A Study in Size

Travis had moved from his mother's house in San Mateo to the city to live with Charles and his wife during seventh grade (Travis' parents split when he was 6). It wasn't an easy adjustment, but Travis did well at Luther Burbank Middle School. When it came time to choose a high school, Travis was excited about computers, so he and his father picked John O'Connell High School of Technology.

Near the end of Fenech's freshman year, in 2004, the district announced that June Jordan would move into the unused high school wing of Luther Burbank, across the street from the Fenechs' house. Charles, already a doubter, heard rumors that June Jordan's students were "the worst of the worst" and had been thrown out by San Francisco State, where the school was housed during its first year. (The rumor was false.) He and other local parents stood up in community meetings and denounced the move. Charles didn't want kids like that moving into his neighborhood. The protests failed, though, and June Jordan moved in that summer.

In late August 2004, as Charles walked around the neighborhood and the school grounds picking up litter (which he does as a sort of hobby), the kindness of the students and teachers he encountered changed his mind. When Travis struggled at O'Connell, his father transferred him to June Jordan, where his grades and his attendance have improved.

"I was wrong," Charles says. "I don't say that very much."

Few critics of the city's small schools initiative have had a similar change of heart, and the passion of the movement's supporters has only frustrated them further.

"There's a lot of irrational exuberance for small schools as an easy solution," says school board member Jill Wynns.

The main obstacle to the creation of more schools like June Jordan is the high potential cost of expanding SSRI, which competes for budget supremacy with several other initiatives. "It becomes a growing challenge in a funding crisis to be able to tend to your Dream Schools and your STAR schools and your SSRI schools and your general education schools," says district spokeswoman Lorna Ho. "Just because something is working in one place doesn't mean we abandon all other things that are also showing improvement."

The Students & Teachers Achieving Results program, for example, has had good results in improving education for struggling students, but it's extremely expensive. STAR targets money and classroom resources toward struggling schools for only a few years, whereas local small-by-design schools have yet to demonstrate that they can function without an ongoing, annual infusion of extra funds. However, research at the nascent Oakland small schools program has shown that, after the initial startup expense (hundreds of thousands of dollars per school, provided by various foundations), a group of small-by-design schools can collectively serve the same number of students as a large high school, with the same amount of money. One reason is that the state bases funding to districts on student attendance and dropout rates, both of which are improved in small schools versus large high schools.

Compared to Oakland — which has embraced the small schools idea — San Francisco's progress seems sluggish. Yet the Oakland Unified School District may be in for some growing pains. Some massive, citywide Gates Foundation grants like the one it accepted have not yet been as successful as planned. Michael Klonsky, director of the Small Schools Workshop at Nova Southeastern University and a frequent advisor to small schools and districts nationwide, describes the pattern in many cities: "You get these cash-strapped school districts ... a drowning man will grab a rope from anybody. Here comes Mr. Gates' crew, and they throw them a rope. The schools say: ÔOK, small schools? Fine, we'll do that; tell us what to do.' But a year or two into it, they find teachers and community and parents and students haven't necessarily signed on to that agreement."

Without community support, top-down redesigns often fail to improve the grades and test scores of already-struggling students. The most highly publicized case of such a failure is that of Manual High School in Denver, Colo.: Five years after the Gates Foundation financed its split into three separate small schools, Manual will shut down this spring and restart in 2007 as a single school. As a Gates-funded report on several of its high school grants summarized last November, "... the quality of student work in all of the schools we studied is alarmingly low." (Students in Gates-funded schools have not been as successful on test scores or grades as those at the grassroots-designed small schools, though it's important to note that Gates schools serve the lowest-performing kids.) Recently, the foundation has focused less on school size than on making improvements in curriculum and teaching.

Many in SFUSD see school redesign as a way of letting the Gates Foundation, whose education initiatives are admittedly a work in progress, direct district resources. "We have been ... unwilling to say, 'We'll do whatever you want; just give us money,'" Wynns says. "I don't want the administration to say, 'We don't know how to fix our schools; we need some foundation to come in here and give us money and let them be in charge.'"