Small High School Research Articles

Using Book Clubs to Enhance Social–Emotional and Academic Learning With Urban Adolescent Females of Color

The purpose of this article is to elucidate how book clubs can be used as a forum to enhance students' social–emotional and academic learning. The author conducted a study in a small urban high school with 2 different book clubs: The younger group consisted of 2 African American 9th graders, 2 Latina 9th graders, and 1 African American 10th grader; the 2nd group consisted of 11th-grade girls—2 African Americans and 5 Latinas. Qualitative data came from various sources, including observations, interviews, book club discussions, and surveys. The author conducted pre-interviews with all 12 girls to document literacy, family, and school information; she used post-interviews and surveys to analyze the girls' attitudes toward their experiences. She transcribed and analyzed all interviews and book club discussions (a total of 22 meetings with the younger group and 24 meetings with the older group). The findings show that book clubs promote academic literacy learning and the competencies of social–emotional learning.

The Meaning(s) of Teacher Leadership in an Urban High School Reform

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the meaning of teacher leadership from teachers’ perspectives. The authors examine teachers’ practice of and talk about legitimate sources of power and influence in the context of an urban high school reform. Design: This is an interpretive study of teacher leadership situated in one small high school within a large urban high school (comprised of six small school communities) in a Midwestern city. The school was engaged in a technology-driven, project-based reform requiring team teaching and high levels of teacher involvement in curricular, pedagogical, and other organizational decision making. Researchers conducted monthly observations and two to three in depth-interviews with each participant and collected and analyzed relevant documents during the 2007-08 school year. Participants included all seven teachers in the focus school, the small school administrator, and a district-level administrator. Findings: Data revealed a cultural logic that afforded some teachers more authority than others. Three of the seven teachers were repeatedly identified as being the leaders (despite other teachers actively influencing organizational activities). Analysis of teachers’ talk about teacher leadership and related interactions revealed patterns falling into three categories: organizationally legitimized roles, institutionally legitimized content area expertise, and gendered leadership roles. Significance: Because leadership is a cultural construct itself, this study brings to the foreground the meaning(s) of teacher leadership from teachers’ perspectives and how these meanings reward or eclipse actual leadership practices. This is especially salient for researchers and leaders interested in the role of teacher leadership in nurturing democratic school communities.

Impact of Occupational Instruction on the Performance and Vocational Identity of Special Education Students

A special education teacher in a small rural high school instructed 23 students with disabilities in the occupational domain of the Life Centered Career Education curriculum. The students increased their Performance Battery scores from pre to post test, achieving both mastery on the competency tests and a skill level comparable to that of regular education students (n=15). Although the instructed students tended to report increased levels of occupational information from pre to post testing, they did not report fewer barriers to employment or increased vocational identity on the My Vocational Situation test.

Teachers Providing Social and Emotional Support: A Study of Advisor Role Enactment in Small High Schools

Background/ContextThis study investigates the teacher's role in the student advisory process, which to date has generated limited research literature. Teachers who serve as student advisors assume a role that extends beyond the more traditional instructional role, and includes implied or explicit expectations to provide student advisees with academic and nonacademic support. Part of this nonacademic support role involves providing social and emotional support to students. This study particularly focuses on the advisor role and advisory programs in small high schools, which places a premium on strong student-teacher relationships, rendering advisory programs a central structure. Organizational theory that distinguishes role complexity from organizational complexity further frames the study, which explores the complex teacher-advisor role in an organizational setting that has intentionally decreased the number of differentiated professional roles.Research QuestionHow do teachers in small high schools enact their advisor roles, specifically their roles relative to the social and emotional support of students?ParticipantsTeachers assigned the role of advisor in three small public high schools.Research DesignThis is a qualitative study with a theoretical framework based on Giddens’ structuration theory.ConclusionsAdvisors were found to possess identifiable characteristics that impacted how they enacted their roles, and ultimately, provided support and guidance to their students. These characteristics concerned advisors’ background knowledge, relevant experience, skills and guiding principles about advising. Teacher education, either in preservice or professional development settings, contributed minimally to the personal resources and schemas, or guiding principles, that teachers used as they enacted the advisor role. Advisors with lower levels of personal resources, and less developed role schemas, tended to struggle more with the role, while advisors bringing more of these assets to their work experienced greater comfort and effectiveness with it. Implications are discussed for the small schools movement, teachers’ potential to provide social and emotional support to their students, and role complexity within organizations.

