A Study in Size

Travis Fenech struts down the hallway of the June Jordan School for Equity in the Excelsior, copping the self-assured swagger of a rapper. His pants hang several inches below his waist, and a black leather jacket blankets his upper body. The curls of his dirty blond hair, which he's been growing out for months, are matted down in the front and frizzed out in back. The look conveys the devil-may-care attitude adopted by Fenech, his friends, and most other 16-year-old American boys.

Fenech enters his advisory period (like homeroom), greeting each classmate with "What up?" and an inverted handshake, then sits near the back. It's the Friday before spring break — not a heavy academic day — so most of the 11th-graders are working on the mock college applications due at 4 p.m. Fenech pulls a piece of paper out from his mess of a backpack.

"This is my freshman year," he says, pointing past the transcript's columns of grades (mostly B's and C's) to another string of numbers: 6, 8, 6, 10, 8, 30. Those figures represent, class by class, Fenech's absences during his first semester at John O'Connell High School of Technology in the Mission District. Fenech says the numbers vastly underestimate how much school he missed. The problem was so bad that his father, Charles Fenech, a longtime truck driver, considered taking on a second job to cover the cost of sending Travis to military school.

Instead, Fenech transferred to June Jordan, one of a few small-by-design public schools in the San Francisco Unified School District, across the street from his house. Small-by-design schools limit their size to about 100 students per grade (as compared to as much as 650 per grade at traditional S.F. schools), which enables administrators to more easily adapt the curriculum to the kids and creates a tight-knit community of parents, teachers, and students. Fenech may not have earned a place on the June Jordan honor roll, but he's missed only one school day in the last year and a half, has a B average, and plans to attend college.

When June Jordan opened three years ago, small-by-design schools were viewed by some as yet another flavor-of-the-month experiment in San Francisco, though they were encouraged by millions of dollars in grants from the Gates Foundation and others. Despite decades of research showing the benefits of fewer students per school, many local parents and SFUSD administrators were skeptical, suffering from a sort of reform fatigue.

June Jordan and its ilk got less autonomy and thinner budgets than small-by-design schools in other cities, but the pilot project worked. Students like Fenech, who might have fallen through the cracks and dropped out at a larger school, have thrived, and June Jordan's low-income, minority students are outperforming most of their peers statewide. Yet SFUSD still hasn't figured out how to capitalize on that success, leaving frustrated parents asking: If we've finally found something that seems to help, why aren't we pursuing it? The answer is a typical San Francisco mix of distraction, misplaced priorities, and bureaucratic inertia.

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The modern small schools movement began about 20 years ago, as disparate groups of teachers and parents searched for ways to fix struggling, big-city school districts. They had different ideas about how and what to teach, but wanted the autonomy to break out of a one-size-fits-all district-wide curriculum and increase student interest and involvement. Based on the available academic research, small schools seemed like a promising method for making change on a limited scale. Two distinct types emerged: autonomous small-by-design schools (like June Jordan) and schools-within-a-school, in which larger schools were reorganized into distinct entities housed in the same complex.

Small schools are different from charter schools, though they're often confused (and frequently overlap). Charter schools are funded directly by the state, rather than through the local school district. This gives their administrators near-total control over everything from academics to budgeting for facilities. Yet they don't inherently limit themselves by size. Small-by-design schools almost always have fewer than 100 students per grade, which gives administrators slightly more power over academics and student life than at a traditional large school, which is almost entirely controlled by the district. Plus, it's easier to build consensus and spark unconventional ideas — and put them into practice — among a smaller group of teachers and families. They can be in-district public schools (like June Jordan), public charter schools (like Leadership High School in the Excelsior), or even private schools.

In the early years of the small schools movement, most states did not allow charter schools, so teachers and parents focused on lobbying for change within their local districts. Eventually, cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston opened several small schools, and the movement spread throughout the 1990s. By 2000, there were about 3,000 small schools nationwide. Not all of them succeeded, but they did produce a compelling body of research showing that, in the majority of cases, small schools improve student grades, test scores, attendance, and safety, and reduce levels of violent behavior and drug abuse. This data drew interest from private corporations (nonprofit and for-profit), which brought a more top-down, businesslike philosophy to what was once a grassroots effort.

The Gates Foundation has been the largest donor, granting more than $1 billion toward high schools during the last six years and helping to create more than 1,900 new small schools across America. In Oakland, $35 million from the foundation has supported a district revamp, with 28 small-by-design schools opening since 2001 and a dozen more starting up this fall.

