Students in New York City's small high schools are more likely to graduate than other students, and perhaps are also better prepared for college-level reading afterward, according to the latest in an ongoing longitudinal evaluation of the schools.

Since 2002, the city has closed 31 large, struggling public high schools and replaced them with more than 200 new "small schools of choice," designed to be academically nonselective but in many cases centered around community or academic themes. All of the schools that were closed graduated 40 percent or fewer of their students.

Since the new schools first started, researchers Howard S. Bloom and Rebecca Unterman of MDRC, a New York-based research group, tracked more than 12,000 students who did and did not win a lottery-based admission to one of the city's more than 80 small schools in three cohorts from 2004 to 2007....

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