Schools' Dropout Remedy: Get Small

Those three words have become the reform of the moment in the nation's second-largest school district, where troubled high schools are a major focus. With scant evidence to prove it works in a large, urban system, the Los Angeles Unified School District has embraced the concept that creating smaller schools within a school will improve large campuses.

"We have to get smaller," said schools Supt. Roy Romer at a conference this week to address the problem of high school dropouts. "We have to get more personal in our education experience."

After successes in elementary schools, where test scores have been steadily rising, Romer now must deal with the district's 56 high schools, particularly the underperforming schools with the lowest graduation rates. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, districts must raise achievement levels or face sanctions.

A Harvard University study released this week showed that just 39% of Latinos and 47% of African American students in the district who should have graduated in 2002 managed to do so. Overall, the district's graduation rate was 45.3%, the report found.

In an effort to deal with troubled secondary schools, the Board of Education voted last fall to convert its 131 middle and high campuses into smaller schools of no more than 500 students each by 2009. And the board held a recent afternoon session solely to examine the district's troubled high schools.

But some experts question whether the district -- with its many challenges -- will be able to transform its existing high schools into substantially different programs.

Converting to small schools, said Pedro A. Noguera, a professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education and the director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, "is a fairly complex process, and it typically takes time to pull it off. You're not just changing the structure of schools. You are changing the structure in order to improve the teaching and the relationships between adults and kids."

Romer acknowledged that the district's accelerated timetable, which demands that all secondary schools begin their move to small learning communities in the next two to three years, was extreme.