EDUCATION 18 Ohio high schools part of pilot program

Advocates say smaller schools lead to greater student-teacher rapport.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- Eighteen large, urban high schools in Ohio are part of a nationwide effort that is dividing schools up to determine whether students in smaller schools perform better.
"Ohio has probably the largest concentration of these schools," said Deborah Howard, program director for school improvement at KnowledgeWorks Foundation, an Ohio-based education philanthropy.
Linden-McKinley and Brookhaven in Columbus are two of the schools that have been transformed into laboratories in the five-year, $50 million project. The experiment involving 25,000 Ohio students is being sponsored by the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, the Bill & amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, the state and federal departments of education and others.
Though the 18 schools' exteriors look the same, the interiors have been divided into a total of 58 smaller schools.
Counters 50-year trend
The Ohio project and other small-school programs nationwide counter a 50-year-old national movement that favors big high schools. The argument for the larger schools has been that they are more cost-effective and can offer a wider range of specialty classes such as science and languages, Howard said.
She said, however, that those specialty classes aren't worth much if students can't read or understand basic math. Big schools can reduce cost per student, but some research shows that they don't necessarily reduce cost per graduate because so many students either can't graduate or drop out, Howard said.
Brookhaven Principal Talisa Dixon said that it will take three to five years to measure achievement gains.
"It's a process," said Roger Braund, a Brookhaven science teacher. "It's not something that you can get done in a hurry."
Anthony Arrington, principal of the new school of business leadership at Linden-McKinley, said the idea is that by making the schools smaller, teachers will have a better rapport with students and be able to provide more direction.
Better discipline
Georgia Hauser, a business and marketing teacher at Brookhaven for more than three decades, said discipline issues have largely disappeared when she has had opportunities to work with a small group of students.
Students at Brookhaven were not sure they liked the idea of the new format.
Eleventh-grader Ruth Jones said she didn't want to make the change, but now thinks it is not so bad.
"I was thinking I was never going to see my friends, they just want us broken up," she said.
Now, she said she's built some good relationships with teachers and has met new people. She said that behavior also seems to have improved.