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]

It's the principal of the thing

The New York education world is buzzing with the news of a study ostensibly showing that small high schools are better than big ones, carried out by Gordon Berlin and Howard Bloom of a nonprofit firm called MDRC, funded by the Gates Foundation, and "proving" the correctness of the path followed by the Bloomberg administration over the past ten years, of shutting down those awful old failure mills and then filling the buildings with these little boutique schools, the School of Armenian Studies, the Renaissance School for Future Hipsters, the Cupcake Academy, where all the math and science classes are keyed to understanding the life cycle of the cupcake,  and so on.

And does it, actually? There's no telling in any proper sense, [jump]