Can school structures improve teacher-student relationships? The relationship between advisory programs, personalization and students’ academic achievement

In this paper, we present findings from a three-year study of students' perceptions of personalization and, specifically, advisory as a reform strategy and its relationship to students' academic progress at 14 recently converted small high schools in a large, urban school district in California. This study examined the degree to which students' sense of personalization (connections to the school and to adults at the school) interacted with students' academic achievement, as measured by standardized test scores and weighted grade-point averages. In particular, we examined the relationship between students' perceptions of formal structures to enhance personalization -- such as advisory periods -- and students' academic achievement.

Beyond Changing Culture in Small High Schools: Reform Models and Changing Instruction With Project-Based Learning

This study describes the status of small school reforms in U.S. high schools and contemplates their future. It asks how cultural and instructional reforms differ across school reform types. Analyses focus on indicators of teacher and student culture as well as instructional reforms including project-based learning (PBL) and other inquiry-related practices. Findings are based on data from a national survey completed by 395 high school teachers who were responsible for and had used PBL in core academic subjects. Study participants taught in large, comprehensive high schools; in schools that had converted to small learning communities; and in newly created small school start-ups. Some of these small schools and conversions were based on a reform model, and others were not. Teachers in reform model schools reported the greatest number of cultural and instructional reforms, followed by teachers in other small schools. Reform models were particularly strong on instructional reforms and student culture. In general, start-up teachers reported more success implementing reforms than teachers in conversion schools, and teacher culture was reformed much more often than student culture and instruction. These findings help shed light on how widely practices and conditions have spread throughout the broader small schools movement, and which of these (including extensive PBL use) only seem to flourish in schools that subscribe to a holistic reform model.

Patterns in Student Perceptions of Start-Up and Conversion Small High Schools

Schools created as part of the small schools movement have been in operation for almost a decade, allowing identification of patterns in their growth. This study examines 4 years of survey data on 12 start-up and 13 conversion small high schools. Start-up small schools, almost all of which began with one grade level and grew by one grade per year, were highly rated in Year 1, relative to students’ previous schools and to a set of established effective schools. A Year 2 dip was followed by a rebound in Years 3 and 4. Conversion schools’ growth trajectory appeared dependent on the school's level of desired autonomy, defined as the amount of decision making the school ideally would have. Schools with higher desired autonomy showed the most growth as measured by student perceptions.

“So What.” “Who Cares?” “Whatever.” Changing Adolescents’Attitudes in the Art Classroom

AbstractWhile teaching art in a small midwestern high school, I began an investigation to better understand my students’ learning experiences. As my students engaged in a visual culture—oriented art curriculum, I investigated their responses to curricular activities, their interactions, and my teaching practice. Student journal entries, survey responses, teacher observations and reflections, transcriptions of classroom discourse, and student artwork were among data collected for analysis. Although the activities the students encountered during the curriculum were noteworthy, the relationships and interactions occurring in response to curricular activities were of most significance in influencing students’ actions. This essay further describes my observations and findings from this study, and offers suggestions for the teaching of adolescents in the art classroom.

School Choice or Schools’ Choice?

Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic research in three New York City small high schools, this study examines the role of the school in managing school choice and asks what social processes are associated with principals’ disparate approaches. Although district policy did not allow principals to select students based on their performance, two of the three schools in this study circumvented these rules to recruit and retain a population that would meet local accountability targets. This article brings together sensemaking and social network theories to offer a theoretical account of schools’ management of choice in an era of accountability. In doing so, the author demonstrates that principals’ sensemaking about the accountability and choice systems occurred within the interorganizational networks in which they were embedded and was strongly conditioned by their own professional biographies and worldviews. Principals’ networks offered access to resources that could be activated to make sense of the accountability and choice systems. How principals perceived accountability and choice policies influenced whether they activated their social networks for assistance in strategically managing the choice process, as well as how they made sense of advice available to them through these networks. Once activated, principals’ networks provided uneven access to instrumental and expressive resources. Taken together, these results suggest that schools respond to accountability and choice plans in varied ways that are not simply a function of their short-term incentives.

