Patricia Kilday Hart
Size Matters
If small high schools graduate more and better-prepared students than big ones do, why aren’t more high schools small? Good question.
(Page 2 of 2)
Ah, yes, football. Now we’re on to something. Because, you see, football is a major reason for megaschools. In communities whose schools are bursting at the seams, voters have firmly refused bond proposals to build a second high school, even when the educational benefits for students are clear-cut. Usually, the “anti” campaign wraps itself in platitudes like “tradition” and “excellence,” with the not-so-opaque subtext of “state championship football team.” Opponents of building a second high school in the Austin suburb of West Lake Hills a few years ago sported bumper stickers proclaiming, “Westlake Divided by Two Equals Mediocrity.” “You mean ‘mediocre football,’” snorted the parents of kids in Austin schools whose football teams regularly get shellacked by Westlake.
The insidious role of football dawned on Bill Ercoline, a former president of the school board in the Judson Independent School District, on the northeast side of San Antonio, as he sat on the graduation stage one year in the late nineties and saw how few students were getting their diplomas. His daughter had graduated from Converse Judson, a football powerhouse, in 1990 in a class of 850, so Ercoline braced himself for a long evening, since the student body had been growing steadily for years. “I thought we’d have eleven hundred kids,” he recalled. “We didn’t have seven hundred.” Ercoline later discovered that that year’s graduating class had started with 1,400 ninth-graders. “We were graduating one for every two kids. If we were a business, no one would accept this,” Ercoline said. “Somebody has to be responsible for these kids.”
In 1999 Ercoline persuaded the board to propose a bond package for a second high school. It was soundly defeated. “It came down to football,” he told me. “We had name-calling going on. It was ugly. A high school assistant principal called me and said, ‘We’ve got to think about those big bears that sit on the fifty-yard line’”—a reference to an influential group of die-hard football boosters. “It had nothing to do with the kids. It was about keeping a large pool [of athletes] to pick from.” Ercoline managed to get the board to call for a second referendum, but it also failed. Finally, the board found a strategy that prevailed in a third referendum. An extensive early-voting program—ballots available at every parental event at every school—helped the proposal win. “We lost every polling place on Election Day,” Ercoline recalled. “Then, lo and behold, the early voting from these little elementary schools came in and put us over for the high school.”
Duncanville, a Dallas suburb that Sports Illustrated last May rated as having the twenty-fourth best athletic program in the country, went in the opposite direction. Three years ago the school board had to decide whether to expand the high school or build a second one. Since the construction of a new ninth-grade center was a more pressing concern, the board decided to enlarge Duncanville High. After the community passed a bond issue, the expanded school opened last year with 863,137 square feet—about the size, as the Dallas Morning News noted, of four Wal-Mart Supercenters combined. Nearly 3,800 students attend the school. Steve Martin, a Duncanville businessman who was the president of the political action committee that helped pass the bond issue, told me that athletics was “a very minute part of the discussion” on whether to enlarge the current school or build a new one. But he also said that Duncanville High boasts some of the premier athletics facilities in the country, including a 1,500-seat baseball stadium, a fitting tribute to its three state championships in that sport. If the district chose to build a second high school, Martin told me, it would be very expensive to match Duncanville High’s athletics facilities. “We don’t have the resources,” he said. “There’s a sense of pride for the kids too.”
But nowhere is it etched in stone that a good high school must be encircled by costly green fields. So the Texas High School Project, armed with philanthropic dollars, has begun doling out grants to school districts willing to take a chance on entirely new types of schools. An example of a high school that could receive such funding is a high school named Challenge Early College, in southwest Houston, where teenagers are allowed to work concurrently on high school and associate college degrees. “They started out in a bunch of portables on a community-college campus. It is not a typical setting with a lot of green grass,” says Fitzpatrick. “But getting kids on a college campus when they are fourteen and getting them comfortable with the idea that they are college material has a huge impact.”
What about downsizing the megaschools that currently exist? In four districts with high-needs students—Austin, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Ysleta—Fitzpatrick’s group has funded redesigns of large schools to divide the campus into smaller “schools within a school.” The idea is to allow teachers to work with the same teens during their entire high school careers. After Austin’s Johnston High received an unacceptable rating from the Texas Education Agency, the school district reorganized the campus into themed “academies” called Arts and Humanities, Global Enterprise and Information Technology, and Scientific Inquiry and Design. The idea, according to Rosalinda Hernandez, an Austin ISD associate superintendent, was to reduce the number of kids that a group of teachers would be responsible for. “Here, the teachers get to know three hundred kids, instead of twenty-seven hundred,” she said. “It is very difficult to establish that relationship in a big school. That’s a big plus.”
Cynic that I am, that sounded a little bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, until I visited Johnston and talked with its campus academic officer, Celina Estrada. She told me that by dividing up the school, the same twenty teachers will track the same group of kids for four years. Once a day, they meet in “seminar” with a teacher who talks to them about their grades and goals. And that teacher too will stick with them for all four years. I visited a seminar class, and the kids told me that their teacher, Lindsey Vela, regularly talked to them one-on-one about their grades. “I never had a teacher who actually wants us to get ourselves to college,” a boy named Jose said. All the kids expressed a preference for Johnston’s new format.
Two things are certain about the future of Texas high schools. One is that the big-band, big-football high school is not going to disappear. The other is that Texas cannot continue to rely solely upon this model without losing entire generations of students. Big urban and suburban districts are going to have to offer a menu of smaller high schools, theme high schools (such as a girls’ school), or schools within a school based on career tracks (for instance, high tech) if they are to perform their mission of educating every student. Then kids can choose the atmosphere best suited for them, one in which a grown-up will know their name and be responsible for their success. And that will be something to do handsprings over.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
