High schools divided into schools -within -schools: Implications for equity and access.

Abstract

Substantial government and foundation support has recently coalesced behind restructuring large public high schools into smaller learning communities, or schools-within-schools (SWS). Despite this groundswell of support for the SWS reform, the empirical base on schools-within-schools is quite sparse. Those who advocate the SWS model often cite research on school size and small schools to justify their advocacy. However, it is unclear whether research on small schools and school size is directly applicable to schools-within-schools. Results from field work in five public high schools employing the SWS model suggest that the SWS structure is a promising reform that increases meaningful social relations among students and teachers, and forces high schools to consider what they want students to know and be able to do. During the course of this research, however, one negative aspect of the structure surfaced (to varying degrees) in each of the five SWS high schools. Each school organized its sub-schools around curricular, pedagogical, or (most often) career themes, and permitted students to select their sub-school based presumably on their individual preferences and attraction to the various sub-schools' themes and offerings. The processes by which students were allocated to their smaller sub-schools, however---either inadvertently or by design---sorted and stratified students into different sub-schools based on their race, social class and/or academic background. In this sense, the curricular allocation processes that occur in comprehensive high schools were replicated in these SWS high schools, although the locus shifted from processes that allocate students to academic courses to those that place students in sub-schools. Specific social and structural processes---including unrestricted student choice made within hierarchical sub-school contexts---exacerbated this stratification. Students' race, social class, academic background, and other characteristics were associated with their sub-school selections. In particular, minority, lower-income, and lower-achieving students were less likely to choose academically rigorous sub-schools. Random assignment of students to theme-less sub-units is a potential way to preserve the social benefits of the reform while avoiding between-sub-school stratification and segregation.