Behind the Headline: Another MDRC Study Confirms Wisdom of New Small High Schools

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Another MDRC Study Confirms Wisdom of New Small High Schools
10/22/14 | Real Clear Education

Behind the Headline
School Inflation
Fall 2004 | Education Next

 New research from New York City continues to find that small high schools there have boosted graduation rates for disadvantaged students of color. Tom Vander Ark, who was the executive director of the Gates Foundation when it supported efforts to create small high schools, writes in Real Clear Education about why the new small schools are so much more effective than the larger schools they replaced.

A study by Chris Berry that was published in Education Next looked at the impact of the school consolidation movement, which swept through the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. That study, “School Inflation: Did the 20th-Century Growth in School Size Improve Education,” found that smaller schools had a significant positive effect on students’ wages as adults.

A 2006 article by Paul Hill described the early work of the Gates Foundation on schools.

Paul Peterson and Jay Greene have written about earlier research on small schools for Ed Next.

-Education Next

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