Thinking small

It all started with a band of frustrated parents. More than 1,000 of their children were crammed into schools built for 600. Teachers had to rove from room to room.

One mother's third-grade son had trouble spelling his own name. And consistently, their children scored lower on standardized tests than children from the wealthier parts of town - where schools were significantly smaller.

Eventually, 100 people showed up at a meeting to put the new superintendent in Oakland, Calif., on the spot. And just two months later, in the spring of 2000, the district approved a plan to build 10 schools - with no more than 500 students - in their low-income neighborhoods of Latino, Asian-American, and African-American families. Voters passed a $300 million bond to pay for the initiative.

Suddenly, Oakland found itself in the forefront of a reform movement.

Researchers have been saying for years that large, impersonal schools can impede the kinds of support and events that lead to academic success: teachers who know children well, smaller classes, even the chance to participate informally in extracurricular activities. Make schools smaller, they say, and much will improve, including student performance.

Suburban districts started questioning their megaschools after a spate of school shootings heightened concerns about

teenage alienation. But it's primarily urban districts, swimming upstream to address racial and economic achievement gaps, that have latched on to small schools' potential for making education more equitable.

"This is the civil rights movement of the 21st century," says Michael Klonsky, director of the Small Schools Workshop at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Small schools help poor and minority children most, he says, because "the neediest kids find support in smaller, personalized environments where they're known not just for their deficits ... but for their assets."

A few recent signs of the momentum:

• The Florida Legislature voted earlier this year to cap enrollment in new high schools at 900 students, middle schools at 700, and elementary at 500.

• The US Department of Education has given $170 million in local grants for small-school initiatives in the past two years.

• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has poured more than $235 million into such efforts in public school districts nationwide, including Chicago, Boston, and Oakland (which gets the bulk of a regional $15.7 million 5-year grant).

• During the past 12 years, Philadelphia has broken up 22 large high schools into more than 100 learning communities.

Money can accelerate the pace of change in schools, but advocates of small schools know it is not a panacea. "If the relationships are not healthy, no amount of throwing money at the problem is going to help," says Steve Jubb, executive director of the Oakland-based Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools (BayCES).

Many of Oakland's 55,000 students certainly have a long way to go in terms of test scores. In 1999-2000, for example, about 70 percent of children in Grades 2 to 5 scored below the national average on reading tests, compared with about 55 percent in California overall. There was a similar gap in math.

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