Students say small schools not all created equal

Student activists battle obstacles to conversion of large high schools.

by Dale Mezzacappa and Shani Adia Evans

Photo: Harvey Finkle

Lawrence Jones-Mahoney is one of several student activists who have been in the forefront of the Philadelphia small schools movement. He has gone to more than a hundred meetings and traveled to several cities as a member of the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU), which has been pressing the District since 2002 to convert West Philadelphia High into four smaller, themed schools.

But while thousands of students have been able to attend some two dozen small high schools created here over the past five years, Jones isn't among them. Nor are any of the PSU members from West Philadelphia High, a school with one of the lowest graduation rates in the District.

“We've been going through all of this stuff, and we just haven't gotten anything yet,” said Jones, a senior. “It's frustrating.”

PSU and their counterparts at Youth United for Change (YUC), which organized students at Kensington and Olney high schools, are among the unsung heroes who have helped create a small schools movement in Philadelphia. They have battled relentlessly not just for new high schools, but for a transformation of the secondary education experience for students now trapped in largely dysfunctional big schools. Their vision of more intimate, themed settings helped push the District to recognize the value of small schools.

For instance, while Paul Vallas came to Philadelphia with a plan to build new high schools of 800 to 1.000 students, the youth organizing groups touted examples of effective urban high schools serving as few as 400 students.

“They've been influential,” said Albert Bichner, deputy chief academic officer. “They got involved in small schools research and talked about what they'd seen. They were well prepared, asked good questions, and were advocates for their own future.”

Still, as small schools have proliferated across the city, they have not all started on an equal footing. So far, the new schools, including Constitution High School and the Science Leadership Academy, have had key advantages over small schools that were created by breaking up larger schools, like Kensington and Olney.

This has meant, for the most part, that students who fought hardest for change, those now attending the most distressed of the city's neighborhood schools, have yet to see the full benefits. Some complain that the District has created a two-tiered system – a conclusion largely backed by a Research for Action review of small schools in Philadelphia.

That ongoing study cited “inequity” as one of the results of small schools creation in Philadelphia, along with more positive outcomes including innovation, energy, and momentum. The RFA study said that the small schools started from scratch phased in one grade at a time, had a full year to plan, were able to choose all their own teachers, received a higher teacher allotment per student, and received more freedom from the standardized curriculum.

“They never gave us a chance to succeed because they never even gave us the resources,” said YUC member Marcella Gibbs, a 12th-grader at Kensington High School of International Business, one of three small schools created by the breakup of Kensington High (a fourth school in a new building is planned).

“We had to fight for what we have and we're still fighting,” Gibbs added.