Leading Small: Eight Lessons for Leaders in Transforming Large Comprehensive High Schools

Abstract

Simply carving up a large comprehensive high school into several smaller schools does not guarantee improvement. But Mr. Copland and Ms. Boatright find that key lessons garnered from numerous small-school conversions can guide school leaders through the cultural changes that must accompany the structural ones if small schools are to fulfill their potential. IN RARE contemplative moment, Steven Gering is scratching his head and thinking. Over the past 18 months, assistant principal Gering has been leading the effort to reshape massive suburban Mountlake Terrace High School into a collection of autonomous small schools, and his frenetic schedule has left him with little reflective time. The school now perches on the precipice of change. It is late July, and in a few short weeks Terrace's nearly 1,900 students will split into five new ninth- through 12th-grade schools of no more than 400 students, each with its own unique mission, goals, course offerings, faculty, and schedule. Gering and his colleagues continue to work out the remaining details for the transformation, including not-insignificant final decisions about exactly how each of the new small schools will be led. Pondering the question of leadership, Gering notes, We've changed our view of teacher leadership and administration. Small schools just take more leaders than large schools, more people to step up and provide the knowledge and skills we need at any particular moment. You've heard how it's important to have teachers as generalists in small schools. Well, we also need leaders as generalists. For school administrators and teachers, the process of change begun by Mountlake Terrace -- just one of numerous comprehensive high school conversion projects across the U.S. -- raises some fundamental questions for those seeking to create and lead a different kind of secondary school experience for America's young people. How should leadership in a small high school differ from leadership in a large one? What unique leadership opportunities do small schools offer? And what new challenges or old di-lemmas remain? Moreover, what leadership lessons can those who seek to transform large comprehensive high schools derive from the knowledge base that is emerging on small schools? What is certain, to Gering and others like him, is that leadership must adapt if the current movement to downsize high schools is ever to matter much. If educators can learn anything from more than two decades' worth of efforts to restructure schools, it is that structural changes alone are not enough to improve schools for the students who attend them or the professionals who work in them.1 Without key shifts in the emphasis and disposition of leadership, the new small schools that emerge from the transformed large schools run the risk of winding up simply as smaller versions of their former giant selves. Transforming the Behemoth Gering and his colleagues at Mountlake Terrace High School are among many secondary educators currently seeking to transform large comprehensive high schools into collections of smaller learning communities, a movement gaining momentum nationwide. Significant investments made in this reform strategy suggest that educators and policy makers place considerable stock in smaller learning communities as a way to improve schooling for students and teachers. Along with grants from the U.S. Department of Education totaling well over $145 million annually, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation initiatives have so far funneled some $375 million toward this end.2 Why are so many large high schools downsizing? progression of studies beginning in the late 1980s and continuing to date strongly suggests that small schools are more productive and effective than large ones. Reviews of research summarize the findings of such studies and the advantages of small schools for students.3 As one researcher summed it up, A large body of research in the affective and social realms overwhelmingly affirms the superiority of small schools. …