High Schools on a Human Scale: How Small Schools Can Transform American Education
Toch, Thomas (2003).
Boston: Beacon Press; 141 pages. $15. ISBN 080703245x.
Since 2001, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested more than $700 million in high school reform efforts focused primarily in urban districts around the United States (Miner 2005). With the funding has come much publicity highlighting the merits of small high schools – defined by the Foundation as schools with fewer than 400 students – and emphasizing the inability of the nation’s large, comprehensive public high schools to meet the needs of most students today. What the majority of urban comprehensive high schools lack, the Gates Foundation asserts, is the means to deliver the essential “three R’s” of the 21st Century: rigor, relevance and relationships. In High Schools on a Human Scale, the publication of which was underwritten by the Gates Foundation, education writer Thomas Toch adds his voice to the litany against large high schools, making the case for a more intimate secondary education that connects students with the skills, motivation and support they need to succeed in college and in life. Toch has become a leading proponent of school reform, having written about education policy and trends for U.S. News and World Report throughout the 1990s and served as writer-in-residence at the National Center on Education and the Economy. This is his second book on the subject, and it wholeheartedly supports the Gates Foundation’s mission to replace the nation’s comprehensive high schools with small, specialized schools. It serves to augment the promotional efforts of the Foundation more than to provide a critical, research-based perspective on the high school reform debate. Teachers in training and experienced educators interested in small schools, members of school boards, parents of high school students, school facility designers, and others with an interest in school reform trends will appreciate the book for its emphasis on practice and its clear writing. In his introduction, Toch describes how American high schools ballooned throughout the 20th Century in the name of efficiency, and how isolated small-school reform successes in the 1980s inspired the current effort that has gained widespread support, thanks to an influx of funding and research. The heart of the book is comprised of separate profiles of small high schools that have received Gates Foundation funding: Julia Richman Education Complex in New York City; Urban Academy, located within the Julia Richman complex; High Tech High in San Diego, California; The Met in Providence, Rhode Island; and Minnesota New Country School in Henderson, Minnesota. The profiles highlight ways in which each individual small school approach has produced results around student and teacher satisfaction, educational achievement and the creation of real-world opportunities that help students find their talents and build relationships with adults in their communities. In an epilogue, Toch reiterates the essential qualities of successful small high schools and makes the case for “Scaling Up” school reform efforts. The appendix lists model high schools nationwide. The case for connecting American high school students with their abilities, their teachers and their communities has been convincingly made by many in recent years, including environmental psychologist Herb Childress (2003), and educator Dennis Littky (2004), whose book, The Big Picture: Education is Everyone’s Business, describes in detail the progressive philosophy and approach of The Met, one of the schools Toch profiles. But the concept that small schools can help students achieve their potential by becoming an indispensable part of a close-knit community is nothing new. In response to the high school consolidation drive of the 1960s, researchers Roger Barker and Paul V. Gump conducted a series of studies in urban and rural areas of the country to find out whether student experiences in large high schools and small high schools differed significantly. They found that students in small schools generally had richer experiences:
Good facilities provide good experiences only if they are used. The educational process … thrives on participation, enthusiasm, and responsibility. Our findings and our theory posit a negative relationship between school size and individual student participation. What seems to happen is that as schools get larger and settings inevitably become more heavily populated, more of the students are less needed; they become superfluous, redundant. … The data of this research and our own educational values tell us that a school should be sufficiently small that all of its students are needed for its enterprises. A school should be small enough that students are not redundant (Barker and Gump 1964, 202).
Ensuring that students are recognized at school and providing meaningful opportunities for engagement remain classic themes in the school reform literature. In his foreword to High Schools on a Human Scale, Thomas Vander Ark, executive director of the Gates Foundation’s education initiatives, also speaks to a different theme that is increasingly evident in the school-reform literature today. He states that the Foundation’s priorities in promoting small schools are based on “a conviction that only by redesigning the American high school can we prepare students, particularly African American and Hispanic students, for today’s demanding world.”
