In her high school career at Global Leadership Academy, Gabriella Hernandez transcended the B’s and C’s of her lost-in-the-shuffle middle school years to achieve straight A’s and the honor society.
In classes of no more than 20 students, she grew close to teachers willing to spend extra time on instruction. She learned accountability because, well, everybody knew her name. No blending into large-school behavioral anonymity where, she says, “If you ditched, you got detention. Whatever.”
Recently, Hernandez got word that she has been accepted at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and will become the first in her immediate family to attend college. “This whole small-school thing, it’s amazing,” said Hernandez, a 17-year-old senior. “It feels like a little community here.”
Her experience cuts to the heart of what Mapleton Public Schools sought to establish in 2004, when the 5,800-student district just north of Denver started to remake itself into an all-choice, “small by design” conglomeration of schools with capped enrollments.
And it mirrors the small-school movement that other urban high schools — most recently Denver’s Montbello High School — continue to consider as one part of a formula to boost achievement.
The theory behind the model holds that smaller schools foster closer personal bonds and, in concert with a carefully defined academic culture, improve everything from attendance to student and teacher satisfaction to graduation rates. But the track record on standardized test scores remains mixed, highlighting the challenge of reconciling a niche school’s specialized academic approach with standards-based evaluation.
“If you’re doing small schools, themed schools, some of the themes tend to be a lousy fit for state standards — that’s one tension,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the Washington, D.C.-based American Enterprise Institute. “The second is, if improvement is gradual, states will run out of patience.”
Wins and losses
Both nationally and in Colorado, the small-schools movement produced enticing success and spectacular failure as it boomed in the new millennium behind more than $2 billion that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested in a model whose roots go back decades.
The Gates’ money alone helped launch more than 2,000 such schools, whose relatively small enrollments — generally in the low hundreds — replaced sprawling comprehensive high schools, sometimes by opening multiple small academies within those same walls.
Denver’s Manual High School, which had the lowest test scores and the most low-income students in Colorado, attempted such a changeover in 2000, using Gates money to help install three small schools in the same building.
But after four years, the Colorado Small Schools Initiative delivered a troubling assessment: Low student achievement persisted, along with high dropout rates, ineffective teaching, discipline problems and an alarming lack of cooperation among the schools and DPS.
The experience became a road map for how not to approach a small-school makeover. Ultimately, DPS scrapped that model and started from scratch, installing a single small school incrementally, starting with 9th grade and adding a class each year.
“I think they got people who didn’t know how to lead a school the first time around,” said Patrick McQuillan, an associate professor of education at Boston College who has tracked the Manual metamorphosis. “And the schools weren’t really about anything — there was very little sense of a common culture. Now, the place exudes common expectations and values and a sense of community.”
Students who launched that effort will graduate this spring from a school that shows significantly more academic growth than similar schools in Colorado, says DPS superintendent Tom Boasberg.
“Manual was a very strong lesson for us,” Boasberg said. “Any comparison between the Manual split up of 10 years ago and Montbello is a false comparison.”
The current heated conversation over which way to take Montbello — another public comment session is scheduled for Monday — unfolds in a markedly different reform environment.
The Gates’ money that shifted the small- schools movement into overdrive dried up after 2009, when the foundation determined that it wasn’t getting the results it sought.
Too many of the small schools didn’t improve achievement. Remakes proved more problematic than startups. Many didn’t take “radical” enough steps to change school culture. So even though attendance and graduation rates often rose, Gates pulled the plug and channeled the foundation’s money toward developing more effective teachers.
“When you just change structure and don’t also make changes in teaching and learning that are required, you get less than you hoped for,” said Vicki Phillips, director of education for the foundation. “So the student-achievement scores don’t move as rapidly. And while you get great graduation rates, you don’t necessarily get college-ready graduation rates.”
Hess, the education expert at the American Enterprise Institute, calls the foundation the “800-pound gorilla” whose decision likely will slow the small-school movement nationally.
“It’s not like anybody hit the brakes,” he said. “But Gates took the foot off the gas pedal.”
Kevin Welner, an education professor and director of the National Education Policy Center at CU-Boulder, said expectations outpaced the initial wave of small-school reform and were “lacking in nuance.” And while the model has had generally positive outcomes and substantial promise, the shifting of money to newer reforms means that small schools “are getting old and ugly in the corner.”
“I think we’re setting ourselves up for another series of dashed hopes,” Welner said. “If we chase the latest shiny object without looking carefully at what the strengths and limitations are for a given reform, we end up going into this awful cycle.”
“We need to get better”
Montbello has forged ahead with what Boasberg terms a “fundamentally different” small-school proposal that acknowledges the Manual mistakes. Yet in some ways, the community response echoes the furor that preceded both Manual makeovers.
Tradition, emotion and pride still run strong among residents who remember more prosperous times and crave a return to glory that mirrors their own experience. What they don’t see, says principal Anthony Smith, is the creeping sense of low expectation that has permeated the school culture.
