Press Release
Graduation Rates at Small Schools, Which Serve Highly Disadvantaged Students, Are 9.5 Percentage Points Higher Than Other Schools for Comparable Students
Another Study Finds Big Gains at Small Schools
SchoolBook Blog, WNYC
August 2013
A new study finds further evidence that students at the city's small high schools are more likely to graduate on time than students at more traditional large schools, affirming the Bloomberg administration's small schools initiative. The city created more than 200 small high schools since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office while closing many low performing comprehensive high schools.
The report, by the research group MDRC, looked at a cohort of students who entered ninth grade in the fall of 2006 to see how many of them graduated on time.
On average, the four-year graduation rate for students in the small schools was 74.6 percent compared to 65.1 percent in the control group. The researchers also looked at students entering small high schools in the fall of 2004 and 2005. When all three groups were averaged, with 12,000 students attending 85 small schools, the total graduation rate was 70.4 percent compared to 60.9 percent for students attending other schools. The results build upon a previous study released last year.
"It seems pretty clear now that these small high schools are much, much stronger than some of the traditional high schools," said MDRC president Gordon Berlin. "So we came away very impressed by the size of the result."
Berlin said this performance was especially noteworthy because the city's overall high school graduation rate went up during that time period, yet the small schools continued to do better than average....
