Small schools are rated better.

• Position: Education

Faced with dismal statistics and the gargantuan task of fixing what critics call a broken system riddled with inequities, some educators have turned to supporting the development of small schools. Unlike large, "warehouse" schools with thousands of students and the system of anonymity they perpetuate, small schools with 300 to 600 pupils are more likely to solve problems because they cannot be hidden and ignored, contends Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor in the School of Education, Stanford (Calif.) University. An expert in teacher education, she explains how the public school system in the U.S. developed during the last century to respond to the needs of an industrializing society. From a rural one-room schoolhouse model, an urban school bureaucracy was then created to educate the masses--five percent for "thinking work" and the remainder for rote work and semiskilled labor. In this setting, efficiency was gained by increasing the size of schools and using a "platoon" system where students went to a different part of a school every 45 minutes to study a different subject taught by a different teacher. Students were...