We were told it could be the “Silver Bullet” to fix America’s lagging high school performance – moving to smaller high schools (around 400 or fewer students).
Since 2000, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been all over small high schools to the tune of an incredible $2 billion. With Gates support, over 2,600 small high schools were opened across the country.
Here in Kentucky, small schools have been pushed by the Kentucky Long Term Policy Research Center and the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence.
Now, education historian and commentator Diane Ravitch writes that this education fad simply isn’t working out, and the Gates crowd admits it.
Ravitch reports that students in the fad high schools didn’t learn as much math as kids in traditional high schools. Test scores in reading and math came in lower for the boutique high schools. Also, supposed small school advantages in New York City turned out to be due to the fact that the small schools turned away students with learning disabilities and students who were still learning English.
In a remarkable bit of candor, Ravitch writes that while the Gates Foundation deserves credit for honest self-scrutiny of its small high schools program, that, “Most proponents of education reform defend their ideas against all critics, regardless of what evaluations show.”
I wonder – was Ravitch was thinking of Kentucky when she wrote that?
Ravitch’s bottom line – there are no silver bullets in education. Clearly, we need to be wary of those who think there are.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Small High School Fad – Fading
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3 comments:
But there IS a silver bullett to increase high school scores.
It's making sure that all children read at the earliest grade level.
All children that are not reading at grade level in first grade should be put in a second and third grade classes consecutively which focus intensive reading strategies for two years on the reading strategies that work for children with reading disabilities which works for 100% of all children.
What is happening in the elementary grades is a haphazard bounce between phonics and the whole word method with little consistency. Children with learning disabilities, mild to severe get lost because the original phonics method is not reinforced after first grade- if then.
By the time a child gets to fourth grade and cannot read; he has a 75% of dropping out of high school. Forget all this writing portfolio crap- what we are seeing in Kentucky is the result of education reform which puts writing before reading. That's why colleges are having to require so many remediation classes because when the students took them originally their reading ability was not high enough to comprehend.
RE: Anonymous November 24, 2008 8:19 AM
We've written before about the importance of proper reading instruction in the lower grades, so I can't disagree except to point out that properly teaching reading in the lower grades isn't an un-researched, fad silver bullet. Proper reading instruction that starts with good phonics instruction that then moves on to reading comprehension is an increasingly better documented situation that the fad-chasers simply refuse to acknowledge, just as Ravitch wrote.
I am sure you have written about it. But it so vital that I felt the need to emphasize it so when your daily readers at the department of education read the comments they might actually get a clue and spend money wisely for a change.
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