Report Calls for Personal Touch In High School

By Meg Sommerfeld

High schools as they now exist are too large, impersonal, and rigid, a report released last week says.

The report, two years in the making, calls on America's high schools to evolve into smaller communities where students and adults know each other well, the curriculum emphasizes depth over breadth, and a flexible, active learning process replaces the factory-era model of teachers lecturing to rows of students. It also urges that the Carnegie unit, the long-standing gauge of whether students graduate and one of the factors that shape the way the school day is planned, be redesigned or abolished.

"High school lays the foundation for what Americans become, and what Americans become shapes the high school," says the report, a joint project of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the National Association of Secondary School Principals. "Now, buffeted by powerful and unsettling winds, both the high school and the country are searching...