LEBANON, Ore. - Thinking small is all the rage these days at American high schools.

From Oregon to New York, school districts are scaling down to combat problems that are very big indeed: high dropout rates, sinking test scores and low attendance levels.

Over the years, plenty of high-flying fads purporting to cure such ills have come and gone by the wayside.

But the so-called "small schools" movement, which has a powerful fairy godfather in Microsoft founder Bill Gates, is reaching a tipping point.

Schools with no more than 400 students are in place or starting up in at least 41 states. And some urban districts, like Sacramento, Calif., has converted all of their high schools to the small schools model.

Now, as the small schools movement expands to Oregon and other new places, educators are watching closely to see whether it will be able to make a large-scale difference in secondary education.

Educators in Lebanon are banking on it. Lebanon High School, with about 1400 kids, opened this September as four separate "learning academies," each with roughly 300 kids.

The idea is that those students will stay together through four years of high schools, and get to know the same core group of teachers.

"We'll get to know more and more about them so we don't lose them down the road," said Aaron Cooke, a history teacher in the learning academy that centers on the physical sciences. "That, eventually, will be the real advantage we'll have."

Lebanon, along with a handful of other Oregon schools in Portland, Eugene, Woodburn and the Medford area, got a grant partially backed by the Gates Foundation to go small, a decision administrators made after feeling as though they had reached a dead end.

"We were not serving the needs of 100 percent of our students," said Leanne Raze, assistant principal of Lebanon high school. "We had a high dropout rate, underperformance on state tests, and low attendance rates. We were looking for an upheaval."

Research had shown that going small produced higher graduation rates, lower dropout levels and more students attending college. That's been the case in cities including New York and Chicago.

Some students attended new startup small schools; others, like in Lebanon, went to larger high schools that w Plus, there was the lure of the money: In the past decade, the Gates Foundation has poured $745 millionere converted into smaller schools.

in grant money into promoting small schools, including $35 million for the creation of 75 new schools in Texas, and $20 million in Ohio.

Even the federal government has gotten into the act, with a $142 million grant program that's aimed at subdividing larger high schools into smaller ones. Making the changeover work isn't easy, experts said.

"A lot of schools that launch into this will get stuck," said Tom Vander Ark, who directs education for the Seattle-based Gates Foundation. "They might spend several years debating schedule options or structural options, and never get to the heart of the matter, which is instruction."

A 2003 report commissioned for the Gates Foundation by researchers in Menlo Park, Calif. and Washington found that many of those working with new small schools were running into similar roadblocks.

Startup schools, especially in urban areas, often had trouble finding locations, the survey found, and it was also difficult to find teachers trained to work in experimental small schools.

Researchers also found that some students, used to traditional education models, were thrown by the autonomy offered in their new school. Other missed the wider curricular options available at their old schools.

That has been the case in Lebanon, where during the first weeks of school, some students complained about being "career-tracked" into one of the four academies - biological sciences, physical sciences, information and technology or social systems.

"I don't think it is fair that the ninth graders have to make their career choice now," said Kayla Jones, a 16-year-old junior. "In a couple of years they might not want to be a scientist. High school is supposed to be a time to have choices."

Her concerns are shared by some parents. Jennifer Walter, a language arts teacher in Lebanon, said she'd sent out a questionnaire to parents to ask what they feared most about the upcoming school year. The most common answer, she said, was, "that my child won't get what he needs."

Scheduling glitches abounded during the first few weeks of school in Lebanon, and some students found themselves forced to take courses outside their academies, because of space restrictions.

Teachers said it was tougher than they thought it might be revamp their curriculums to dovetail with the themes emphasized in each academy.

Still, teachers in Lebanon are optimistic, saying they look forward to building new curriculums, to moving away from reliance on textbooks and to mentoring students that they'd see in their classrooms for four years running.

The moral of the story, English teacher Anne Williams said, may be that going small successfully takes a long time. "There is still so much more to be done," she said.

But the Gates grant, and federal money earmarked for small schools, are time-limited. The Gates grants in Oregon, for example, last for only four years.

And it takes at least three to five years before the results of going small really start to emerge, said Deborah Meier, a small school expert who is the co-principal of Mission Hill school in Boston.

"I would rather slow this thing down a bit, and make sure that where we are doing it, people really would be investing in it," Meier said. "You don't want to have to persuade people that it's a good idea, because it will revert quickly to being superficial."

Vander Ark, the education director for the Gates foundation, said in order to successfully go small, schools need four things: help from outside experts, multiyear grants, clear direction from administrators and a pipeline to other schools going through similar changes.

"It is our sense that with really strong support in those four areas, most schools would have a chance to make this transition," he said.

(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)