Once sold as the solution, small high schools are now on the back burner

September 29, 2015

Urban Assembly Gateway for Technology graduates Venetia Boyce and Federico Leyva, who are headed to college with near-full scholarships, say they chose the small school after feeling lost in a big middle school. Photo: Meredith Kolodner

What does New York City's experiment reveal about the merits of small schools?

Federico Leyva remembers fights in the halls or lunchroom almost every day at his 2,000-student middle school in Queens. Sometimes the adults in the building would hear them and intervene, sometimes they wouldn’t. When it came time to apply to high school, he chose a small one.

“There’s personal attention — that’s the biggest difference for me,” said Federico, 17, who graduated from Urban Assembly Gateway for Technology in June with a near-full scholarship to Babson College, near Boston. “I think the fights occurred because there wasn’t the personal attention.”

In 2011, Federico joined the first class of ninth-graders at Gateway, one of four schools that replaced the High School for Graphic Communication Arts. That chaotic school was closed in 2013 after more than a decade of graduating barely half of its students. It was the last of more than 35 big-city high schools to be closed as part of a profound reorganization of New York City’s educational landscape begun in 2002 by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his long-time schools chancellor, Joel Klein, with help from $150 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The reorganization completely revamped the high school system: about 70 percent of the city’s more than 400 high schools now have fewer than 500 students (although small schools enroll just over one-third of all city high school students).

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