Of the downsized and personalized schools Toch profiles, only the schools in the Julia Richman Educational Complex in New York City appear to directly address the needs of students of color. Richman, an inner-city comprehensive school that was closed after years of decline, was transformed into six successful small schools that now attract students from around the city. The small high school movement has tended to appeal to districts grappling with increasing minority student populations, declining achievement and threats to funding – but reform does not always lead to regeneration and success for such schools. It would have been useful if Toch had included at least one case in which small school reform failed, by way of drawing lessons for school administrators, teachers and parents interested in changing underperforming high schools.
Manual High School in Denver, Colorado, is one such case. Manual was one of the first schools to receive money from the Gates Foundation for a small school makeover – more than $1 million over four years, from 2001 to 2005. The student population of the large, historic high school had changed dramatically after mandatory busing ended in the mid-1990s, shifting from 42 percent African-American and 14 percent Latino to 43 percent Latino within one year of becoming a neighborhood school (Sherry 2006). In an attempt to deal with declining achievement, the school’s administration appealed to Gates for funding to divide the institution into three separate schools under one roof – without consulting the students or teachers. The funding was granted, and three new principals were hired to run the schools.
Unlike the six schools in the Julia Richman Education Complex – which were developed as physically distinct, self-contained entities that share select “public” spaces, such as the library – Manual did not provide sufficient physical or economic resources to meet the needs of students and teachers in the new small schools. The Gates Foundation and its local partner through which the grant funds were channeled, the Colorado Children’s Campaign, had no oversight of the project, and Denver Public Schools had no formal role in the transformation, as the grant funds had gone to Manual directly. The small school principals rejected coaching; families pulled their children out of the schools, and programs dried up. By 2005, the dropout rate for Manual as a whole exceeded 75 percent. The building and its three schools were closed in 2006.
Manual is not the only school that failed to thrive after receiving Gates Foundation funding for small-school reform, and its story is instructive, pointing to a need for greater oversight of grant funds and increased requirements for funded schools, as well as community participation in the transformation of existing schools, especially given the Foundation’s emphasis on supporting the success of students of color. In books such as Toch’s that promote the merits of small-school reform, some attention to the contextual and human factors that can contribute to project failure is important.
Toch does address the need for careful planning and the development of reliable, responsible partnerships between administrators and teachers in small high schools, and his interviews with teachers and students occasionally reveal the need to rethink school concepts that are not working as well in practice as they were expected to – especially at High Tech High. But the overall impression the book gives is that smaller is always better. Critical consideration of what it takes to create small high schools with “rigor, relevance and relationships” in different places will be an essential next step for the Gates Foundation, as more information about successes and challenges at funded schools becomes available.
Barker, Roger G. (1964). Big School, SmallSchool: High School Size and Student Behavior. Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Childress, Herb (2000). Landscapes of Betrayal, Landscapes of Joy: Curtisville in the Lives of Its Teenagers. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Littky, D. (2004). The Big Picture: Education is Everyone's Business. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Miner, B. (2005). “The Gates Foundation and Small Schools.” Rethinking Schools 19(4): np.
Sherry, A. (2006). “Manual's Slow Death—THE BOUNDARIES: High School's Test Scores Dropped with the End of Forced Busing. THE BREAKUP: When Campus Split into Three Smaller Schools, Infighting Followed. THE MONEY: Private Funds Poured in, but Teachers Say DPS Offered Little Support.” The Denver Post. Denver:A-01.
Reviewer Information
Darcy Varney is a student in the Ph.D. Program in Design and Planning at the University of Colorado, College of Architecture and Planning. Her background includes work in journalism, nonprofit development and early childhood education, and she holds a Master of Education degree from Loyola College in Maryland. Her current research focuses on youth participation in community planning, youth-led development and the planning of child-friendly cities.