Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | Texas Monthly

Size matters: if small high schools graduate more and better-prepared students than big ones do, why aren't more high schools small? Good question.

Article Excerpt
I'm a sucker for that uniquely Texan spectacle of youthful beauty and energy: the Friday morning pep rally at a big public high school. Everything is choreographed to generate exhilaration: the drum line; the noisy, jostling kids; the cheerleaders handspringing in a blur of ponytails; and, of course, the morning's heroes in letter jackets, bristling with testosterone, If it's a theme day, the class clowns show off in hilarious costume; the sexy dance team adds a flourish of theater. The sentimental moment at the end, when the swaying throng sings the school anthem, is sweet enough to bring a tear to your eye--unless you happen to know that this huge, overcrowded building is, according to all credible research, the exact worst venue for delivering a quality education. By any measure, Texas public high schools are broken. Although you wouldn't know it from the Texas Education Agency's prettied-up dropout statistics, around a third of all students who enter high school never graduate; for inner-city students, the percentage is even higher. Among students who continue to college, nearly 30 percent will require remedial courses. Texas' SAT scores rank forty-seventh in the nation. Anglo students in the class of 2005 had an 82 percent passing rate on the state's high school exit test, but the figures were much grimmer for African Americans (52 percent) and Hispanics (56 percent). The true failure rate would have to account for the kids who didn't stay in school to take the test in their junior year. For at least the past decade, a growing body of research has suggested that smaller high schools graduate more and better-prepared students than megasized schools. If common sense tells you that huge institutions are intimidating to teenagers, so do the statistics: The U.S. Department of Education compared crime at small high schools (three hundred students or fewer) with that at large schools (more than a thousand) and found that big campuses incurred 825 percent more violent crime, 394 percent more fights, and 378 percent more...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!