By comparison, San Francisco's Secondary School Redesign Initiative — a five-year-old plan to create small schools aimed at helping low-performing students — has run a much slower course. The Gates Foundation gave $1 million to the S.F. Schools Alliance (the nonprofit that bundles grants for SFUSD) for the 2003-2004 school year, most of which went toward the founding of June Jordan and Aim High Academy, a small-by-design middle school. Over the last three years, it also funded the redesign of Mission High School and Balboa High School as "small learning communities" (i.e., schools-within-a-school), the aborted expansion of Gloria R. Davis into a hybrid middle/high school, and other youth-related projects. There are no other small-by-design schools within the district — only small charter and private schools outside it — and no concrete plans for any new ones.

The district has yet to establish a standardized policy on how to fund and manage small schools, so administrators often end up having to beg for money just to cover basic resources. Last spring, for example, the teaching budget SFUSD offered June Jordan would have forced the school either to raise class sizes (meaning it would no longer be "small") or to cut courses students needed to graduate. After months of lobbying by parents and teachers, then-district superintendent Arlene Ackerman agreed to add one additional teaching position to June Jordan's budget, keeping the small model working.

San Francisco's small schools have also had to compete for central office attention with several reform plans — particularly Ackerman's baby, the elementary school-focused Dream Schools initiative, whose success and future are still in question. School board member and small schools advocate Mark Sanchez has even accused Ackerman of taking grant money intended for small schools and feeding it to Dream Schools. An ongoing audit has shown no wrongdoing, although the year the Dream Schools launched, June Jordan received 15 percent less funding per student than during the previous year, despite an increase in Gates Foundation support to $1.5 million. June Jordan's per-pupil budget continues to drop.

Notwithstanding these obstacles, S.F.'s small school students have performed well. Ninety-three percent of June Jordan juniors have already passed the state high school exit exam; the district average is 90 percent by the end of senior year. Based on last year's test scores, Aim High students scored better than 90 percent of demographically similar schools in California. In the two years since its redesign, Mission High's student scores jumped 22 percent, from among the lowest in their statewide demographic to about average, and Balboa High's scores have increased by about 11 percent in its first "small" year.

"For us, it's a natural evolution," says Matt Alexander, a co-founder, co-director, and teacher at June Jordan. "The thing started, we had funding and community interest, and the superintendent said, 'Great.' Now there's clear data showing we've been successful. It's time to take the next step."

Yet last year no new small schools or small learning communities opened in the city, as compared with seven new Dream Schools. The Gates Foundation's funding of the city's Secondary School Redesign Initiative dropped to $625,000, and the grant wasn't approved until November, months after the school year began. A major reason for the reduction was the district's lack of a clear policy direction on small schools, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.

Representatives from both the Gates Foundation and the San Francisco Foundation, another prominent local education donor, indicated they're willing to put more money toward small schools if the district makes a concerted effort. For a variety of reasons — including leadership changes (Ackerman was forced out in September), a budget crisis, and bureaucratic caution — it still hasn't done so. For now, the district Web page devoted to the SSRI is frozen somewhere around spring 2005, with Janet Schulze, now the principal at O'Connell, still listed as its director.

"It's basically in hiatus, hibernating," Sanchez says. "We're in a holding pattern right now. If the school board comes up with realistic policies that funders can buy into, it'll move forward. If not, it'll slowly fade away."

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Fenech and his classmates sit around the U-shaped arrangement of tables in Celia Monge Mana's Chicano literature class. Posters of chili peppers and Che Guevara cover the walls, and half-painted canvases rest on easels throughout the classroom, which doubles as the school's art studio. The guest lecturer, a poet named Tomás Riley, perches on a stool at the head of the class wearing a puffy vest and a green hoodie.

Riley rocks back and forth as he reads his poems aloud. At first, kids lean their tired faces against their palms or allow their eyelids to droop. But once Riley hits his groove, they laugh at slick turns of phrase and shrewd descriptions of the neighborhoods in which many of them live.

"I'm feelin' dat, though," says a boy with a thin mustache, his long hair peeking out the back of his hat. "Like, I see that in the Mission every day."

As a white kid living in the Excelsior, Fenech might not see what the poem describes, but like most of his classmates, he's into hip hop — which matches the rhythm of Riley's poetry. The pieces use the same cadence as the students' music and the same language heard in June Jordan's hallways.

Many San Francisco high schools would invite Riley as a guest speaker, but few would devote an entire course to Chicano literature. Because June Jordan is small, though, teachers know every student and can tailor the curriculum to the specific individuals in their classes. As a result, students learn about concepts like theme, tone, and metaphor via material that interests them.

"We know what kind of kids we have. We're not going to teach Huck Finn and expect them to relate to a little boy on a river," says Jackie Jenkins, a teacher-in-training who'll be a full-time June Jordan instructor next year.

