"I had passing grades when I decided
to drop-out. Nobody tried to stop me. Nobody cared. None of
the counselors paid any attention to me. The only time I ever
saw the principal was when I got sent to him, which I never
stayed around for. The individual classes were too big for
students to learn, students should have longer exposure to
individual teachers. If students could have the same subject
teachers throughout their high school careers, this would
allow teachers to get to know students better. No high school
should have more than 400 students max, and all on one floor.
Who needs seven floors in a school?"
-- A New York City dropout explains how
the system is structured for not caring:
In 1949, W.E.B. DuBois said, "Of all the civil rights for
which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right
to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental." He went on to
describe a vision of democratic and equitable and successful schools
for all of our children. But instead of enacting a right to learn
for all children, society has constructed a system with deeply embedded
inequalities that, in many respects, dares our children to learn.
We Dare Our Children
to Learn We dare many of our children to learn in schools
that were designed at the turn of the last century explicitly on
the factory model - schools in which we put children on a conveyor
belt and move them from one overloaded teacher to the next, from
45 minute class period to 45 minute class period, to be stamped
with separate, disconnected lessons six or seven or eight times
a day. We dare them to learn in schools where they have little opportunity
to become well known over a sustained period of time by any adults
who consider them as whole people or as developing intellects. We
dare young people to learn when they are supposed to get "personal"
advice and support from a counselor with a caseload of 500. We dare
our students to learn to think when they work alone and passively,
listening to lectures and memorizing facts and algorithms at separate
desks in independent seatwork. We dare too many of our children
to make it through huge warehouse institutions housing thousands
of students and focused substantially on the control of behavior
rather than the development of community, with a locker as students'
only stable point of contact. While these factory-model schools
may have worked for the purposes they were asked to serve 50 years
ago - when fewer than 50 percent of students were expected to graduate
and only a handful were expected to learn to think - they do not
meet most of our children's needs today.
Institutional
Structures Create Barriers The problem with these schools does not lie with
the people in them, but with the institutional structures that organize
their work. Just as we dare students to learn, we dare many of our
teachers to teach, when they see 150 students or more every day,
precluded by this structure from doing the work that they are committed
to doing. We dare our teachers to teach when they work in isolation
from one another with little time to plan together or share their
knowledge. A California high school student put it well: "This
place hurts my spirit." An administrator in the same school
voiced the dilemma of caring educators caught in the squeeze between
students and the system: "[M]y spirit is hurt, too, when I
have to do things I don't believe in" (quoted in Poplin &
Weeres, 1992, p. 11).
Heavily stratified within and substantially dehumanized
throughout, the factory model school, which we inherited from the
efficiency experts of so many years ago, creates a context in which
many students experience schools as not caring, even adversarial
environments, where getting over becomes important when getting
known is impossible. But school does not have to be like this. Successful
new schools in cities across the country have shown that new possibilities
exist, and we now know that envisioning theses possibilities means
starting small.
Smaller is Better, But
Small is Not Enough Over the past few decades, educational research
has suggested that, all else equal, small schools tend to produce
significantly better results for students. These results are the
most pronounced for students who are typically least well served
by traditional schools. Yet it is important to recognize that "small"
is not enough. While it is true that small schools are generally
more successful than large schools, smaller size is only a part
of the answer.
There are key design features that have been observed
in successful small schools that are conspicuously absent in those
that have failed. Valuable lessons are provided by extraordinarily
successful small schools like the Urban Academy, Central Park East
Secondary School, International High School, Vanguard High School,
and Landmark High School in New York City that have been studied
over many years. These schools serve African American, Latino, and
recent immigrant students from low-income communities - students
who routinely drop out of traditional city high schools at rates
above 50 percent. Students in these schools are now graduating at
rates well above 90 percent, and more than 90 percent are going
to college. Also in contrast to national trends, most of them are
staying in college and succeeding there (Darling-Hammond, 1997).
The ten "features" highlighted in the pages that follow
encapsulate the lessons learned from these successes.
