Annenberg Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Center for Collaborative Education, Center for School Change, Gates Foundation, Harvard’s Change Leadership Group, Open Society Institute, Pew Charitable Trusts, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Smaller Learning Communities Program.

Give up?

Each believes smaller is better. Not smaller class sizes. Smaller high schools of 400 to 600 students each.

Many are willing to bet millions of dollars they’re right; $200 million from Gates alone. They have enough data to prove it that, says one, “it seems morally questionable not to act on it.”

In New York’s worst school district, an East Harlem secondary school is one of the city’s best. It graduates 90 percent. And it’s reduced violence without metal detectors. How?

Former Secretary of Education Richard Riley asked top security experts how to improve school safety. Question: Was their top recommendation metal detectors, more police in hallways, or video monitors? Answer: None of the above. It was smaller schools.

I graduated from University High School with 40 classmates in 1952. Then seven percent of high schools had over 1,000 students. Today two-thirds of all high school students attend such schools – including ours.

Smaller schools reduce students’ estrangement. They nurture a sense of belonging. And safety is only one of the benefits.

Smaller schools have better attendance rates, fewer dropouts, more academic achievement and extracurricular participation, more college-bound. Students feel closer bonds with teachers. Teachers with each other.

There are dozens of proposals for improving high schools. Even summaries require something closer to 650 volumes than 650 words. But smaller size is a good beginning.

John Carver says most school boards are incompetent groups of competent people along a continuum from micro-managing at one end to rubber-stamping at the other. All such boards can hope for is to do the wrong things better.
 
Competent and caring high school teachers confront a comparable dilemma. The system processes 150 students a day along a conveyor belt through their classrooms. They must function with a curriculum and classrooms designed to produce the assembly line workers of a bygone industrial age.

It is not teachers’ fault that, like board members, all they can hope for is to do the wrong things better.

They may be the best source of ideas on how to fix this system, but all the community’s stakeholders must have ownership. And decisions have to come from school boards and administrators.

Our superintendent, Lane Plugge, now chairs Iowa’s Urban Education Network. It’s just stepped up to the plate with a new book-length report titled Redefinition of High School – one of the 650 volumes anyone who cares about these issues ought to read.

The individual authors of its 12 chapters each focus on an issue. Waterloo’s superintendent, Arlis Swartzendruber, cites our school board’s contribution to concepts of board governance. Our own Pam Ehly and Bill Dutton propose “instructional strategies” that if read, understood and implemented would solve many high schools’ problems.

Many chapters note the value of smaller schools.

We’re not about to tear down City and West High and build eight new high schools of 400 each. So how can we gain similar benefits? It’s called “schools within schools.” Four teams of teachers in each. Four “schools” of students with their own portion of a building.

Athletic and music groups continue to draw from all four. Theaters and cafeterias are shared. It’s a best-of-all-possible-worlds win-win. Shared facilities and administration mean lower costs. Smaller schools produce better relationships and climate – and more learning.

Dr. Plugge has thrown an added starter into the board’s consideration of boundaries and educational opportunities: a redefinition, and possible physical redesign, of our high schools.

Architects need to know if clients want a cathedral or a tractor barn. So we’ve begun the process of redefinition.

Now every district stakeholder needs to participate in planning what will, hopefully, include the benefit of smaller schools.

Nicholas Johnson is an Iowa City School Board member. More information is available on his Web site www.nicholasjohnson.org.