Alliance for Excellent Education Panel on Small Schools

The Alliance for Excellent Education recently hosted a webinar on "Scaling and Sustaining Positive Effects of the New York Small High Schools Initiative." The webinar discussed the findings of an ongoing study, done by policy research firm MDRC, that found that small high schools of choice helped narrow the achievement gap, increased graduation rates and improved college readiness for students in New York City.

Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and the Open Society Institute, the "New Century High Schools" initiative created more than 100 small, public high schools of choice, more than half of which were created by New Visions and its partners. Appearing on the panel were Gordon Berlin of MDRC; Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University; Bob Hughes of New Visions; Adam Tucker of the Gates Foundation; and James Shelton III of the US Department of Education.

On the success of New Visions' involvement in the initiative, Mr. Hughes commented: "New Visions was able to bring a set of social relations with a wide array of different community groups to the table. Those partnerships enabled us to really move very quickly to scale the initiative. We started with 10 schools our first year, and by the fourth year, we had 45 schools up and running in the Bronx alone. At the end of the day, it wasn't just about 'small,' it was about a set of resources that changed the relationship of teacher and student to the curriculum and the community in which they operated."

Addressing the purposeful investments in intermediary organizations, Mr. Tucker remarked: "In order to move the needle on graduation rates, it was part of our belief, part of our experience, part of our theory of action, that what New York City needed was outside capacity to help change the system...the way to help that system move forward was to invest in organizations like New Visions."