Small Schools, Big Ideas

To change America's high schools, let synergy replace squabbling.

By Thomas Toch

"The Casement and Doublehung Window Foundation has committed $14 billion over the next five years to the creation of miniature schools," the conservative education commentator Chester E. Finn Jr. reported in a playful parody of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in his weekly newsletter last April Fools Day. "Grants will be made primarily to toy factories, traditional doll-house carvers, and makers of Swiss cuckoo clocks ..."

It would be difficult for anyone in education circles today not to recognize the target of Mr. Finn's jesting. In less than four years of grantmaking, the Gates Foundation has transformed the notion of replacing large, "comprehensive" high schools with smaller, more personal models into a national movement. The world's wealthiest philanthropy has earmarked nearly $700 million to states, school systems, and a range of nonprofit organizations to create 1,400 mostly urban high schools of 400 or fewer students each—some of them in new locations, some of them in large, existing high school buildings that have been subdivided. In September, the foundation pledged $51 million to create 67 of the new-style high schools in New York City alone.

This, alas, has made conservative school reformers very unhappy: Mr. Finn's humor wasn't completely innocent. That's unfortunate. The Gates high school initiative has the potential to improve greatly the performance of the nation's secondary education system. If conservatives successfully attack the nascent small-schools movement, students will suffer, and an important...