My colleague Valerie will be blogging this week about YouthTruth -- CEP's work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's beneficiaries within their US Education program. She has some incredible perspective to share. I'll do some thinking aloud on indicators of school effectiveness in the comments here.
Meantime, the NY Times article today on Brockton high school and its success as a large school (4,100 students!) adds to a growing set of research and anecdata suggesting that school size by itself is no guarantor of failure or success. This directly contradicts the premise of a huge B&M Gates Fdn initiative to break up large high schools into smaller schools and to encourage charter school startups. If I can find any public Gates Fdn evaluation results from this initiative, I'll post them here as well.
I know this may sound somewhat silly but I honestly have never considered school size in the calculation for how to succeed ... it was completely an oversight on my part, but hopefully not a terribly bad one in light of what this information (maybe)implicates.
ReplyDeleteWhat would be truly telling is how the school structured its teaching and support staff to handle 4100 students. Scheduling might be a very key factor, as well. Can you imagine trying to facilitate that many students, each with unique schedules? You would need to be well-prepared and well-resourced to accomplish such a task.
ReplyDeleteMy assumption would be that the M&BGF were instead acknowledging the idea that most schools do not have such resources. But I haven't yet read the article(s).