At the December school board meeting, the Milwaukee board closed several small high schools. Others were folded into larger programs or stripped of their charter status. Some small high schools were left on life supports.
Closing are SUPAR, WORK Institute, and Wisconsin Career Academy. The School of Entrepreneurship lost its charter and will be returned to regular status. Community High School will be required to move once more, four times in eight years. Chances are some other small high schools will be gone by the end of next school year, perhaps the year after.
This is an end of an era that began nearly ten years ago.
Even before he became superintendent, William Andrekopoulos pushed for small high schools. I watched him outline for parents some possible small high schools at the Sholes Middle School building. This was in 2001, when he was still principal at Fritsche Middle School.
When Bill Gates announced in 2003 that high schools needed reforming, and his foundation pumped millions of dollars into creating small high schools, the heavens opened for now Superintendent Andrekopoulos and a like-minded school board. Washington and North Division were “multiplexed” with three schools in each building. So was Sholes following the Superintendent’s dream of several years earlier. A host of other small high schools were developed.
But too little attention was paid to quality, and some small high schools closed within a year. By 2008 Bill Gates was calling the attempt at small high schools “disappointing” and turned his efforts elsewhere. The small high school money dried up.
Some of the very business and community leaders that pushed Milwaukee towards decentralization and small schools were now calling for more centralization and more financially efficient, larger schools. Andrekopoulos pulled back from wholesale creation of small high schools, but never completely gave up on the concept.
When Gregory Thornton became Milwaukee’s superintendent in 2009, he made no secret of his dislike of small high schools, especially if they were teacher-led, without an administratively appointed principal. If schools were to be charter, they should truly be charter, freed from union rules as well as administrative restrictions. So Thornton pushed for non-instrumentality charters, with nonunion teachers, often at the expense of instrumentality charters, with their union teachers.
While Andrekopoulos had a support team to help charter schools improve, Thornton replaced that team with a compliance oriented office that offered far less hand holding.
Andrekopoulos supported small high schools because he believed they offered more individualized attention. Thornton supports larger high schools because he believes in a “standard of care” where each student has a chance at music, art, foreign language, and other enrichment programs.
But Thornton does not want to return to the large comprehensive high schools often approaching 2000 students. He supports high schools no larger than 1200 students.
I split the difference between Andrekopoulos and Thornton and support high schools around 800 to 1000 students. A 6-12 or 7-12 grade secondary school has its advantages. Above all else, smaller secondary schools tend to be safer than larger ones, the primary concern for parents.
The public is impatient for improvements in our public schools. But calls for bold reforms often result in unnecessary detours. Efforts to simply blow up the school system has created choice schools which are often much worse than the public schools. The same can be said for small MPS high schools. Good schools in both categories will likely survive. But simply throwing educational reform against the wall and seeing what sticks is unfair to children who have only one shot at education.
