Study Finds Makeup of Successful High Schools Changing
The Boston Globe
By Anand Vaishnav and Suzanne Sataline
November 30, 2003
A new report suggests that the traditional model of a large, four-year comprehensive high school is quickly becoming a dinosaur in Massachusetts urban school districts, where small, highly focused schools are succeeding with many low-income and minority teenagers.
In a recent study by the Center for Education Research and Policy at MassINC, researchers found just nine high schools in the state's urban communities to be "high performing" or "improving." And of those, seven were small schools of a few hundred students, schools with themes, such as the arts, or schools that operate outside of the traditional bounds of districts, such as charter schools or pilot schools. Schools that fulfilled the center's definition of high performing had to meet seven criteria, such as strong passing rates on the MCAS test and high numbers of students who qualify for free- or reduced-price lunches.
The Center found that impoverished high schools tended to succeed when they had small classes, high standards and expectations, personalized instruction, data-driven curriculum, and close community ties.
Paul Reville, the center's executive director, said larger high schools that operate more traditionally can adopt some of those features and succeed as well. But the national movement to downsize those campuses -- backed by millions of dollars in grants from the Carnegie Corp. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation -- is gaining steam because more research is pointing to the benefits of smaller high schools that nurture as well as educate.
"Small is probably more important," Reville said. "To implement some of these success factors in a comprehensive high school is more difficult than in smaller learning communities."
The report rated only one Massachusetts urban, low-income high school as high performing: the 210-student University Park Campus School in Worcester, a public school that works with Clark University. Eight others were listed as "improving," based on MCAS scores, dropout and attendance rates, and post-secondary graduate plans. The public schools were Accelerated Learning Laboratory in Worcester, Lynn Classical High School, and Somerville High. Pilot schools highlighted were the Boston Arts Academy and Fenway High School, both in Boston. Charter schools included the Academy of the Pacific Rim and the Media and Technology Charter High School, both in Boston; along with Sabis International Charter in Springfield.
The report was presented at a conference at FleetBoston Financial that explored, in part, the difficulty in duplicating what works at these schools. Boston has begun breaking up all of its high schools into smaller, independent schools housed within one roof, while similar efforts stalled in Cambridge. And making schools smaller by hiring more teachers and housing fewer students for more one-on-one work is expensive -- especially because many high schools in the state's aging cities were built for hundreds of pupils. Here are profiles of the nine schools, taken from the center's report. The figures are from 2001:
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