It's the principal of the thing (update)

The Puzzle of Boys. From Chronicle of Higher Education.

The study I wrote about last January purporting to show that small high schools are better than large ones now exists in online published form (I don't know since when, but it is dated January 2012)—

"Sustained Positive Effects on Graduation Rates Produced by New York City's Small Public High Schools of Choice", by Howard S. Bloom and Rebecca Unterman (a different coauthor from the one named in the Times story)—and there are some new things to say about it.

The first thing is that it doesn't purport to show that small high schools [jump]
are better than large ones at all; as the title makes clear, it's about just one kind of small school, what are called Small Schools of Choice (SSCs), the little boutique schools devoted to special little interests that have been opening up all over New York City over the past decade or so—the James D. McCawley High School of Chinese Restaurant Studies, or the Academy of Underwater Living.

It would not be at all surprising (as I noted before) if such schools, often dispersed like mall shops through the corridors of one of the vast failure factories they are replacing, get better outcomes than the failure factories do. There's the Hawthorne Effect for starters, which is that when you experiment to find out what makes people respond positively, they respond positively to everything—to being experimented on itself in this nice way, in fact.

And then to be fair the SSCs really do have a lot of good qualities; they're new, and nobody in them is tired yet. Indeed they are enthusiastic about the mission—it's exciting!—and then the support they get from the DOE is very different from what older schools get, because everybody knows what the mayor and the chancellor want.

SSCs, however, don't seem to be the subject of much research in the field. The literature Bloom and Unterman cites is more about small vs. large, and it comes to ambivalent conclusions. Valerie E. Lee and Julia B. Smith, "High school size: Which works best and for whom?", 1997, found that an

ideal high school, defined in terms of effectiveness (i.e., learning), enrolls between 600 and 900 students. In schools smaller than this, students learn less; those in large high schools (especially over 2,100) learn considerably less. Learning is more equitable in very small schools, with equity defined by the relationship between learning and student socioeconomic status (SES).

An important finding from the study is that the influence of school size on learning is different in schools that enroll students of varying SES and in schools with differing proportions of minorities. Enrollment size has a stronger effect on learning in schools with lower-SES students and also in schools with high concentrations of minority students.

But the Evaluation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s High School Grants Initiative (2006) reports that in the course of the study, 

After examining projections for the total number of students they could support through grants for the creation of high schools serving 100 students per grade, foundation education staff concluded that a refinement in their strategy was needed.... The revised theory of change therefore deemphasized promotion of a particular school size, structure, or instructional philosophy in favor of an increased focus on outcomes for high-need students.

For them, small size was often a handicap:

Helping students—many of whom entered with skills three or four grade levels below their nominal grade—become college ready is a major challenge, and one not typically surmounted in 1 or 2 years. Further, with shoestring funding based on their small enrollments and before having a graduating class that could establish a record of college admission, many of the new schools have struggled to build a reputation for success. 

This jibes with what I have noticed as a parent in the New York City school system--both of my kids went to very large but selective high schools, daughter to La Guardia Arts and son to Bronx Science, both insisting that they had no interest in small schools. They were right, too, as far as their own preferences were concerned: boutique schools are charming and the faculty are excited, but there's just too much missing—too little <em>choice</em> of languages, art and music programs, sports, advanced classes.

Then again, my kids were going to do what they were going to do—maybe mediocre, but ready for college—in any case. They are not the target population we are worried about; not "minority" (meaning black or certain flavors of Latino) or "lower-SES" (meaning I think we're poor, but we are never food-insecure, insh'Allah).

But I can't help wondering, if you were going to try to turn one of those failure factories into one school, if you had a budget like La Guardia's (in my daughter's time it was about ten times that of an "ordinary" school), one tough-ass principal, qualified department heads and guidance councillors, and all the richness that you can get out of those economies of scale—you could provide a small-scale environment by dividing it into Houses like Hogwarts—if you couldn't get much better results than the honestly no more than modestly encouraging ones reported in Bloom's and Unterman's study. I know there are some not-so-great, not-so-small high schools in Manhattan that are already getting some decent results. Only that's not what Bloomberg and the Gates Foundation really like; for them it's always more principals.