Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: Small schools work

Sunday, July 30, 2000 | 9:56 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor.

New Clark County School Superintendent Carlos Garcia says that he wants to study and have a say before anybody moves to break up the school district. This request follows the warning from former Superintendent Brian Cram about the problems such a breakup could cause financially and socially.

I would suggest that the decision makers all read "The Power of Their Ideas" by Deborah Meier before moving too swiftly. Meier, a talented teacher and school administrator, is well known because of her success with a small school in Harlem and several other schools.

Before getting into the substance of her book, please read a note from one of her journals and get an idea about good education:

"I was so certain that the distinction between living and nonliving was a 'simple' idea. I chose the most obvious: a rock and our gerbil. I figured I'd leave the gray areas for later. But 5-year-old Darnell insists on making it difficult. Is he putting us on? 'Rocks change too, and rocks move.' He reminds me that on our trip to Central Park I described how the rocks had come down with the glaciers, and how they change shape over time. He won over some of the kids. They reproduce, said one: little rocks break off from big ones. I feel I'm losing the argument. So much for my neat chart.

"How can we show kids that it is precisely in such ideas that important discoveries are made, rather than closing the conversation off with an 'explanation.' We dismiss the mistakes as cute, the accidents of ignorance; but they are at the heart of the intellectually curious mind."

Very simply, Deborah Meier is the finest example of what teaching is all about. What she learned in the 20 years she pioneered staff-run schools friendly to both students and parents is beyond the scope of this column. What is important is the success her schools had in both graduation rates and movement toward additional education beyond high school. For the purposes of this column, allow me to concentrate on school size having a positive effect on success rate.

I was thinking about the number of Clark County schools that have 2,500 up to 3,500 students. Meier writes, "Small size is a major factor in improving schools and an absolutely essential one for the kind of pedagogical exploration we are talking about. Neither parents nor teachers can begin to talk together about what they want to do in schools where meetings take place in auditoriums and face-to-face conversation is a rarity."

She suggests that success is felt by some students in large high schools because they have found an informal small school within the structure of the big school. In turn this results in only about 20 percent of the big-school student body getting the advantages of both a big school and a small school. Schools should be small enough so there is the opportunity to know each other and find time to celebrate and mourn successes and losses.

Before the reader of this column gets too upset, let's hear more from Meier: "Small schools are not more expensive. We get the same per-student budget, dollar for dollar -- minus the extras for dropout-prevention and drug-prevention programs that we don't qualify for! If we count the cost per graduate, we're amazingly cheap compared to many of our large sister schools. There are more than 20 large high schools in New York City (including all but two of the zoned high schools in the Bronx) in which only about one out of four students who enter ninth grade graduates. There are a half-dozen in which it's more like one in 10. Consider the cost per graduate in such schools, which is a legitimate question given that a diploma from high school is a minimal survival tool today. No method of building autos, no matter how 'efficient' would be deemed economical if th ree out of our cars that came off the line didn't run."

Maybe, just maybe, the real answer to a better education is smaller schools and a large district isn't a negative factor. Have we built ourselves into problems which we are now trying to solve by answering the wrong questions?

Again allow me to suggest that "The Power of Their Ideas" be read by people interested in education. I'm starting on Meier's latest book, "Will Standards Save Public Education," which is also published by Beacon.