The staff of BEST High School–eight people in all–was seated at a circle of desks in an empty classroom, five minutes into its weekly planning discussion, when parent Cornel Jackson walked in unannounced.
Jackson was concerned about his son Kevin, a freshman at the new South Side high school. Immediately he was offered a desk and the circle became larger. For the next 40 minutes, the topic of conversation was Kevin and what the staff could do to help.
This scenario represents the ideal behind the “small schools” movement: Fewer students, a safe environment and increased attention from teachers equals better academic performance or at least a lower dropout rate.
Achieving those results takes time, however. Five new public high schools that opened in the fall as the first in a wave of small schools planned for Chicago have seen both progress and problems in their first year.
Housed on the campuses of three large, troubled high schools, the five new schools–Phoenix Academy at Orr, the School of the Arts and the School for Entrepreneurship at South Shore, and the Chicago Discovery Academy and Bowen Environmental Studies Team (BEST) at Bowen–are designed as autonomous learning communities with their own budgets, staff and curricula.
Their enrollment may not exceed about 400 students, which is three to four times less than that of an average neighborhood high school.
In the early going, educators have found hope in small successes. For Joann Podkul, the lead teacher at BEST, the impromptu meeting with Jackson was significant and “a reminder of what we hoped to do.” But teachers and others say they also are contending with a wide range of problems.
Topping the list of complaints is insufficient money and support from middle-tier bureaucrats in the school district. Longer work hours and a lack of autonomy are others, as well as philosophical clashes between teachers committed to new approaches and those with a more traditional mindset.
With such small teaching staffs, the departure of even one teacher can be hugely disruptive. And problems common to many city schools–unruly students, lack of security–persist in smaller schools, too.
Jackson said he likes the close contact he’s had with his son’s teachers at BEST and is glad his son is enrolled there, but has his doubts. Recently, he said, his son was attacked by gang members from the larger high school after class.
“It’s still Bowen to me,” he said. “It’s still the same school. … Bowen is like the backbone and they are just sectioning it off into different schools, but basically it’s still Bowen.”
School officials say some growing pains are to be expected. They hope complaints about lack of support will decrease next year. Efforts are under way to accommodate the needs of small schools based on feedback they have received.
“Chicago is really leading the nation in trying to do this,” said Jeanne Nowaczewski, head of the office of small schools. “You need to remember, the beginning is always the most challenging part.”
Teachers at Best Practices High School, a pioneering small school that opened in 1996 on the West Side, say its collaborative and caring approach has proved effective. Although student test scores still are not ideal, the school has high attendance rates and most of its seniors graduate–both of which are rare for city high schools.
The success of the new push is important not just to Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan, who has gambled heavily on the small-schools concept, but to administrators across the country. Denver, Indianapolis, Boston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee and Atlanta are among the cities either starting new small schools or struggling with their first few years of operation.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has poured more than $400 million into the creation of small schools in the last three years, and two grants jumpstarted the movement in Chicago. Tom Vander Ark, the foundation’s executive director of educational programs, cautions that the schools must be given time to work.
Even then there is no guarantee, advocates say, that a small school will succeed. A recent report commissioned by the foundation suggests that a clear mission, a competent staff and leader, safety and a good curriculum are crucial.
A visit to Phoenix Academy at Orr High School in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Humboldt Park reveals some of the frustrations.
The idea for the school is to develop students who can have a positive impact in their community, but on this day most students seem more interested in goofing off. Even with class in session, they roam the hallways, paying little or no attention to teachers.
The academy, which also has a JROTC component, tore down its classroom walls to facilitate work on academic projects. But the outcome seems to be lots of noise and a distracting environment.
As students swirled around administrator Michael Farley, he noted that officials have not yet implemented lessons on fostering student leadership–an important priority. They are on the agenda for next year.
Kenneth Mathis, 18, a senior, said he was promised a good education before he enrolled. Instead, he said, the most important lesson he has learned is how to “fall in and fall out”–military terms for lining up and dispersing.
Still, the school is an improvement over Orr, he said.
“There are too many kids” at the bigger school, Mathis said. “They’re just noisy, very noisy and too many fights.”
English teacher Sheila Noonen said that after the year ends she will leave the school, following two other teachers who left in the middle of the year.
But Noonen still had praise for the small-schools concept.
“It gives the power back to the teachers as far as designing an educational program that makes sense to them,” she said. “Also, it gives the students a right to choose and therefore take control of their education. However, it’s been poorly implemented, poorly managed and poorly maintained.”
For example, she said, the textbooks teachers ordered last summer did not arrive until the middle of the year.
“That seems like a really silly little thing, but the impression immediately on the student is, `I don’t have books. This is not important.'”
Richard Miller, another administrator, said the school struggled in its first year but blamed it partly on district bureaucrats, contending that they “devour little ideas.”
“Next year I feel real confident that we’ll be closer to our goals,” Miller said.
Nowaczewski acknowledged that such problems are not uncommon among the new small schools. The second year should be easier, she said, with less time spent on logistical issues and more on teaching and methodology. Many of the schools’ teachers will receive professional-development training during the summer, she added.
Teachers who plan to stay for the long haul say their motivation comes from the glimmers of hope that surface.
One student was so frustrating to Twumwa Grant, a teacher at the School of the Arts at South Shore High School, that she recently told him to give her a “holler” when he decided to “get straight.”
But after another teacher stepped told Grant about the student’s tough home environment, she decided to offer him the opportunity to apply for a coveted scholarship opportunity this summer. The student, stunned, later apologized for his behavior and even gave his teacher a heartfelt hug.
“This was the student that would roll his eyes at me,” Grant said. “I know that none of that would have happened if it wouldn’t have been for the … other teacher talking about him. I see that kind of thing all the time.”
