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The Breakup: Suburbs Try Smaller High Schools

Union Township, Ohio

With its football games, average test scores, and angst-filled social world, Glen Este High School might well symbolize America's suburban high school, remarkable chiefly for how typical it is.

The folks who run Glen Este and Amelia, the other sprawling, brick high school in this middle-class district 20 miles east of Cincinnati, know that many embattled urban principals would envy their 85 percent graduation rate and covet even those middling test scores. But district leaders here believe average isn't good enough; they want better.

Their schools may not be academically failing and violence-torn, but here, amid the gently rolling woods and farmland, they are fighting...