BOSTON MAGAZINE
The Best Schools:
Smart Answers
10 Bold Ideas
That Will Make Your Kid Smarter
Is Your School
Using Any?
by Katherine Ozment, September 2005, p.137 (excerpt)
The
Incredible Shrinking School
CHALLENGE:
In schools with thousands of students, it can be easy for some kids
to wind up lost in the shuffle. SOLUTION:
Make schools smaller. CASE
STUDY: Tech Boston Academy, Dorchester
When the massive
Dorchester High was broken into parts two years ago, TechBoston was
one of the three small-scale learning communities that resulted from
the reorganization. Like all the micro-schools that have sprouted in
and around the city in the past decade-each of which shoots for fewer
than 400 students-it has benefited from its small size. Students and
teachers at TechBoston work together to create programs of study tailor-made
for each student’s strengths and interests. That kind of flexibility
has led other supersized schools to follow suit: This month, Hyde Park
and West Roxbury high schools each will splinter into smaller, independent
pieces.
Proponents say microschools not only give
faculty and staff more autonomy (read: job satisfaction), they also
cultivate the one-on-one relationships that encourage genuine learning.
That certainly seems to be working here. “What we've seen on the
whole is that small schools have increased attendance and lower transfer
rates, decreased suspensions, an increase in graduation and college-going
rates, and an increase in MCAS scores,” says Dan French, executive
director of Boston's Center for Collaborative Education. It’s not
just educational analysts who are exited by the promise of a smaller
schools. So is Bill Gates, who has pledged nearly $1 billion from his
very large pockets to develop them across the country.
