Getting small: transforming our high schools: Sacramento's large, impersonal high schools are becoming smaller learning communities that provide customized paths for student to reach standards mastery.

More than a hundred years ago, a highly centralized educational bureaucracy was born out of the successful industrial management model--high school. This model focused on an approach that emphasized time and specialization due to a heavy reliance on unskilled labor. School attendance was mandatory, while high quality achievement was optional. Perhaps because high schools were partly responsible for producing "raw products" for the labor force, the industrial management model became the foundation for the development of America's high schools.

Sacramento City Unified School District's high schools are not unlike their average American counterparts. Like the assembly line model, bells still sound for the beginning and ending of mostly unrelated learning periods. Our high schools have far too many students (2,000 to 2,700) and few support services that nourish the development of the emerging adult. A sorting system remains based upon arbitrary, value-laden assessments as to who is smart and who is not so smart. The system has little chance of success in the Information Age.

High schools in the new economy

Our Information Age focuses on the use of technology and the globalization of the labor force. Due to "cost effectiveness," unskilled jobs increasingly migrate outside the United States. Technology advances have rapidly reduced the number of available vocational jobs. Further, the economy today stresses cognitive rather than manual labor skills.

Where the industrial model saw students as raw products, the new economy views students as human resource capital for the Information Age. Today's world values intellectual capital. The 21st century puts a premium on people who are able to work together, people who are able to solve problems as they arise and who can easily adapt to changing technology. How can high schools be organized to add value to the intellectual capital of today's youth?

Given the juxtaposition of these two concepts, it is not surprising that the desire for high schools to change has met with both subtle and outright resistance. Despite a bleak past of failed reforms, a past shared by other districts in the nation, SCUSD has embarked on a "systems approach" to bring about high school transformation. The district is one of seven school districts in the country to receive $8 million from the Carnegie Foundation to transform its high schools, as well as a $4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Relationship crisis

Our initiative, which we call e21, begins with the notion that schools must change profoundly in order to educate current, and future generations of children successfully. It is grounded in the reality that not only has the model of the labor force evolved, but also the definition of the family unit is more varied than ever before. All relationships--school to home, teacher to student, student to system--are dysfunctioning.

Once upon a time children relied on an abundance of extended family relationships. Today, many students are more likely to spend time alone or with other peers. Our new model seeks to transform--not merely reform--this relationship crisis by ensuring that our system guarantees personalization.

Over the next five years, our goal is to transform Sacramento high schools from large, impersonal educational institutions to small, personalized learning communities. They will be transformed in name, culture and practice into teaching and learning centers that view teachers as instructional experts, principals as instructional leaders, students as active participants, and parents and the community as meaningful partners in supporting student achievement.

Seven essential elements provide the framework that guides SCUSD's transformation:

1. Small, caring and personalized learning communities;

2. Student-centered system with student supports and safety nets;

3. Student pathways to the world of work and post-secondary education;

4. Rigorous, relevant, standards-driven teaching and learning;

5. Culture of continuous learning;

6. Collective responsibility; and

7. Home-school-community alliances.

The engine of our transformation and the major lever to ignite meaningful change are the smaller learning communities. We believe the evidence that smaller learning communities, coupled with other strategic initiatives, can provide the nexus from the Industrial to Information Age.

Scholars across the country have already made the case for small high schools. The evidence for small learning communities is less conclusive, but provides valuable insights. Ayers, Klonsky and Lyons (2000) provide evidence that student achievement increases when small schools are created. They found that poverty had a weaker influence on student performance in smaller schools than their larger counterparts. Their research also concludes that incidents of violence and disruption are drastically reduced, which provides for a better learning environment.

Indeed, the small schools movement, combined with the establishment of standards across the K-12 system, represents the largest and most in-depth equity effort in our public school history. Even more importantly, smaller schools rekindle quality and long term personal relationships between students and adults, which are a welcome replacement of the factory relationships that still plague our system.

For Sacramento City Unified School District, smaller learning communities offer possibilities once thought impossible. Moreover, they create an opportunity to permanently alter the culture to one where faculty and students can interact in a climate of mutual respect.

The SCUSD e21 high school vision

We envision small learning communities, no larger than 300, where students remain with their core teachers at least two years. Within this core group, we expect to fully train all of our teachers in a new protocol that is imbedded in standards. Our teachers must model what we expect of our students by learning to work together in teams across disciplines, which is not a feature of the industrial model.

All schools will focus on student work as a means of student and system assessment that is relentless. Indeed, student work as the focus of adult conversation will be the lever of basic changes in the lives of our students. For this to become a reality we must avoid a pervasive problem built into new breakup designs that makes it impossible for the different culture of smaller learning communities to exist in a large school setting. The challenge is to create a culture and environment for these new relationships to prosper. Not unlike other districts, we will seek the help of practitioners and researchers to help us make the necessary adjustments.

Powerful teaching and learning

Although the smaller learning community provides the context in which profound educational change can take place, the context alone will not effect the change that is needed. Inside that infrastructure, there must be a rigorous, standards-based curriculum; powerful and responsive teaching; and an ongoing monitoring and assessment system that informs the responsive teaching.

A standards-based curriculum requires commitment on the part of all stakeholders. Students, teachers, parents and administrators alike need to know the standards; resources and materials need to be aligned to the standards. Although one important outcome of the smaller learning community is to meet the individual needs of students, this cannot be confused with individualized outcomes. A standards-based system defines common learning outcomes for students. The opportunity and the challenge exist within the smaller learning community to customize the path for students, by name, to reach standards mastery.

The customized path to standards mastery requires ongoing assessment, monitoring of progress and responsive interventions for students. For some students, interventions in reading and mathematics must be very intensive and designed for acceleration to grade-level competency. The district already has such reading interventions in place in all high schools. The smaller learning community context will allow teachers to diagnose and remediate with a more highly focused eye on the individual student--less driven by the confines of the master schedule in a large high school.

All teachers need to be expert in their content and artful in their delivery. In a smaller learning community, teacher quality is even more essential. Students reap the benefits of having consistent adults who will stay with them over an extended time period. Because students encounter fewer teachers, there is no place for a weak link.

Teachers need to be knowledgeable in many dimensions of their content. The biology teacher and world history teacher may teach other courses in their respective disciplines in the smaller school structure. Teacher knowledge and skill is even more critical than ever.

The smaller learning community is a powerful innovation in reforming large, comprehensive high schools, which have become impersonal and unresponsive to changing student populations and needs. The SLC can be considered the engine to drive high school reform. If the train of reform is to reach the station, we must all remember that strategic planning for what happens inside the SLC is critical to this reform effort. Let the change begin!

References

Ayers, Klonsky and Lyon. (2000). A Simple Justice. Teachers College, Columbia University: New York, NY.

THE ENGINE OF TRANSFORMATION

Small learning communities (200-300 students)

* Responsive teaching and learning

* Student-centered system

* Student work and mastery focus

* Student pathways to world of work

* Culture of continuous learning

* Collective responsibility

* Home-school community alliances

Large high schools (2,000-2,500 students)

* Impersonal teaching and learning

* Bureaucratic system

* Graduation focus

* Disconnect to world of work

* Culture of "busy-ness"

* Individual responsibility

* School alliances

Richard Owen is associate superintendent, High School Improvement Division; Kathi Cooper is associate superintendent, Instruction & Learning Division; and Melissa Brown is assistant superintendent, Community Health & Human Services Division for the Sacramento City Unified School District.