"So What." "Who Cares?" "Whatever.": Changing Adolescents' Attitudes in the Art Classroom

While teaching art in a small midwestern high school, I began an investigation to better understand my students' learning experiences. As my students engaged in a visual culture-oriented art curriculum, I investigated their responses to curricular activities, their interactions, and my teaching practice. Student journal entries, survey responses, teacher observations and reflections, transcriptions of classroom discourse, and student artwork were among data collected for analysis. Although the activities the students encountered during the curriculum were noteworthy, the relationships and interactions occurring in response to curricular activities were of most significance in influencing students' actions. This essay further describes my observations and findings from this study, and offers suggestions for the teaching of adolescents in the art classroom.

A Focus on Achievement at Excel High School: A Best Practices Case Study

This case study describes the first years of leadership for Headmaster Ligia Noriega at Excel High School in South Boston, one of the Boston Public Schools' small high schools. It is one of a series of case studies developed by Ed Vestors and the Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy to share the best practices of schools that are awarded the Ed Vestors Thomas W. Payzant School on the Move Prize, given each year to one of the most improving Boston Public Schools. Ed Vestors hosts the $100,000 Prize and awards the Prize following a thorough quantitative and qualitative review. The purposes of the Prize are to highlight the ongoing work of strengthening schools and advancing the academic achievement of all students over a four-year period and to support the sharing of best practices with other schools in and outside of Boston. A portion of the award is set aside for a case study documenting the successful strategies from each year's award-winning school. The case study of Excel High School is featured in this Special Section.

An integrative cultural view of achievement motivation: Parental and classroom predictors of children's goal orientations when learning mathematics in Korea.

Our goal was to identify how students' perceptions of their parents shape the kind and degree of motivational goal orientations that they adopt in their mathematics classroom, broadening the application of achievement goal orientation theory and self-determination theory to students in Korea. Two groups of students participated, one from a middle school located in a large metropolitan area and the other from a small city high school. Multisample path analysis of data from both groups revealed that Korean students' different goal orientations were predicted by their perceptions of parental goals and motivating styles and by their perceptions of classroom goal structures, mediated by different types of self-regulated motivations. Particularly interesting was the finding that Korean students' degree of mastery goal adoption was associated mostly with identified regulation, not with intrinsic motivation, and predicted by their perceptions of their parents' motivating styles, both autonomy supportive and controlling, in addition to perceptions of parents' mastery goals. Perceptions of classroom goals were stronger predictors of students' own goals than were perceptions of parents' goals and motivating styles. We offer an integration of self-determination theory and achievement goal theory.

Feeling Like a Failure: Teaching/Learning Abolition Through <i>the Good the Bad and the Innocent</i>

