I don’t have a position of support or opposition on small schools configuration. But, the evaluation of small schools, I believe, must look at advantages and the disadvantages of the concept.

And, then there must be a calculation as to whether the advantage the small school may provide is worth the cost.

If a campus with one head administrator now becomes a campus with two administrators you have increased your fixed cost. In hard financial times that is a reality that is hard to not consider.

As for should the split of a campus into parts be equal? Maybe not. But, the example at McClymonds with one school being dropped may be an argument for equal resources.

Jim Mordecai

“ECP has morphed into a campus that even I didn’t believe possible…”

But, ECP did not morph. Instead there was originally one campus Elmhurst Middle School, grades 6-8 that was broken into two schools.

Do you feel that the other school Alliance is the equal to ECP with the change?

Jim Mordecai

Here’s word that I’ve heard. Linda Darling-Hammond, whom I overall respect and admire, did a study of schools statewide a couple years ago that singled out five schools that were supposedly providing models for closing the achievement gap. Two of them were in my district, SFUSD. One is June Jordan Small School for Equity, which is currently our district’s only official Small School by Design. JJ is consistently the lowest-achieving general-ed high school in the district, with its API dropping year by year. Undoubtedly it has other assets (though as the parent of two high-schoolers in a fairly compact community I can tell you its rep with the kids is not great), but it’s eye-opening to take the lowest-achieving school in the district and cite it as a model among schools STATEwide.

The other is Leadership, a once-sought-after charter that has struggled for some years. A couple of years ago, Leadership went to SFUSD and asked to become a district school again, but it wanted to retain some of the “freedoms from burdensome bureaucratic regulations” of a charter school (mainly a nonunion staff), and that never was successfully worked out. That demonstrates how un-smoothly things are going for Leadership, though it continues to limp along.

Anyway, recently I heard word that Darling-Hammond has started to rethink her admiration for those two schools. Now she’s looking to the high schools in SFUSD that truly have made gains, two primary examples being Balboa and Galileo (once both disdained as ghetto schools, now rapidly improving in performance and prestige). Both those schools are organized around Small Learning Communities. Darling-Hammond visited Balboa to find out more about how that’s working. Stay tuned…

A striking difference between Elmhurst and Alliance is the vacancy rates. Alliance had one vacancy 06-07 but none in the other two years. However, Elmhurst had a vacancy rate of 0 in 06-07, but 12 in 07-08 and lists 4 in 08-09. Small schools, large schools, lacking permanent teachers has to be a problem.

The number division of special education students is unequal with all of the special education students enrolled at Elmhurst. Perhaps it is easier to have the special education students serviced in one school on campus.

I would be interested in learning how under the small schools concept it is decided as to which of the campus schools a student attends. Perhaps every student family in the area has a choice except for those in special education.

The next Stanford study might be able to make statements about the viability of small schools at the macro level but there are a great many details that may not be captured by such a study.

Jim Mordecai

Jessica you have the patience of a saint.

Way to make $250 look like a million bucks!

Great article!