What ever happened to the small-schools craze? A little over a decade ago, philanthropists and policy leaders, believing they had identified the key to student performance, threw their collective weight behind an effort to redesign the nation's large high schools. They spent over a billion dollars and transformed hundreds of large schools into smaller ones. Then, as suddenly as it began, the effort was declared a failure and brought to an abrupt end.

Now, post-mortem research indicates that small schools appear to promote several important outcomes, such as higher graduation rates.

So were small schools just another failed school improvement effort? Or do they actually work? The answer, it turns out, is not an all-or-nothing proposition.....

.....Creating smaller schools wasn't a bad idea, per se. But as a large-scale school improvement strategy, the movement was destined to fail. The theory of action—that wholesale reproduction of a particular structure would lead to equal learning outcomes—simply didn't make sense. To paraphrase the policy scholar Richard Elmore, schools are vessels "into which educators and communities" can "pour whatever content and pedagogy" they want. In other words, the size of a school building is a limited tool that leaves most of the instructional core untouched.....

.....But were small schools really the problem? A decade later, we have fairly robust evidence suggesting otherwise. A 2014 study by the nonpartisan research organization MDRC, for instance, found that graduation rates in New York City improved by 9.5 percent at small schools, with effects across every student group—a tremendous increase that also led to higher college enrollments. Another study, by a team at Northwestern University's Institute for Policy Research, found similar increases in high school graduation rates in Chicago's public schools, despite the fact that small schools generally served a more disadvantaged population in the city.

Making schools smaller was not an inherently unsound strategy. It was a poorly shepherded one. Had policy elites thought more about their plan, developed a more nuanced theory of action, set more reasonable goals, or taken a more holistic approach to measuring outcomes, the small-schools movement might have turned out differently. The movement's leaders might have built upon their work or developed a more coherent approach. Instead they folded, threw in their cards, upped the ante, and reshuffled.....

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