Small high schools show encouraging signs of change

by Dale Mezzacappa

In ninth and tenth grades, Inozencia Harrington was getting mostly Ds, attending school two or three days a week, and doubting she'd ever graduate. Today, at 18, she is a senior and student body president, attends school every day, earns As and Bs, and is waiting to hear from five colleges.

But to hear Harrington tell it, she's not what completely turned around. Her school did.

Between her sophomore and junior years, Kensington High School, with some 1,300 students, split up into three smaller schools – one focusing on culinary skills, one on international business, and one on creative and performing arts. And that, she said, made all the difference for her.

“When I first came to Kensington, people were doing their hair in class, watching videos and walking around the school,” said Harrington. “There was fighting. Teachers were scared of students…[they] passed you with the lowest grade just to get you out of their face. I didn't learn anything.”

After the breakup, Harrington chose Kensington Culinary, and the change in atmosphere was stark. Now, she said, the hallways are calm, students behave, and teachers provide real instruction. “I have to work to pass,” she said. “A lot of kids I thought would drop out [are still here]. To tell you the truth, I didn't think I was going to graduate.”

If Philadelphia is to successfully tackle the crisis of out-of-school youth, it cannot simply create ever more programs to reconnect them after they've left. It has to prevent them from quitting school to begin with. One of the School District's major strategies for doing that is the creation of dozens of smaller high schools – some by breaking up the large and increasingly chaotic neighborhood schools that have become what researchers call “dropout factories.”

Today, Philadelphia has 60 public high schools (plus 21 charters), nearly twice the number that existed five years ago. Thirty-three of them have fewer than 700 students, the School District's definition of “small.”

The Kensingtons are among those created by breaking up bigger schools. Others, like Vaux and Sayre, are middle schools that gradually converted to high schools. Some, like Lankenau, were existing programs within larger schools that became independent. A few are magnet schools that have existed for decades, including Carver and Bodine.

And six, including the School of the Future designed by Microsoft and schools affiliated with the Franklin Institute and the National Constitution Center, were started from scratch.

Albert Bichner, the School District's director of secondary education, said his goal is to downsize most of the troubled large neighborhood high schools and have a menu of choices for students in each region. Evidence that the small schools are making a difference in attendance and discipline is beginning to trickle in, he said: “Kids at small schools are suspended at half the rate of those at larger schools.” District researchers say that small schools have fewer violent incidents and higher attendance rates.

Academically, though, change is slower. More students in small schools than at large schools are passing their courses, a District analysis showed, but monthly benchmark testing still shows alarmingly low percentages – barely 5 percent in the Kensingtons – mastering what they've been taught in reading and math.