It's not as if the classics are neglected at small schools — last year, the entire ninth and 10th grades at June Jordan read Romeo and Juliet — but works like Riley's poetry help students engage more directly with their coursework, making it easier to move beyond basic, rote lessons into critical thought. As for that critical thinking, huge sheets of paper hang from the walls of Fenech's economics class, evidence of last week's spirited debate over how Ronald Reagan's economic policies affected the poor and middle class.

"It's actually fun to come to class. You get into discussions instead of doing normal bookwork," says Fenech. "Everybody puts in their position, and you have to have evidence to support your argument."

To honors students at a place like Lowell High School, this may sound like a standard class, but it's well beyond the instruction level at many San Francisco public high schools. While still at O'Connell, for example, Fenech took a technology class with upperclassmen. "The thing [the teacher] designed, I knew how to build," he says. "It was, like, little gear boxes with wires connecting switches, hooking to a light fixture. It was a five-minute job, and you had two class periods to do it." (After Fenech transferred, O'Connell was reformed as a Dream School, and its students' test scores have improved significantly.)

The school's size also gives its teacher-directors license to change student life outside the classroom. Kids spend one afternoon per week on "service learning" projects, ranging from assisting in elder care to tutoring elementary school children. In order to pass 10th grade and to graduate, they must present large projects called "portfolios" and "masterpieces," respectively, before a committee. For one portfolio, Fenech presented the results of a group science project that collected bacteria in places like hallways, lockers, and bathrooms throughout the school and grew it in petri dishes.

June Jordan's least tangible, though perhaps most important, strength is its culture. One-third of its students are African-American, one-third are Latino, and Asian/Pacific Islanders make up the bulk of the rest. Yet instead of self-segregating by race, as is common at larger schools, the students all seem to be at least acquaintance-level friends with each other. The school is too small for segregation, or even to support many cliques. Fenech puts it simply: "It's a small school. I can talk and kick it with most people."

The same ethos extends to teacher-student relationships. Instructors treat the students with respect (though not as peers), and the kids tell story after story of teachers who care enough to stay late to help them with challenging assignments. This dedication is partly due to the many young, idealistic educators on the staff, but that community-oriented, almost familylike atmosphere is consistent with other successful small schools nationwide. For Fenech, it was a major change from his experience at O'Connell.

"They would beat us out the door," he says. "They wouldn't stay after and help. Some teachers, as soon as the bell would ring, as soon as class would end, they'd shut the door. No extra help." (When O'Connell became a Dream School, every teacher had to reapply for his position or leave. Fewer than half stayed.)

Over the last few years, June Jordan's academic rigor has translated into impressive performance. Among the 20 students who transferred to June Jordan as sophomores in 2004, the average freshman-year GPA was 0.94; by winter 2005, the group had improved to a 2.2 average. Only seven of the school's 94 juniors have GPAs below 2.0. The student body also outperformed 80 percent of the state's demographically similar schools on standardized tests. (Balboa High School, less than a mile away, is better than only 20 percent of similar schools.)

"We're all left-wing, progressive educators. We're not supposed to care about test scores," says Alec Lee, one of the co-founders of Aim High Academy. "Then we saw them, and we said: 'That's pretty good.'"

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From the outset, Travis Fenech's father, Charles, was skeptical about small schools. The concept didn't make much sense to him, and he didn't expect the idea to survive for long in San Francisco.

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.'"

There's also some question as to what it would mean to expand the small schools initiative and where additional money might be deployed. In San Francisco and elsewhere, autonomous schools like June Jordan have generally performed better than small learning communities like those at Mission High, but schools-within-a-school are less costly and involve fewer facilities headaches than starting a school from scratch. More important, though, is the shortage of people with the skills and desire to create a new school that could replicate June Jordan's success. The original proposals for June Jordan and Aim High Academy went beyond simply cutting the number of students — they were detailed plans, approved by a district committee that included Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, a leading school redesign researcher. Several other school applications did not make the cut, though it's possible that if policies changed, administrators and teachers behind successful charter schools might propose new district schools or bring their charter schools inside the district.

SFUSD is a long way from small school expansion. In fact, it's been a challenge just to maintain those small schools that already exist. This fall, Aim High Academy may become the first casualty of the district's lack of support for the initiative.

The board of Aim High — the nonprofit that operates the academy — quietly decided in February to end its partnership with its namesake school at the close of this school year. Alec Lee, the organization's executive director, says the nonprofit's longstanding summer enrichment program will continue, and the nonprofit may open a new small-by-design charter school (it has already received a state grant) — that is, a small school not controlled by SFUSD. Aim High would have stayed involved with the academy if not for its continual clashes with the district over budgets and administration, according to several people who have spoken to Aim High board members and executives.

