Smaller Schools Called Antidote to Alienation

Ask 11th-graders at Elizabeth Learning Center what they like about their school and they fire off a barrage of answers: “The teachers are our friends.” “We feel secure.” “Each individual gets lots of attention.” “It feels like a big family.” “Everybody knows everybody else.”

If that sounds like the rosy assessment of a group of privileged preppies, consider this: The high school is in a down-at-the-heels Latino neighborhood in Cudahy, 11 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

And it is thriving--primarily, students and teachers say, because it has just 550 students, dinky by the standards of Los Angeles Unified and most other school districts.

In the month since the Littleton, Colo., shooting tragedy, big urban and suburban schools--like the two dozen 3,000- and 4,000-pupil behemoths that dot the Southern California landscape--have been coming under fire.

Touted a generation ago as low-cost solutions to mounting student populations, mega-schools are being scrutinized anew by researchers and educators. Increasingly, many conclude that they are breeding grounds for violence, dropouts, academic mediocrity and the sort of alienation that is widely believed to have led to the massacre at Columbine High School near Denver.

Speaking in southern Iowa on Sunday, Vice President Al Gore called for reducing the size of high schools as one of many ways to improve the nation’s troubled education system.

“When you hear responsible adults saying they had no clue there was a Trench Coat Mafia or plans to bomb a building . . . it tells you that even in our middle-class suburbs there’s a disconnection [between adults and kids],” said Michael Klonsky, director of the Small Schools Workshop at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “One reason is impersonal big schools.”

Many educators say the evidence in favor of smallness is ample and compelling. Research shows that students, particularly inner-city children, learn more and better in small schools. They are more satisfied, and fewer drop out than from large schools.

Small schools also report better attendance and more participation in extracurricular activities. They experience fewer problems with discipline, teenage pregnancy and gangs.

Nation’s Schools Keep Getting Bigger

Though there is no clear agreement about where “small” leaves off and “large” begins, many researchers say that an optimum size is 350 for an elementary school and 400 to 800 for a secondary school.

Yet schools keep getting bigger. Between 1940 and 1990, the total number of elementary and secondary public schools nationwide plummeted 69%--to 62,037 from about 200,000--despite a 70% rise in U.S. population. As a result, the average school enrollment rose more than five times, to 653.

New York City and Los Angeles, the nation’s two largest school districts, have many schools with enrollments of close to 5,000. Under construction in downtown Los Angeles is the Belmont Learning Complex, with an overall planned enrollment of about 4,800. The school’s year-round schedule ensures that at any given time no more than 3,200 students will be on campus.

The school’s current price tag is $175 million, including unforeseen costs to deal with contamination at the site, and district officials warn that the figure could rise.

Derided by some as a “Taj Mahal,” the school nonetheless has a staunch defender in Principal Augustine Herrera. Though the enrollment is huge, he said, his goal is to “make small out of large” by dividing the school into four “houses” of 800 students each, with the houses in separate buildings connected by pedestrian bridges. Within each house would be two or three “academies,” or targeted learning programs that would steer students along a particular career path.

For example, in House I, arts and humanities, students could select one of three academies: visual arts, performing arts or multimedia. Students from all houses would come together for certain core classes, such as physical education, foreign languages and calculus. And the school would be large enough overall to allow for a football team, a marching band and other popular perks of student life.

Over the last few years, Herrera has been subdividing part of the old Belmont High School into academies, with favorable results. Students feel a greater sense of belonging to a social group, he said, and teachers compare notes in an effort to spot students in trouble.

Such collaboration among teachers and other adults appeared to be lacking at Columbine, with a student population of 1,965. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the two gunmen who killed 13 others before taking their own lives, gave plenty of indication that they were headed for explosive trouble, but the adults who knew bits and pieces of the puzzle failed to pool information that might have prompted an intervention.

Could a small enrollment have helped head off such a disaster?

Quite possibly, said Kathleen Cotton, a researcher at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland, Ore.

“In large schools it is inevitable that many students will be marginalized and alienated,” Cotton said. “Some researchers even use the term ‘redundant’ to describe the many young people who are left over after all the teams, clubs and student government slots are filled with more popular students.”