Feeling Like a Failure: Teaching/Learning Abolition Through the Good the Bad and the Innocent Jessi Lee Jackson (bio) and Erica R. Meiners (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Kinnari Jivani , “Emancipation” (2009) Example # 1, from Jessi: It is the 8th week of English class in our adult high school completion program, and we have just read a short excerpt from Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? As a class, we review vocabulary words, and then, piece by piece, work to understand Davis’s argument for prison abolition. All of the students have firsthand experience of the system, and they agree that the prison system is clearly racist in its impact. But when we get to the point of discussing abolition—of shutting down prisons—the class quiets. The disagreements start. “I agree with abolishing the death penalty, but . . .” “But some people need to get locked up.” “I agree we need to change the system, but getting rid of prisons entirely . . .” “It’s too much . . .” “I don’t think we need to go that far . . .” I find myself in the awkward position of being the only person without direct experience of being locked up, and the only vocal abolitionist. By the end of our conversation, I perceive that students have made up their minds and are united in their analysis: the prison system is messed up, but abolition is “going too far.” I wonder to myself what went wrong in our conversation. Why was I not able to present abolition in a way that challenged people to go further or question their assumptions about the necessity of prisons? Example #2: from Erica: I am teaching a Feminist Activism class at my public, urban, relatively open-access university. We are in the last third of the semester and the course has centered on anti-prison organizing. Students in the course all identify as women, many are mothers, and a few have named friends and relatives who are locked up. All are working full-time or part-time, most are the first in their family to attend college, and the majority are Latinas. They are women who enlisted in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) in high school because it offered a way out of their neighborhood, and they are taking six years to complete an undergraduate degree. For me, our term together has been smart, often funny, full of good, thick conversations, and we have hosted a few guest speakers who are engaged in small-scale anti-prison work across the city of Chicago. The course has included a range of [End Page 20] readings this semester—from Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? to “The Critical Resistance-INCITE statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex” to selections from Bissonette’s When the Prisoners Ran Walpole—and while many admit that the system targets them and their families, and that it does not make their communities safer, the ending discussions, to me, seem to always fall flat. We circulate around “what about the really bad people?”: the child molesters? rapists? those who really belong in prison? I am the one sitting—yes in the front of the room, with my coffee cup, waiting, waiting, wondering. Yes, what about the bad people, Erica? Signing up as a card-carrying abolitionist and admitting there are no “bad people” seems hard for those of us that have experienced violence, or perpetrated violence. As colleagues and friends involved in working and thinking through anti-prison engagements, we are motivated to write this article because of our commitment to resisting our nation’s punishing carceral logic and our similar perceptions of our failures in teaching and learning abolition. We offer these examples because they are immediate, and because, as the people in the classroom were closer to incarceration than most populations in the United States perceive themselves to be, we naively thought that conversations might be different. We teach and learn about abolition in a variety of contexts. Both of us teach in a small community-based free adult high school completion program for formerly incarcerated adults (Erica for ten years, Jessi for three). Housed in a vocational training center that...

“Beware! This is a Man!”

I have long had an ambivalent relationship with who I am. In the earliest years of my education, I was categorized as bookish and spent many a lunch period in the school library and several summer afternoons riding my orange banana-seated bike to the county library. The women who worked there knew me by name and kept books like The Neverending Story aside until my next visit, allowing me to immerse myself in the minds and worlds of other people. In high school, like many a gay man before me, I joined drama club almost immediately and acknowledged the existence of my body for the first time. I only saw it, though, as a tool for acting like someone else. Whether as a judge in The Crucible or an aging father in Anne of the Thousand Days, I had to comport my body so it would be seen as someone else’s. By the standards of a small town Texas high school, I did well, earning the occasional medal or trophy. People liked when I pretended to be another person. In college, I found a home that allowed me to continue my immersion in the words and ideas of others. Though never a stellar student across the board, I excelled in classes that exposed me to rich, diverse stories of other people’s lives. I spent hours in the library with the printed editions of the MLA International Bibliography open before me, photocopying and highlighting journal articles for research papers that often earned As or close to it. Though I would barely admit it at the time, I loved this kind of work. It became difficult to ignore my body, however, and I spent numerous hours in Houston’s gay bars and adult bookstores searching for men who wanted to use their bodies in the same ways I was realizing I wanted to use mine. Once I started, I couldn’t stop, and I spent my life moving between two extremes, one that pushed my mind to its limits and the other that pushed my body. Rarely did the two intersect. At least that was the case until I started graduate school in women’s studies in the mid-1990s and began teaching for the first time. At that point, I was forced to ask myself certain questions. When does my maleness provoke a response from students? My whiteness? In what ways does my queerness shape the class? What exactly do students see when I enter the classroom? And how does what they see change when a particular aspect of the

It’s Only Part of the Story: The Fallacy of Improved Outcome Data in New York City’s Effort to Make Its High Schools Small

This article examines a recent reform effort that has opened hundreds of small high schools in poor urban communities in New York City, The New Century Schools Initiative (NCSI). Outcome data have shown that NCSI has dramatically increased graduation rates among poor students and students of color. However, an ethnographic study of the instructional practices at 3 NCSI high schools revealed that these schools are struggling to maintain high expectations and to prepare their students for higher education. In a climate that prioritizes outcome data, these challenges are obscured. Consequently, this article argues that urban school reform focus its efforts on improving instructional practice so to truly make sustainable improvements in the education of poor students.

