Gatesbucks and miracles vs. fads

A July issue of the Seattle Weekly took an unusually clear-eyed look at the latest education “miracle,” small schools, and the role of private funders in promoting education trends.

Of course I know that small, more-personalized schools work best for some kids. That's one benefit some families go private to seek out. But there are tradeoffs, nuances, complications and downsides. And the empirical results don’t yet show clear success.

The Weekly focused on Mountlake Terrace High School in the Edmonds School District outside Seattle, a large school that deployed $833,000 in Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funding to break up into five small schools. The Gates Foundation is putting $1 billion into projects like this nationwide.
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Some excerpts from the Weekly article:

As the year passed, some real benefits became obvious. The smaller schools allowed closer tracking of individual students. …

There were, however, some unforeseen complications. A lot of programs had to be duplicated from school to school, and resources got overbooked. "All the math teachers used to share rooms, calculators, math tiles," says [math teacher Andi] Nofziger. "Now that we're broken up, we're spread throughout the building and we have to buy five sets of things." Students say they felt hemmed in by being limited to just one small school while they could see other opportunities around them. …

And there was ongoing tension between the Gates Foundation and the schools' staff. The foundation wanted strict adherence to its plan for change. But it was too rigid to work, [former vice principal Steven] Gering says. "It's clear that the Gates Foundation had a clear agenda. For instance—not allowing kids to switch from one school to another or to take electives out of their own school. They wanted pure small schools." …

In addition, some teachers felt the Gates Foundation was sending a not-too-subtle message that the teachers were the real problem with high schools. …

Over the summer of 2004, almost one-quarter of the staff &mdash 23 teachers out of 100 &mdash decided not to come back to the school, well above the typical turnover rate of 5 percent to 10 percent per year. There's disagreement about why so many faculty left, but some of those who left say the conversion experience drove them out. "A number of us bailed," says [former teacher Heather] Helman, who now teaches in Lake Stevens. "I don't think that anyone understood how much work it would take. …

[T]he Gates Foundation is generally dismayed by the early indications. "In Washington state, we've seen limited progress in high-school indicators, attendance, grade promotion rate, achievement levels," says [Gates Foundation small-schools head Tom] Vander Ark. "It has been very slow, very different from what we expected." Those problems are mirrored across the country. "We can conclude," he concedes, "that for large, struggling high schools, conversion is a very difficult entry point."

Here in SFUSD, small schools haven’t taken off like a rocket yet. There are certainly students thriving in the district’s official small high school, June Jordan School for Equity, and its small middle school, Aim High &mdash which grew out of a highly popular and successful longtime summer program. But in the most recent enrollment application round, neither was in notable demand.

A number of incoming middle-schoolers who had applied only to popular Hoover Middle School &mdash a 1,285-student school with an array of programs, including a stellar music department &mdash were unhappily assigned to Aim High. With no band, orchestra or chorus, Aim High was the exact opposite of what many of those applicants wanted. (At least some are known to have won spots at Hoover during the wait-pool process.) Some incoming 9th-graders were startled to be assigned to June Jordan, never having heard of it. Clearly, both schools had slots open after enrollment requests were processed.

Again, I recognize that small schools are a better environment for some (perhaps many) kids. What I question is whether they're being hyped as a miracle and, if so, whether that's a good thing. And is this the most effective way to spend $1 billion (counting only the Gates investment &mdash there are other funders too)?

Meanwhile, a few commentators have questioned whether private money is funding flash-in-the-pan education fads, noting that the small-schools trend is designed to reverse a now-bygone fad pushed by private funds &mdash large, comprehensive high schools. Education columnist Richard Rothstein looked at that issue in a 2002 column, and the question is still on the table. From Rothstein:

In New York City, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is helping to break up large high schools into smaller units. The idea is that adolescents need stable relationships with teachers who understand each student's intellectual and personal problems. Some New York educators already valued small schools and had developed about 100 of them before the Gates Foundation came to call, so private money reinforced a priority that many in the system had already embraced.

But another foundation helped to create the problem that Gates now hopes to solve. Giant high schools were promoted 40 years ago, when the Carnegie Corporation sponsored a campaign by James B. Conant, a former president of Harvard University, to consolidate small high schools. Dr. Conant wanted schools to be large enough to offer both an elite curriculum to students who scored well on standardized tests and a large variety of vocational and less demanding courses to the rest.

Many urban schools were already large before the Carnegie campaign, but the rise of large schools was accelerated by the foundation's influence.

I’ll look at another question about Gates money in another post.
&mdash Caroline

Tags: Small Schools, Gates Foundation