Most students become resigned to being a nobody and keep a low profile, she said. But those who buck the system with attention-getting talk, clothes or behavior can count on being mistreated.

“If that makes them angry enough, and if they have access to firearms,” Cotton said, “they can exact a terrible revenge.”

In smaller schools, students tend to develop closer relationships with teachers and one another. However, size alone doesn’t dictate success, educators and researchers say. The notion of community must permeate the school, and teachers must be committed enough to take collective responsibility for all students.

“Kids need adults,” said Jacqueline Ancess, a researcher at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

New York, Ancess’ home turf, is a hotbed of small-school activity. Some of the 150 or so schools that share the philosophy have performed well, but others have had trouble finding appropriate housing and have been lax in gathering and posting achievement data, making it difficult for parents and politicians to judge them.

By all accounts, one of the most successful is Central Park East Secondary School in East Harlem. The school boasts a graduation rate of 90% in a city where the average is 50%.

Deborah Meier, a longtime advocate who now heads a 150-student K-6 charter school in Boston, went on after founding Central Park East to advise the city’s school board on how to salvage Julia Richman High School on the Upper East Side. Until several years ago, it was the lowest-achieving school in Manhattan, drawing students primarily from East Harlem who dropped out at a high rate.

Over time, the big high school was phased out, supplanted by six new schools scattered throughout the community, including a junior high for severely autistic children and a school for pupils in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.

Each school has its own space, schedule, staff and curriculum. None is larger than 300 students, said Ann Cook, co-director of the Urban Academy, one of the autonomous high schools in the complex.

Heading into the high schools’ third graduation, the “statistics are extremely good,” Cook said. Things also have improved from a security standpoint. In the past, metal scanners were used but failed to detect all weapons. Now the scanners are gone, Cook said, “and there are almost no incidents.”

Working against the spread of small schools is the long-held conviction of many educators that large is better. Many still align themselves with views dating from the 1950s that large schools can offer a broader curriculum and a more varied experience. Districts also tend to fret that small schools would cost more because of the need for more staff and facilities. Not surprisingly, small-school proponents dispute most of those arguments.

Schools are getting bigger in Los Angeles “out of necessity, not out of educational theory,” said Ray Rodriguez, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s director of project management and construction. Land is expensive and tough to find. And unlike New York, he added, Los Angeles cannot put schools in high-rises because of strict seismic codes.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “we don’t have the luxury [of going small].”

Creating a Feeling of Community

But Elizabeth Learning Center in Cudahy proves that ingenuity can sometimes accomplish what facilities planners and project managers cannot.

The school was transformed five years ago when it was selected as one of nine national model schools for the New American Schools Development Corp., a privately sponsored reform effort. A high school and middle school were added over several years to the existing elementary school.

High school students now share the large campus with 1,200 elementary pupils and 980 middle schoolers. The student population is almost entirely Latino; many of the students’ parents speak only Spanish and have had only a sixth-grade education.

Administrators attempt to reduce the scale of the middle school by dividing the children into “clusters,” said Elizabeth Neat, curriculum coordinator. Interdisciplinary teams of teachers work together to develop complementary instruction plans. In the elementary school, smaller class size has helped keep things manageable.

The school’s sense of community is palpable. Throughout the day, students greet siblings, cousins and friends of varying ages. High school students routinely help with math and reading in primary classes. The community feeling is enhanced by a family health center, an on-site child care center and a large adult education program that attracts many parents. Dozens of parents volunteer regularly at the school.

High school students select one of two academies: health or information technology. Most students aspire to college, but the skills they pick up in the academies can help them find work if need be. Test scores have been rising, and nobody gets teased for being a bookworm.

“It’s not a magic formula,” said Principal Emilio Vasquez. “If you scale down to [a few hundred students], you’ve got a tight group.”

Many of 11th-grader Blanca Hernandez’s friends from the area chose to attend Bell High School, partly because it is a big school with a strong football team. But they complain of the lack of attention from teachers and counselors.

“Here we can talk to a counselor like a friend,” said Hernandez, 16. “If your grades are dropping, they ask what’s wrong. It helps to know that somebody cares.”

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