Divide and conquer: how breaking up big high schools can be the key to successful education reform.

• Author: Toch, Thomas

HIGH SCHOOLS DON'T PRODUCE A LOT of headlines in the national education debate. But they are arguably the weakest link in American education. International studies show that U.S. grade-school students perform reasonably well compared to their counterparts in developed countries in Europe and Asia. By junior high school, however, Americans fall behind their international peers, and plummet during the high school years. The gap is especially pronounced for kids who attend large high schools in urban areas with lots of students from low-income families.

A typical example of a sprawling inner-city school was the Julia Richman High School on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Though located in a high-rent neighborhood and once a prestigious school, by the early 1990s, Richman was one of the city's worst. Buffeted by a changing student population, sharp staffing cuts, and other forces, the enormous high school had degenerated into a cauldron of violence. Students tore out water fountains, destroyed bathrooms, and smashed windows, recalls John Broderick, the school's veteran engineer. Graffiti covered the hallways. Metal cages were constructed in the vice principal's office to separate belligerent students, and local cops labeled the school "Julia Riker's," after New York City's notorious Riker's Island jail. It was, says Broderick, "utter, utter chaos." The words of philosopher Francis Bacon inscribed over the building's front door, "Knowledge Is Power," seemed to be lost on everyone: The school's graduation rate was 37 percent.

Today, however, Julia Richman has, in Broderick's words, "turned around 500 percent" The disciplinary cages are gone, along with the metal detectors that fortified the school's entrances. Richman is bright, clean, and safe. Fights are rare. Attendance is up. Dropout rates are down substantially. And greater numbers of graduates are going on to college.

What produced this educational Reformation at a time when the nation is lamenting the plight of urban education? A big part of the answer can be found in the two-foot-by-three-foot banners that hang largely unnoticed along the school's main corridor: Urban Academy, Vanguard, Manhattan International, Talent Unlimited, P226M, Ella Baker--these are the names of the six separate schools that collectively share what is now known as the Julia Richman Education Complex. Richman has abandoned the American tradition of the "big high school" in favor of multiple scaled-down educational settings within the same building that engender a strong sense of community, where both students and teachers can flourish.

In recent years, there's been a movement among school reformers who argue that size is the enemy of excellence in America's high schools and breaking up super-sized schools into smaller units is the key to improving them. A decade's worth of studies comparing the merits of small high schools to large ones have revealed several clear trends: In small schools, student and teacher attendance rates are higher, disciplinary problems are fewer, graduation rates are higher, and dropout rates are lower.

But merely cleaving enormous schools into smaller units is rarely enough to counter the alienating environments that plague many traditional high schools. So New York City adopted a more radical--and more productive--strategy at Julia Richman. The city began by making a clean sweep of the old high school in the early 1990s, emptying the building of students and staff and then introducing six new schools of no more than 300 students, each with its own leadership. The Richman planners made each of the new institutions "schools of choice," allowing students from across the city to attend. And to help the schools forge unique educational missions that students, parents, and teachers could understand and commit to, they gave the schools a level of autonomy over teacher selection, budgets, and instructional strategies that's rare in public education.

Assembly Line Academies

What makes the Julia Richman experiment so important is that the basic blueprint of the nation's high schools hasn't changed significantly since the rise of the "comprehensive" high school nearly a century ago. At that time, high schools catered primarily to a narrow elite. But that changed in the early part of the 20th century when educators faced in influx of new students, many of them immigrants, who were thought to be ill-equipped to study academics. Leaders of the Progressive movement pushed to extend high school curricula beyond traditional academic subjects to include vocational and other nonacademic subjects that are still taught in today's schools.

Julia Richman opened as a comprehensive girls' high school in the 1920s, a five-story, red-brick structure that stretches from 67th to 68th streets on Manhattan's Upper East Side. With classrooms for 2,200 students, two gymnasiums, a swimming pool, a theater, maple floors, and brass doorknobs inscribed with the words, "Public School, City of New York," the school was not only a model of the comprehensive high school, but a source of great civic pride. Its first students studied "commercial skills," such as typing and stenography. As Greek, Latin, and other advanced subjects later entered the school's curriculum, Julia Richman grew to become one of New York City's most prestigious secondary schools.

This comprehensive system made sense for the industrial economy of the time. Future lawyers, accountants, and other professionals studied academics, while those headed into mills and assembly lines learned valuable practical skills. High schools essentially served as great sorting machines, preparing students very differently for very different roles in the workforce. The system was considered to be both egalitarian and efficient, deliberately applying the industrial principles of mass production to American secondary education by housing everything under one roof.

But just as Richman fell on hard times, so too has the idea that the large, comprehensive high schools are the best way to educate students. In today's "knowledge-based" economy, preparing students for decent-paying jobs means educating all students well enough to enter college, not just an elite few. Of course, some large high schools do that job well, just as some small schools do it poorly. But today, 60 percent of American high school students attend schools of at least 1,000...