forces undermines efforts to create
communities of trust, common values,
and respectful relations within schools,
among schools, and between schools
and the broader communities they
serve (Payne & Kaba, forthcoming;
Fine & Powell 2001). Left unresolved,
tensions around race, ethnicity, and
class seep into and distort discussions
about teaching and learning, leadership,
governance, professional development,
student engagement, resource
allocation, teacher selection, and other
factors central to the creation of small
schools and their support by central
ofÞces and external partners.
In the face of continuing conflicts concerning race, ethnicity, and class, the shift toward local decision making and the creation of small schools can easily be construed as a threat to some group's notion of equity, rather than a remedy. Whatever the stated intentions of the founders of the small schools, communities of color might view with suspicion a reform started and led by whites who appear reluctant to place issues of race and ethnicity on the table. These communities may fear that reforms that do not explicitly address issues of race and culture are doomed to replicate existing resource inequities and patterns of ability grouping and segregation by race, income, ethnicity, and neighborhood. To avoid this, schools need some guidance, supports, and interventions beyond the school or small learning community to ensure results and equity across a community of schools. Moreover, these actions must be informed by direct conversations about historical, current, and future challenges and opportunities presented by the racial, ethnic, and social-class dynamics at work in schools and their surrounding communities.
Lesson 4: Sustained Progress Requires Political As Well As Technical Support
Like the vast majority of the research, the bulk of the discussion about small schools has focused on the technical side of school reform. Yet, many reform efforts come undone, not because of technical flaws, but because of political ones. The political landscape in a district can foster change, or it can undermine it, through changes in leadership, fiscal resources, contractual agreements, and governance. The politics of race, ethnicity, class, region, and other forces, in particular, have as much to do with the struggles of reform in urban areas as do the clarity and capacity of particular approaches.
The leadership of the small schools movement must do a better job of engaging poor communities and communities of color as active participants in the reform rather than groups in need of conversion.
As the small schools movement moves beyond the committed to the wary, it must cultivate a leadership (teachers, students, administrators, network directors) and an approach that can speak directly to the concerns of historically disadvantaged groups (the poor, African Americans, Latinos) and of privileged ones as well (affluent parents, political elites, business leaders, etc.). In essence, the configuration of policies and practices in urban school districts is the result of agreements and compromises made over the course of decades in response to demands from various constituencies. Altering one part of this web sends signals throughout that can activate opposition and support from unforeseen quarters of the community.
One example shows the strong effect of politics on school policies. Under David Hornbeck's leadership, the School District of Philadelphia sought to reconstitute three high schools with a very long and public track record of failure. To the district's surprise, the proposal sparked heated opposition from the local community, including alumni, students in successful programs, local religious leaders, and community leaders, who saw the change as a threat to the ability of these schools to serve as a source of social and political capital for their neighborhoods. Similar racially and ethnically tinged conflicts over school reform erupted in Baltimore, Atlanta, and other urban environments (Stone et al. 2001; Orr 1999).
Viewed through a lens colored by racial, ethnic, and class struggle, dividing large schools into small autonomous schools or learning communities could fragment and thereby weaken the voice of minorities and the disadvantaged, particularly if schools attended by the affluent and well connected remain unchanged. To address these concerns, the leadership of the small schools movement must do a better job of engaging poor communities and communities of color as active participants in the reform rather than groups in need of conversion.
There are good examples of how this process can work, as long as all the participants are willing to engage in self-reflection and accommodation. The work of the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools, for example, exemplifies how a reform effort grounded in the tenets of John Dewey,Ted Sizer, and other white progressives can resonate with communities of color when they are engaged as partners and when their values and beliefs are reflected in the work. Similar interactions are at work in the New Century High School design work in the Bronx and Brooklyn, in New York City.By creating small schools in partnership with communitybased organizations, the movement has expanded and diversified its constituency as well as its approach to small schools. This expanded and engaged constituency will be an important voice in the forthcoming political skirmishes and battles that will inevitably occur as the expansion of small schools threatens existing norms, values, and agreements.
Lesson 5: We Need More Knowledge about Community Engagement for School Reform
For the most part, those involved in community engagement and those involved in school reform have had little to do with one another. As a result, there is a dearth of information and knowledge about the interface between the two and about what outcomes we can expect when these strategies are intertwined. This is beginning to change; the Schools for a New Society initiative, launched by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, integrates community engagement in its education reform design. But the evaluations of this and similar initiatives will do more to advance our knowledge about outcomes than the means by which they were accomplished. All too often, documenting the processes, tools, and intermediate outcomes involved in linking engagement with reform design and implementation falls between the cracks that exist between the work of those doing the reform on a daily basis and the evaluators who stop by periodically and at an appropriate distance to examine its outcomes.
Organizations that blur the line between researchers and practitioners, such as the Institute for Education and Social Policy at New York University, the Consortium on Chicago School Research, Education Matters in Boston, and Research for Action in Philadelphia, are among the best sources of information about the nature and role of community engagement and its growing role in the small schools movement. However, far more work needs to be done and new partnerships and funding streams need to be created to support knowledge development in this arena.
Including Urban Voices to Make School Reform Work
In the last decade, governors, chief state school officers, business leaders, and federal education officials have coalesced around standards-based reform. They have done so with a view of the role of education as an instrument for strengthening the economy and families through workforce preparation. Education reform has suffered from the absence of the urban voice – a voice that would emphasize social justice alongside economic development, and one that would make equity an equal partner with excellence.
Small schools are not a panacea, or a pot of gold, and they will not prove effective for large numbers of students without a lot of hard work. But the powerful ideas underlying the small schools movement have the potential to galvanize and unify urban school reform in a way that hasn't happened before. By heeding lessons from previous reform attempts, reformers, working in concert with community organizations, can redesign schools in ways that offer real opportunities for urban children. If the small schools movement meets its challenges, the urban voice could join the reform choir.
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