Downsizing helps students

Teachers praise East Wake school

If Cody Jones' experience is any indication, North Carolina's biggest experiment in years with high school education shows early signs of success.

"Last year, I was messing up," said Cody, 17, who's somewhere between 10th and 11th grades. "Now I'm getting my act together."

The difference for Cody is a radically smaller school -- one of 11 statewide that opened this fall as the first in an ambitious campaign aimed at making high schools more effective by making them more personal and relevant.

The reform effort is being pushed by Gov. Mike Easley and backed by an $11 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Gates has become a major force in efforts nationwide to improve high school education, particularly for low-income and minority students, mostly by promoting smaller schools. The foundation has spent $1 billion nationally, and its grant in North Carolina has helped set the state's agenda for high school reform.

North Carolina's New Schools Project, the group administering the state effort, plans to develop 75 small, 400-student high schools by 2008, mostly by dividing existing schools.

During the past two years, the state has added $8.7 million to the reform effort, which also includes Easley's Learn and Earn high schools, five-year programs tied to colleges and community colleges. Plans call for 75 of the early college schools within the next three years.

The school Cody attends, the School of Health Science, has been carved from East Wake High School in Wendell. East Wake has struggled to keep up in a county filled with high schools where the numbers tend to look better: higher SAT scores, fewer dropouts, stronger results on state exams.

The new school opened in August with about 250 students and 17 faculty members, and minus a senior class. At its largest, the school will enroll no more than 400 students.

"You get to know everybody better, and you get to know your teachers better," Cody said. In the larger school, he said, he didn't feel as strong a connection with his teachers.

"The teachers here want you to do well," he said.

East Wake is already planning another small school, based on a technology theme, set to open next fall. And two other small schools, one focused on engineering, the other on the arts, humanities and education, would complete the breakup of the campus into four separate schools.

Herman Norman, principal of East Wake, said he became convinced that smaller is better when his previous school, Forbush High in Yadkin County, grew from 750 students to more than 1,000. More students, he said, meant more management headaches and less time focused on classroom instruction. Many Wake high schools now exceed 2,000 students; nearly 1,600 attend East Wake, including the School of Health Sciences.

Change in culture

Yet even Norman says it's not just a matter of downsizing.

"Changing the structure of a school is easy," he said. "Changing the culture of a school is not."

That lesson is underscored by a recent evaluation of the first two dozen small high schools that the Gates Foundation helped create in other states. The evaluation, commissioned by the foundation, gave mixed reviews to the schools, which have been open for three years or less.

Key changes are also needed in the classroom, perhaps as a first, critical step.

"The focus on reducing size is not an end in itself," said Jim Shelton, the foundation's program director for education. "We have to improve the quality of instruction and raise the rigor of the work [that students do]."