Is Smaller Perhaps Better?

Mary Perry dreamed of attending one of Chicago’s big public schools–a place like prestigious Whitney Young High, with its student body of 2,200. Instead she ended up at a tiny school with only 140 students and a funny name: Best Practices High. And now, to her surprise, she couldn’t be happier. Few people in town know her school’s name–but everyone at school knows hers. Once a shy student with low test scores, Perry, 16, has won admission to the National Honor Society. Her high school, she says, is “small, but it’s like a big extended family.”

Across the U.S., education reformers have begun promoting smaller schools as a remedy for the alienation that many students experience when they are tossed into one of the college-size, 2,000-to-4,000-student behemoths often found these days in major cities and their suburbs. Smaller schools not only allow students and teachers to know one another better; they also have less crowding and competition for membership in bands, student councils, sports teams and other extracurricular activities through which students express and define themselves.

At the big schools, hundreds of students compete for the relatively few spots on the elite teams and squads, which can make everyone else feel like nobodies. And that feeling, as events have shown, can contribute to private rage and public tragedy. “We want to make sure the kids feel they mean something, that they don’t get lost,” says David Pava, principal of James Logan High School, home to 4,180 students in Union City, Calif. “That’s particularly difficult at a large school.” (Columbine High in Littleton, Colo., has 1,965 students. Heritage High in Conyers, Ga., has 1,300.) Vice President Gore last week urged school districts to stop “herding all students…into overcrowded, factory-style high schools [where] it becomes impossible to spot the early warning signs of violence, depression or academic failure.”

The smaller-school movement is already well under way in Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles, which in recent years have opened high schools with student populations of 500 or fewer–in some cases splitting existing campuses into several “schools within a school.” Studies show that students make better grades in smaller schools. They are less likely to be involved in fights or gangs because they know someone is always watching. They are less embarrassed to discuss problems with teachers. They have better attendance, lower dropout rates and more participation in extracurricular activities. “It doesn’t matter what category you measure,” says Kathleen Cotton, a researcher at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland, Ore. “Things are better in smaller environments. Shy kids, poor kids, the average athletes–they all are made to feel like they fit in.”

Chicago’s Best Practices High, which has been open just three years, has seen only two fights, in part because students report bad behavior to teachers. Last year when freshmen decorated lockers with graffiti, older students tattled before the paint could dry. When one student showed up with unkempt hair and satanic messages on his shirt, students reported him as well. Teachers saw his costume as a symptom of other problems, which they got him to discuss.

Smaller schools–if equipped with full facilities and sports teams–can cost more per student than larger schools. But there’s also a human cost for the impersonal institutions in which so many adolescents are left adrift on their own.

–By Nichole Christian. With reporting by Maggie Sieger/Chicago