U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Smaller Schools

In 2005, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, then CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, was interviewed about his school reform agenda. Here's what he had to say about small schools:

“[Small schools are] hugely important to me. I went to a small school all of my life and that was a formative experience. I think large American high schools are fundamentally broken. I think it is an obsolete model. I think that is far too easy for students to fall through the cracks. We are trying to reinvent the American high school for the 21st century here and we think you really have to have smaller learning communities. We think you have to have groups of 400 to 500 students working together with small teams of teachers who know those students personally. We need much more personalized instruction. We want to have a range of different types of schools so the students and parents have great choices. The students in large schools feel like they are anonymous. They feel no one cares about them; even an adult with the best of intentions has a hard time reaching students in a centralized environment. We think that model is quite frankly a failed model. We are doing everything we can to move in the opposite direction. We are even putting 3, 4, or 5 schools in the same building and breaking it up by floor or by wing in order to create a much more personalized environment with real discipline and structure that teenagers today really need.”

Source: Metro Investment Report, Chicago's Public School CEO, Arne Duncan