Mixed Record For Coalition Schools Is Seen

By Debra Viadero

Newark, Del.

A brown banner hangs at one end of the cavernous atrium at Paul M. Hodgson Vocational-Technical High School here. "Coalition of Essential Schools," it reads--a hanging advertisement of the school's pride in belonging to that national school-reform network.

But not every high school that has experimented with the coalition's ideas has been so proud of the results. A little more than a decade after Brown University professor Theodore R. Sizer launched the coalition, the group's record...