Small Schools: The Edu-Reform Failure That Wasn't

What ever happened to the small-schools craze? A little over a decade ago, philanthropists and policy leaders, believing they had identified the key to student performance, threw their collective weight behind an effort to redesign the nation's large high schools. They spent over a billion dollars and transformed hundreds of large schools into smaller ones. Then, as suddenly as it began, the effort was declared a failure and brought to an abrupt end. Now, post-mortem research indicates that small schools appear to promote several important outcomes, such as higher graduation rates.