AIM PROGRAM (Prophetic, or merely a Program who's time has come)

IN OUR OPINION


Aim for bigger results with smaller schools


February 1, 2008

Gov. Jennifer Granholm has unveiled the next, necessary step toward improving educational outcomes in Michigan.

Lawmakers should give her call for a 21st Century Schools Fund an unbiased look for the focus it places on poorly performing schools. The idea is to repurpose 100 high schools into small, thematically planned high schools with autonomous principals empowered to hire and fire.

Under the initiative, $300 million would be awarded to cover planning and start-up costs of the schools, which would have no more than 400 students each.

Most impressive is that no new money is needed. The funding would come from bonding against the $32 million a year previously set aside to pay off a special education settlement.

Cities and states moving the needle forward on education embraced this trend ages ago. It's a logical next move here, too, given ongoing reforms such as more rigorous high school graduation standards.

How ludicrous it is to raise education standards, as Michigan has, without simultaneously targeting the culture of failure so rampant in many poorly performing high schools. Large impersonal warehouse-style schools don't connect with troubled students, experts argue. Small buildings, sans bureaucracy, do.

A fine example exists with the University Prep Academy, a standout charter school in Detroit. But one standout is a blip amid an epidemic of low performance. Right now, 1 in 10 of the nation's high schools is considered a dropout factory, a place where 60% of freshmen never reach their senior year.

Determining how many of these factories exist statewide should become Granholm's next fight. The state must have accurate data, not the current mishmash.

Yet enough is known about the staggering failure of Michigan's largest district, Detroit Public Schools, to demonstrate why bolstering students' options can't wait.