Report: Smaller schools mean fewer dropouts

By Lori Olszewski

Tribune staff report

Published August 2, 2006, 6:52 PM CDT

Chicago's small high schools have reduced dropouts and student absences, but this key strategy in the city's recent school reform efforts has not increased test scores.

Sixteen of the small high schools operating from 2002 to 2005 experienced higher academic expectations and other benefits for students, a study released Wednesday found. Still, students at the small schools did not perform better on the state high school exam than their counterparts at larger Chicago high schools.

"Changing the size alone does not get you everything you hoped for," said researcher Susan Sporte of the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago.

Sporte completed the study with Marisa de la Torre and John Easton of the Consortium and Joseph Kahne of Mills College in Oakland. Most of the schools studied were at the Bowen, Orr and South Shore High School campuses.

Boosted by more than $26 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and local foundations, the Chicago Public Schools four years ago began converting some large high schools, which average 1,500 to 2,000 students, to smaller ones with fewer than 500. By the end of the last school year, 23 of the city's 100-plus high schools were defined as small.

The school system and the Gates Foundation already have addressed some of the issues raised by the study and other national research on efforts to reform the American high school. For example, another Gates initiative in Chicago focuses on improving instruction at all schools. That effort to create a more rigorous and standard curriculum will launch this fall at 14 Chicago high schools, including three of the small schools in the study.

Despite the lack of academic results, the study's attendance and dropout findings encouraged school officials in a district where about half of its entering high school students don't graduate.

"First you have to change the culture," said schools chief Arne Duncan. "Students have to want to come to school and stay in school, and that is happening. I'm confident the academic achievement will follow."

By the third year of high school, only 20 percent of the students at the small schools had dropped out compared with 27 percent of the comparable students at other city high schools, the study found.

Preventing a student from dropping out has much more impact on that young person's life than a minor fluctuation in test scores, Sporte said.

A student from one of the schools in the study reminded officials that small hasn't solved the safety problem plaguing the city's high schools.

"With all the violence, you have to watch out for yourself and stay out of trouble," said Shanee Thurston, 15, a sophomore at New Millennium School of Health at Bowen on the South Side. .

Lolszewski@tribune.com