"School should not be
mass production. It should be loving and close. This is what
kids need; you need love to learn." --a student at
Vanguard HS, New York City
"For the first time, [students]
are seen as important individuals in the school system. I compare
this with my experience in large schools with 35 students in
a class, where kids fall through the cracks." --a teacher at
Vanguard HS, New York City
A high-quality education starts with relationships.
One of the major strengths of a small school is that it can personalize
education by supporting the development of meaningful, sustained
relationships among teachers and students. In study after study
of successful small schools, students compare their school to a
family rather than a factory and link their academic achievement
to their caring relationships with teachers. Successful small schools
typically have smaller classes for students and reduced pupil loads
for teachers, so that the young people and the adults in the school
are well-known to each other.
Of course, restructuring schools for this kind
of personalization might be viewed as too expensive. However, schools
can make great strides toward personalization without spending more
– if they are willing to reprioritize and place relationships
at the core. This is partly because in the United States, teaching
is highly departmentalized and class periods are very short, and
partly because we organize schools to place too many staff in roles
outside of core classroom teaching. Only about 43 percent of educational
employees in the U.S. are classroom teachers, as compared to nearly
80 percent in Japan and Belgium and about 70 percent in many other
countries (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Economic Development,
1995). In the U.S., there are 17 students per teacher (National
Center for Education Statistics, 2001) – and yet, in many
high schools, students still sit in classrooms with 30 or more classmates,
and teachers must juggle the needs of 150 or more students each
day. Even in elementary schools, average class sizes in many cities
are 25 students or more.
Reorganizing
Staff Effective small schools have created much
smaller classes (usually 20-25 students per class) and, at the high
school level, significantly reduced pupil loads for teachers (usually
in the range of 40 to 80) by rethinking their use of staff and time.
One way that schools reduce class size is by allocating more of
their resources to hiring teachers rather than non-teaching staff
and assigning more staff to be regularly engaged in classroom teaching
rather than to roles outside the classroom. Allocating more resources
to classroom instruction means hiring fewer assistant principals,
deans, counselors, program administrators, and other non-teaching
staff, and “pushing in” specialists to the classroom,
rather than using “pull out” methods of organizing teaching.
For example, an elementary school in Boston dramatically reduced
class size by “pushing into” classroom teaching the
special education and compensatory teachers who had previously worked
on a pull out model and providing time for them to consult with
other teachers on their teams (Miles and Darling-Hammond, 1998).
Most large schools have a bigger administrative
staff, and they often hire people to run special programs, such
as dropout prevention and compensatory education, that exist to
solve problems that arise because students are not getting enough
personal attention. These programs and positions rarely solve the
core problems that are a result of depersonalized instruction, and
they become less necessary when students feel that they can turn
to their teachers for personal as well as academic support –
and when resources are redirected to the classroom so teachers have
few enough students that they can spend more time on each one.
Reorganizing
Time Small high schools and middle schools
also reduce pupil loads for teachers by having teachers teach fewer
groups of students for longer blocks of time. One way to do this
is to create interdisciplinary courses. In a Humanities course where
one teacher is responsible for both English and social studies,
for example, he or she can have half as many students for a longer
block of time (usually 70 to 120 minutes). Longer blocks of time
can also be used in courses organized around a single discipline.
In schools that use this strategy, students generally take fewer
courses at a time than in traditional high schools, often 3 or 4
rather than 5 or 6. This approach – which resembles a college
schedule – allows students to concentrate on more rigorous
work, while their teachers know them better and can support their
success.
Trade-Offs As schools reallocate their resources
to provide smaller classes and lower pupil loads for teachers, they
also need to figure out how to provide teachers with significant
time for collaborative planning and professional development, which
is essential if teachers are to provide the support that students
need to succeed. Since school budgets are finite, trade-offs are
involved in the redesign process: For example, schools may secure
more time for professional development by allowing slightly larger
classes or more student time in out-of-school learning experiences
such as community service or internships. Successful schools have
balanced these priorities to create structures which are much more
effective than those in traditional school models.
