"Creating small schools is about so much more than smallness. It is about how schools take advantage of size and rethink the high school experience for urban students."
--Regis Shields
"These findings advance the limited existing research on resource use in secondary schools and demonstrate that it is not just how much money is spent that impacts student learning, but how well the resources are used."
--Karen Hawley Miles
Rethinking the Cost of Small High Schools Project
Education Resource Strategies recently concluded a three-year effort aimed at building understanding and tools that would support districts in creating cost-effective systems of high-performing urban high schools. Out of our extensive research, we created the following reports and tools to support leaders as they consider and design small high schools in their districts. This project was made possible by the generous support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Strategic Designs: Lessons from Leading Edge Small High Schools
This report illustrates how nine high performing, small urban high schools across the U.S. are thinking about and organizing their resources strategically to best meet their students' most pressing needs. Through interviews and reviews of class schedules, staffing strategies, budgets, and more, the report provides a detailed look at how leaders in these "Leading Edge Schools" carefully and purposefully think about how they use every staff member, each moment of the school day, and every dollar to support student learning. At "Leading Edge Schools":
- Principals carefully select teaching staff to meet high standards and fit specific school design needs.
- Students, on average, spend 20% more time in school each day and 233 more days over four years on core academic compared to their peers in traditional high schools.
- Teachers devote five times more hours to collaborating and professional development than local districts require.
Case Studies of Leading Edge Small Urban High Schools
This report is a companion to the "Strategic Designs" study and contains the complete case studies for each of the nine schools analyzed. View and download the full report containing the 9 cases studies or click below to view them individually.
- Core Academic Strategic Designs
1. Academy of the Pacific Rim
2. Noble Street Charter High School
3. University Park Campus School
- Relevance Strategic Designs
4. Boston Arts Academy
5. Life Academy of Health & Bioscience
6. Perspectives Charter School
7. TechBoston Academy
8. High Tech High School
- Personalization Strategic Designs
9. MetWest High School
Appendices from "Leading Edge" Studies
- I. Detailed Methodology
- II. Data Request & Interview Protocol
- III. Full Diagnostic Resource Indicators
- IV. School Schedules
- Project Description: Rethinking the Cost of Small High Schools
- Introduction to the "Big 3" Framework
- Comparative Leading Edge School Data on Diagnostic Resource Indicators (average, range)
- Comparative Leading Edge School Data on Diagnostic Resource Indicators (by school)
The Cost of Small High Schools: A Literature Review
This document considers the limited research on small high school costs, resource use, and constraints to understand the key questions surrounding the topic and identify further areas for investigation. View and download in PDF format
District Spending in Small and Large High Schools: Lessons from Baltimore City, Boston, and Chicago
Do districts have to spend more to create small schools? This report finds that three large urban districts spend more on small high schools than on large high schools—but they don’t necessarily have to. While this higher spending is not necessarily undesirable, it is also not always sustainable, particularly given today’s economic climate. This report shows that by rethinking how they allocate resources, districts can minimize extra spending on small schools. District and school leaders looking to create and sustain high-performing small schools will benefit from the findings and policy considerations in this report. View and download the full report or the executive summary.
This tool supports the district planning by allowing leaders to assess district resources against essential district roles using both quantitative and qualitative diagnostic indicators. View and download in PDF format.
NEW District Small School Spending Tool
This tool helps decision makers better understand, quantify, and more strategically deploy the resources used to support small high schools in their own district contexts. It allows leaders to plug in numbers representing current district practice (e.g., number of guidance counselors allocated to each school) and change the assumptions to model different scenarios in terms of school size, staffing ratios, etc.. The model helps decision makers clearly understand the tradeoffs involved in allocating resources, and opens the door to more flexible and effective resource allocation strategies. This tool requires Excel 2007 to download.
By Design Not Default: Optimizing District Spending on Small High Schools
This paper uses the Small School Spending Tool to model how resources would be allocated to small schools if districts use large high school rules to govern allocation. As district leaders think about the optimal size and structure for new small schools, this paper can help them understand what factors typically increase small school spending and how to manage them. Although this paper looks solely at high schools, the overall lessons about funding levels and effectively allocating resources apply to all small schools. Specifically, the paper looks at:
- The total amount of extra spending per pupil districts allocate to operate small high schools, given the district context;
- Which elements of small school design typically drive increased spending;
- How much extra investment is required during the start-up and ramp-up periods; and
- What impact the creation of new small schools has on building usage and enrollment projections.