“Regardless of how you feel about Montbello, we need to get better,” Smith said.
Montbello broached the idea of the small-school model four years ago, when Antwan Wilson was principal. Ultimately, the school instituted half-measures, like launching smaller “learning communities” that produced small improvements.
DPS has proposed splitting Montbello into three small schools at the same site, with the school board deciding later this month. But the new plan features key differences from the 2000 Manual failure.
Principals would pick their own staffs, assuring teacher buy-in. Classes would be phased in over four years. Expectations, for both students and the use of shared space, would be clearly defined.
Given that many students arrive at Montbello well behind grade level, Wilson — now executive director of post-secondary readiness — would set the metrics of evaluation to identify growth rather than proficiency on a standardized test.
Higher test scores, at least in theory, would follow.
“The danger many districts fall into,” said Wilson, “is that politicians or educators or the public wrap all the measures of success into one indicator: ‘How’d you do on CSAP?’ “
Yet that remains the inescapable question.
No skipping “the dip”
At Mapleton, where superintendent Charlotte Ciancio oversaw the conversion of that district’s comprehensive high school to smaller schools, observers largely praised the way she helped orchestrate buy-in from the community, parents and teachers union.
But just three years into the conversion, when CSAP results lagged and the threat of state intervention loomed, the district blinked: the small schools would adjust school design to address the standards.
Advocates didn’t doubt that the small- school model, and the instructional approaches they’d adopted, would eventually produce higher test scores. But the period of adjustment, when performance slips while school culture changes and new teaching methods gain traction, would take longer than they’d hoped.
Reality had a name: the “implementation dip.”
“There’s this false notion in education circles that you can ‘skip the dip,’ ” Ciancio said. “I guess what I get surprised about is that we all agree that good performance takes three to five years. But they only give it three. What happened to years four and five?”
Five years in, Mapleton saw CSAP scores improve dramatically.
CU’s Welner did an early evaluation of the Mapleton effort and noticed higher attendance, teachers embracing the model and generally more engaged learning. He anticipated that better test scores would follow — and eventually they did.
What was unusual, he thought, was that Mapleton had the persistence and support to see it through.
“It’s a little bit surprising, knowing that the life span of ambitious reform usually isn’t long,” said Welner. “The life span of a superintendent isn’t that long.”
But Ciancio is still standing. And despite a tough economy, Mapleton voters last week passed a key bond issue, which Ciancio called “a referendum on community involvement.”
The relative staying power of Mapleton’s small-school reform efforts doesn’t yet approach that of New Vista High School, the Boulder Valley school that helped pioneer the model here in 1993.
Rona Wilensky founded New Vista and served 16 years as principal before retiring from the Boulder campus that serves about 340 students.
“It’s hard to start a school from scratch, but what’s harder is taking an existing high school and breaking it up,” said Wilensky, who also advised principals at Manual during its initial conversion attempt. “Then you’re disrupting existing culture. The resistance is enormous.”
Current New Vista principal Kirk Quitter recently roamed through a physics class at New Vista where students were engaged in small groups exploring horsepower. The teacher floated among them, digging deeper into the subject matter, correcting misconceptions and answering questions.
“I don’t think you get that ability — I know you don’t get that ability — when you’re meeting for 50 minutes with a class of 36,” Quitter said. “You’re not going to have that luxury. The way you teach changes. But I think the problem with small schools can be that if instruction isn’t different, nothing changes.”
The value of learning
Senior Aren Dalloul, 17, began his high school career at nearby Monarch High School, a traditional comprehensive environment where he aced all his classes — but didn’t feel he was learning much.
“The teachers were great,” he said, “but the classes were too big for you to matter.”
He tried New Vista. His GPA dipped slightly, but Dalloul felt that he was better able to see the relevance of what he learned.
“Here,” he said, “when I learn, it has value. And if I don’t understand the value, they explain it.”
Wilensky notes that New Vista test scores were never “top-of-the-pile,” but always good enough that nobody questioned the need for a break-the-mold instructional model.
“The drive toward uniformity, where every kid has access to the same knowledge, where you prepare them for tests and rank teachers on test scores — all of that in my view is at odds with learning,” she said. “And learning is strongly influenced by what students care about as well as what teachers’ interests are.”
She helped launch a student-teaching program that works in concert with the Mapleton district. One semester at New Vista is followed by one at a Mapleton school to produce a pipeline of teachers familiar with the small-school model.
In two years, the program has served 11 teacher candidates, helping them to understand the machinations of the small-school environment and the kinds of relationships it can foster.
Wilensky anticipated that Colorado’s small-school scene would be more robust. But even so, she figured the program could provide “a pretty steady drip” of new teachers ready to tackle the challenge at those places willing to weather early difficulties and stick with the small-school design.
“The experience of school people is that they’re whipsawed by every new idea from Washington or the state capital,” Wilensky said. “The mantra you learn to live with is, ‘This too shall pass.’
“Unless you show them you’re in there for the long run, it doesn’t make sense for them to change.”
Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com
