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October 2002 |
Why Small Schools at Mountlake Terrace
High School?
Why Change?
Members of the Innovation School
and a student meet to refine their plans. |
| Other Links:
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Mountlake Terrace High School has chosen to reorganize into several
small schools in order to improve the academic program for all students.
The small schools program will positively impact a diverse range
of students, including students struggling to earn credit, students
performing at standard as well as the honor roll students. Though
MTHS is far from a failing school, a variety of school data indicates
MTHS must improve and the large body of current research reveals
the small school structure is the most powerful tool for effecting
this change.
Small Schools Research
Across the country, it has been demonstrated that students in small
schools, regardless of ethnic background or social economic status,
out perform their counterparts attending large comprehensive high
schools. Restructuring High Schools for Equity and Excellence,
by small schools researcher Valerie Lee, is one of the many studies
that confirms the benefits of smalls schools in terms of academic
performance. The study included 9,812 tenth through twelfth grade
students over a period of three years in public and private schools.
The student samples compared similarly to the demographic make up
of MTHS students in terms of ethnicity and economic status. The
study revealed that smaller schools with about 500 to 600 students
significantly out-performed students in larger schools (1,200 students
and more) in both math and reading. Researcher Lee remarks that
schools engaged in restructuring practices for the purposes of creating
smaller learning communities “really matter.” She found,
“students learned more, and learning was more equitably distributed
among students of different social backgrounds.”
Another recent study of small schools in Chicago, Small Schools:
Great Strides, found students have better attendance rates, lower
dropout rates, higher GPAs, fail fewer classes, and have higher
achievement test scores. Other research indicates many small schools
send a higher percentage of graduates to college than large comprehensive
high schools.
Where Mountlake Terrace Can Improve
An examination of how our students perform academically shows MTHS
can benefit from reorganizing into small schools. One area of concern
has been our top students that have gone off to attend four year
universities. The University of Washington has been tracking data
on students who have attended our school and what happens to their
GPAs when they arrive at the UW. Over the last decade, students
from Mountlake Terrace who have attended the UW have had some of
the most severe declines in their GPAs of almost any school in the
entire Puget Sound area. This is especially concerning to us because
the UW uses this
information as part of their admissions index and our students get
penalized when they apply to the UW because of the poor performance
over the past decade. We have also examined our SAT and ACT scores,
our standardized test scores, and National Merit data in our analysis
of our high performing students. Our national tests place us right
at the 50th percentile and our SAT and ACT scores show that we are
in a similar range. Furthermore, if you compare MTHS to schools
with similar demographic populations, our students should be performing
at a higher level. Despite having excellent teachers and students,
we see a lot of room for academic improvement.
Based on our studies, the small school structure also shows the
most promise for retaining and graduating all MTHS students. We
have focused on this issue because our current drop out/retention
rates show a need for improvement. For example, our graduating class
of 2002 began ninth grade with approximately 516 students, but
only 316 students received their diplomas in June. This particular
trend has held steady for multiple years. There is a similar trend
at the other large high schools as they have gotten larger as well.
Educational research consistently shows small schools retain more
students than large schools. For example, The Metropolitan Learning
Center, a small high school in Portland, Oregon, has a drop out
rate of two percent, while the rest of the district’s larger
schools have a drop out rate of 30 percent. We see our reorganization
as an excellent way to address the issue of retention and make a
positive impact on our students.
Small Schools Create Communities of Thriving Learners
We seek to reinvent MTHS into smaller organizational units because
it will produce the necessary conditions to profoundly affect all
our students’ academic performance. Smaller schools will provide
students and teachers the opportunity to form personalized, complex
and challenging work. In the past, we asked students to bring their
own coherence to their program, connect learning between classes,
and to navigate a path through school that will meet their future
plans all by themselves. The smaller learning communities have tremendous
potential to bring this coherence together for all students and
to thereby improve the academic performance for all students. |
