By WINNIE HU
Published: January 25, 2012
New York City teenagers attending small public high schools with about 100 students per grade were more likely to graduate than their counterparts at larger schools, according to new findings from a continuing study released on Wednesday night.The findings are part of a study that tracked the academic performance of more than 21,000 students who applied for ninth grade admission at 105 small high schools, mainly in Brooklyn and in the Bronx, from 2005 to 2008. The study appeared to validate the Bloomberg administration’s decade-long push to create small schools to replace larger, failing high schools.
Of the students studied, about 40 percent were admitted by lottery to the small schools, and 60 percent attended other high schools.
The $3.5 million study — one of the largest and most comprehensive reviews of the impact of small schools on learning — is being financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and conducted by MDRC, a nonprofit education research group based in Manhattan.
The latest findings show that 67.9 percent of the students who entered small high schools in 2005 and 2006 graduated four years later, compared with 59.3 percent of the students who were not admitted and instead went to larger schools. The higher graduation rate at small schools held across the board for all students, regardless of race, family income or scores on the state’s eighth-grade math and reading tests, according to the data.
This increase was almost entirely accounted for by a rise in Regents diplomas, which are considered more rigorous than a local diploma; 41.5 percent of the students at small schools received one, compared with 34.9 percent of students at other schools. There was little difference between the two groups in the percentage of students who earned a local diploma or the still more rigorous Advanced Regents diploma.
Small-school students also showed more evidence of college readiness, with 37.3 percent of the students earning a score of 75 or higher on the English Regents, compared with 29.7 percent of students at other schools. There was no significant difference, however, in scores on the math Regents.
The Bloomberg administration has advocated for nearly a decade for small schools to replace larger, failing high schools, a strategy that was initially supported by the teachers’ union. In recent years, though, union leaders have contended that the city was shifting its most disadvantaged students into the larger high schools to ensure the success of the small schools.
Schools Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott saw encouragement in the numbers.
“This study shows conclusively that our new small high schools changed thousands of lives in New York City, across every race, gender and ethnicity — not only helping them graduate, but graduate ready for college,” Mr. Walcott said. “When we see a strategy with this kind of success, we owe it to our families to continue pursuing it aggressively.”
But Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, questioned whether there were other factors that might explain the higher graduation rate in the small schools, like fewer special education students or better attendance records for those entering the small schools, since attendance rates have been shown to be an indicator of on-time graduation.
“I’m very happy for any school that is graduating students,” Mr. Mulgrew said. “But a study that is trying to say that one particular type of school is better than the other without looking at all the relevant factors is disingenuous.”
Gordon Berlin, president of MDRC, said the lottery process ensured that there were comparable numbers of special education students and English-language learners represented in both groups of students being tracked. He said attendance records for the students prior to high school were also comparable, and would not have affected the results.
Mr. Berlin and Howard Bloom, a co-author of the study, said that New York’s small schools were unusual because they were created from scratch rather than by reconfiguring existing schools. They said that these small schools tended to have common traits, including a rigorous curriculum, often built around themes like conservation and law, and highly personalized relationships between students and teachers.
The schools have also formed partnerships with community groups and businesses to offer hands-on learning experiences, like building an oyster bed in New York Harbor (at the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School on Governors Island) and participating in a moot court case at Cravath Swaine & Moore (at the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Downtown Brooklyn).
“It’s certainly not just size,” Mr. Bloom said. “It’s how the size is used. These schools were organized from the ground up in ways that would be extraordinarily unusual.”
Richard Kahan, founder and chief executive officer of the Urban Assembly, a network of 20 small high schools and middle schools in the city, said he knew that students were doing better in small schools than large schools, but was still surprised by how positive the results were in the study.
“I wouldn’t even dream of getting these results if these schools weren’t small and structured the way they are,” he said
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