A new report describes the New York City school system’s efforts since 2002 to close large comprehensive high schools and replace them with 200 new small schools.
Released last week by the MDRC, a New York-based research group, the study finds that, by September 2007, the new small schools were serving almost as many students as the schools they replaced. Contrary to some criticism of that policy, the report says that students in the small schools, on the whole, tended to be more academically and socioeconomically disadvantaged than students in other city schools.
The report is the first of four on New York’s small-schools reform endeavor. All four are commissioned by the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which supported the reform effort.