Without its founding organization, Aim High Academy's future is in question. The district has told the staff that, due to other schools closing, Aim High's enrollment might increase from less than 80 pupils per grade to as many as 100 next year, with no guarantee of additional teachers, robbing the school of its intimacy. Dozens of Aim High parents plan to move their children to other schools, in part because of concern over this increase, but also because the school will move across town this fall, from the Haight-Ashbury District into the Luther Burbank building (next to June Jordan). District administrators haven't even decided what the school will be called when classes begin in August. Almost every teacher, including three who co-founded the school, is considering leaving, although none would talk on the record because their employment futures are still in flux. "Everything is going to be a fight," says one Aim High Academy teacher. "I don't want to fight. I want to teach."

The nonprofit and some teachers, though, might be giving up before the fight is over because of an unwillingness to compromise with SFUSD. "I think if they were committed to this, they should remain committed to it," says Wynns. "The job's not done. This school is not fully developed yet. They had a vision, and they need to finish it."

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When Soraya Mabrey's mother told her she'd been assigned to June Jordan, she almost refused to attend. Her friends from junior high were all going to big public schools, places like Lowell and Thurgood Marshall. "I want to go to a real high school," she griped. "They don't even have sports!"

After a week at June Jordan, Mabrey's mother, Ayanna Banks, asked if she wanted to transfer.

"No," Mabrey replied. "I like it."

Now in the 10th grade, the Bayview District resident is no bookworm — she used to write poetry, she says, but stopped because it got "boring." Like many girls her age, Mabrey spends her afternoons chatting on the phone and her weekends shopping for clothes. No one in her immediate family has gone to college, and if she hadn't come to June Jordan, she probably wouldn't have gone, either.

"In junior high, she was glad to be average," says Banks. "A 'C' was OK."

June Jordan raised Mabrey's grades and changed her attitude, and the girl's success has inspired Banks — a single mother who'd never been politically active — to become a forceful advocate for small-by-design schools. Voices like hers, and the stories of students like Mabrey and Travis Fenech, are spreading throughout the city.

Whether or not they buy into the concept of small schools, local families are applying to them in record numbers. This year, June Jordan received 397 applications for 100 places in its ninth grade. Enrollment at small-by-design charter high schools has increased by 50 percent in the past three years, to well over 1,000 kids, or more than one of every 20 high schoolers in the district. New schools such as Metropolitan Arts & Tech High School in Bernal Heights, which opened last fall, and XCEL Academy in the Inner Sunset, which opened in 2003, are on pace to add about 700 students in total during the next four years.

While SFUSD's central office wasted years fighting over autonomy with a few small-by-design schools, several small charter schools opened. With in-district small schools, the central office has a good deal of power over budgets, curriculum, and application processes; with charter schools, which are funded by the state, it has almost none.

"There's a strong and successful small schools movement in San Francisco; the dilemma is that it's the charter school movement," says Gregory Peters, executive director of the San Francisco Coalition of Essential Small Schools, a group representing both charter and district small schools. "The charter schools have been the proxy for a movement in a district not ready to embrace small schools."

When Acting Superintendent Gwen Chan came to power in early February, small schools weren't high on her agenda. In addition to making peace with a board that had forced her predecessor, Arlene Ackerman, to resign, Chan faced school closings, budget cuts, and a pending teacher strike (recently averted).

In late March, Chan and several high-level aides held a closed-door session with parents, teachers, and small schools advocates regarding the initiative. They discussed the creation of a long-overdue policy on how such schools within the district would operate, and how the district would furnish them with resources. Chan established a working group — which includes school board member Mark Sanchez, school administrators, and parents — to study the feasibility of a policy. Many who attended the meeting were encouraged by Chan's interest, although she made no commitments and offered no timeline for an approved policy, much less an expansion of the program.

"The superintendent is very committed to supporting the small schools and reengaging in a process with them," says district spokesperson Lorna Ho. "But ... clearly, in a very challenging fiscal situation, we need to proceed carefully and thoughtfully."

Since the meeting, parents have been leading delegations to meet with board members, and will convene with SFUSD liaisons Myong Leigh and Mary Richards (who has taken over Janet Schulze's SSRI responsibilities) next week. It's likely that a policy will be introduced by board members before the end of this school year, though some of the messy issues — details of the budget allocation process, who would sit on a new small schools approval committee — will probably be left unresolved for now. The meeting with Leigh and Richards is only the first attempt at hashing out these details.

Small schools aren't a panacea for the district's ills. Even the best teaching, individual attention, and a new curriculum can't always turn a kid like Travis Fenech into a straight-A student. It's a triumph, though, for him to come to school every day.

"He's gotten a lot out of this school, and he enjoys it," Charles Fenech says. "I've seen a change in there: He cares about something. He keeps talking about becoming a math teacher in a middle school. For a kid that didn't even go to school before, that'd be pretty good."