ASHA Members in the Big Easy: Convention Tops 11,000

ASHA Members in the Big Easy: Convention Tops 11,000

Evaluation Findings from High School Reform Efforts in Baltimore

The Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS) is one of the first urban districts in the country to undertake large-scale high school reform, phasing in small learning communities by opening new high schools and transforming large, comprehensive high schools into small high schools. With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a dozen local foundations, and school reform developers and technical assistance providers, BCPSS opened 18 small high schools between 2002 and 2006. Using data from surveys, administrative records, and site visits, we examine the implementation and outcomes of these reform efforts. Although BCPSS high schools met many obstacles while implementing the reform, including continual leadership turnover and limited resources, students and staff in the small learning communities reported more positive social and academic environments than their counterparts in the district's comprehensive high schools. In addition, students in small, newly created high schools demonstrated positive academic outcomes (e.g., higher test scores, engagement) relative to students in the other schools in the district.

After the Bell Rings: Student Perceptions of After-School

Background/Context Research on after-school programs has traditionally focused on those programs serving students in younger grades but found positive correlations between student participation in enriching after-school activities and school engagement. For older students, particularly teenagers, there tends to be lower participation. Research has also shown that students learn at different rates and need different amounts of time with the same material. School-based after-school programs have been one policy intervention to address this need. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This study sought to understand better why students in one New York City high school attended after-school sessions and what kept them coming. Who does not attend, and why not? Finally, was the time after school being used in a way that most benefited students? How might the insights of those students who did attend push educators to improve after-school programming, both in terms of the teaching and in terms of how we structure these sessions? Setting This study took place in a small public New York City high school with almost all students participating in the federal free and reduced lunch program. Research Design In this action research study conducted with her own students in her own classroom, the author sought to use student perceptions to make programmatic changes that ultimately benefited the students attending the program. Through surveys, exit slips, interviews, and journal entries, the author collected student opinions and perceptions of the school's after-school program and changed the structure of her after-school sessions to maximize both attendance and student outcomes. Data Collection and Analysis The data suggest that a loosely structured and flexible program with varied types of help and, most important, individual attention is an after-school model that appears to appeal to high school students, particularly in the upper grades. Teenagers need to feel that they get something out of attending. It is critical to have the support of school administrators who understand that attendance figures alone do not reflect “success.” Students reported frustration when they were unable to get help after school because the teacher or peer tutors were overextended. The author recommends that policy makers focus on the quality of service, instead of the quantity served, to create and maintain successful interventions for all students.

Non-Stranger Identification: How Accurately Do Eyewitnesses Determine If a Person is Familiar

The extensive research literature on eyewitness memory has been restricted to memory for strangers. This study assessed how accurately people can recognize individuals they have casually seen before, and whether this determination is affected by the cross-race effect and exposure time to the test picture. One hundred and fifty seven Asian and non-Hispanic White high school students in a small private high school viewed yearbook pictures of (a) graduated students who were seniors when participants were freshman (“familiar”) or (b) unfamiliar individuals, and responded whether each target individual was familiar. Recognition accuracy was surprisingly low. The mean hit rate was .45. The mean false alarm rate was .28; 28% of unfamiliar individuals were misidentified as familiar. Further, the cross-race effect was not evidenced in these results. An eyewitness’s report that he can recognize a perpetrator because he has seen him casually in the past is of dubious reliability.

High School Classmates and College Success

This paper uses administrative data from the University of Texas-Austin to examine whether the number of same high school classmates at college entry influences college achievement, measured by grade point average (GPA) and persistence. For each freshman cohort from 1993 through 2003 we calculate the number and ethnic makeup of college freshmen from each Texas high school. Empirical specifications include high school fixed effects to control for unobservable differences across schools that influence both college enrollment behavior and academic performance. Using an instrumental variables/fixed effects estimation strategy, we also evaluate whether “marginal” increases in the number of high school classmates influence college grades. Results show that students who arrive on campus with a larger number of high school classmates outperform their counterparts from smaller high school cohorts. Average effects of larger high school cohorts on college achievement are small, but a marginal increase in the number of same-race classmates raises GPA by 0.1 point. Results provide suggestive evidence that minority academic benefits from larger high school cohorts are greater for minority compared with white students.