Business Week has a cover story this week about Bill and Melinda Gates’ small schools efforts. The story starts in Denver, where the Gates folks made a mess of breaking up that city’s lowest-performing school, “a complete failure,” in the Denver superintendent’s words. Summarizing reporters’ visits to 22 Gates-funded schools around the country, the article finds that “while the Microsoft couple indisputably merit praise for calling national attention to the dropout crisis and funding the creation of some promising schools, they deserve no better than a C when it comes to improving academic performance…Creating small schools may work sometimes, but it’s no panacea.”
The article points to some real successes. Some are in New York City, and the article says part of the reason for the success is Gates’ partnership with New Visions for Public Schools, which has been in the small-schools business a lot longer than Bill and Melinda. Mott Haven Village Prep HS [pdf] is one example. But of all the Gates schools in NYC, the report says one-third had ineffective partnerships, many have rising “social tensions,” and suspensions have triped in the new schools over the last three years to reach the system average.
We are never snippy but we told you so. The UFT’s 2005 Small Schools Task Force found too many of the Gates-funded small schools have been started with little planning, inexperienced leadership, minimal input from staff or stakeholders and no coherent vision. Some are little more than shells behind a lofty–sometimes ridiculously lofty–name.
Klein has been hell-bent on his goal of creating 200 small schools, and has insisted that attendance, promotion and graduation rates are better in the small schools that are underway. Maybe. DOE doesn’t care to publish the data. But the Gates people themselves admit some serious problems, and people in many new small schools are scrambling to make these experiments work without the preparation, leadership and support they really require.
3 Comments:
1 Chaz
· Jun 25, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Maisie;
I agree with you on the small schools. Unless you screen the students as DOE tries to do, they are no better than the large schools they replace. In fact, the poor administration and inexperienced teachers of these schools make many of them worse!
Now the real issue. When is the UFT going to the media to complain about it? I’m not holding my breath.
2 Maisie
· Jun 27, 2006 at 10:14 am
Chaz–I think you are in baby/bathwater territory here. Many small schools do just fine by their students and staff. The UFT has been a supporter of small schools and the Task Force made very clear that it was the hasty creation of too many such schools that was the problem, not small schools themselves. Going to the media to complain? Sorry, but that’s naive, and a losing strategy. The media mostly plays the UFT/DOE story as a mud-wrestling match. We have a nuanced story to tell here–we support small schools but demand they have real educational expertise behind them. Want to try to write that headline for the NY Post?
3 Maisie
· Jun 27, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Mike Klonsky saw this post and quoted part of it on his own blog (http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-6z6IhP08cqXp9kfshYQPv87gCfJyFg–?cq=1&p=611), but complained that I didn’t raise the burning issue of special ed. He’s so right. A glaring issue with the new small schools is that they serve very few special ed kids and justify this by saying it’s too hard to do for a startup school. Yo, it’s hard everywhere and that’s why there’s federal and state legislation that says you have to. Why should Klein/Gates get a pass? I attended a small schools conference that Mike Klonsky organized in Chicago in 1989 and I’m still referring to what I learned there. It was awesome. Thanks for setting me straight, Mike.