We need smaller schools

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
We need smaller schools				July 25, 2007

It’s about time that someone around here began seriously to reflect on the ancillary ramifications of our robust development propensities and to cautiously consider applying the brakes. Kudos to Planning Commission chair Jim Kennedy and his cohorts for doing just that. Such considerations are long overdue.

A major offshoot of the population crunch we have even now is the necessity for creativity on the part of agencies forced to deal with a constantly increasing county population.

Prime among these is the School Board, whose preoccupation seems to be with building more and more schools of the sort that we have now. More large high schools, more elementary schools, more middle schools.

Unlike the forward-looking Planning Commission, the School Board has apparently never considered the fact that with inevitable growth comes the possibility of rethinking our whole approach to education and the type of schools we build.

According to a recent New York Times report, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has declared an end to the large high school and is in the process of erecting new schools or breaking up large high schools like Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn and Evander Childs in the Bronx into smaller, separate units. When the process is complete, there will be approximately 250 new schools with populations of between 400-500 students. Already 47 such schools have already been established, and graduation rates have soared as a result.

Whereas only 40% of the students at Erasmus Hall graduated in 2002, 92% graduated from the smaller schools it spawned last year. Similarly, Evander Childs had a graduation rate of 31% before it was broken up into three smaller schools. Their graduation rate is now running between 80% and 90%. It should be noted that 90% of the students now in smaller schools are black or Hispanic.

The point is that smaller schools allow for smaller classes, which means more individual attention for students who would normally be lost in the crowd. The relationship between students and teachers is naturally enhanced, since teachers have fewer students to deal with.

In addition, breaking up larger schools into smaller units allows the system to cater to special interests. Hence, some city schools feature the arts, while others deal primarily with science and technology. Several are devoted almost exclusively to vocational arts.

In other areas, like East Orange, NJ, middle schools have become passé. Rather than construct a plethora of middle schools, East Orange has transformed its elementary schools into institutions that focus on different disciplines, such as the arts and theater or technological education. In lieu of middle schools, all ninth-grade students are now sent to a renovated former high school in order to ease the transition to high school. As a result, graduation rates for otherwise lost minorities have skyrocketed.

What these innovative approaches have accomplished is to diminish the need for the social engineering that was formerly associated with so-called “at risk” students and to return teachers to their role as academicians.

As educational consultant Susan Hixson notes, “Students are placed ‘at risk’ when they experience a significant mismatch between their circumstances and needs, and the capacity or willingness of the school to accept, accommodate, and respond to them in a manner that supports and enables their maximum social, emotional, and intellectual growth.”

Smaller schools attuned to special academic interests and smaller classes obviously tend to minimize the mismatch quandary and enhance the social and intellectual growth of all students.

Of equal importance is the necessity for a complete review of curricular matters and the educational toxicity that derives from an academic policy whose sole goal to get more students to pass questionable state tests.

To deny that our teachers are teaching to the SOL tests is pure baloney. One educator recently fessed up to omitting the Magna Carta from her curriculum because there were no questions about it in the SOLs. Also lamentable is the fact that there is little time to teach U.S. foreign policy history because the state tests aren’t interested in that.

Yet, in a recent essay in the Washington Post, Mohsin Hamid, an American-born Pakistani, laments the fact that Americans know virtually nothing about the role of the Carter and Reagan administrations in aiding the mujaheddin jihadists when Gen. Zia was running Pakistan and fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. With our aid, we virtually transformed Pakistan, abetted the operations of Osama bin Laden and opened the way for the Islamic uprisings presently taking place in Islamabad and elsewhere.

“Americans,” says Hamid, “need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad.” But we won’t educate ourselves as long as such topics don’t appear on the SOLs.

These are only a few of the educational issues that our School Board should be discussing before launching any new schools. Others include the inordinate amount of money we spend on sports programs and facilities for each new school and that detestable 400-pound gorilla known as block scheduling.

The bottom line is that the same old, same old simply won’t do anymore.