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CES Small Schools Project Research

The Coalition of Essential Schools is one of the most studied school design movements, from its inception in the 1984 national inquiry A Study of High Schools. We continue that tradition in our research on the creation of new schools and conversion of large comprehensive schools to autonomous small schools in the Small Schools Network.

Our research will examine current Mentor Schools, new start-up small high schools, and conversion high schools. In addition to examining the efficacy of CES practices in these schools, we are providing formative data to participating schools. Each of the surveys students and staff complete will be on-line and each school will have access to a data analysis and reporting system that will provide them instantaneous access to their own data. As we learn about our schools, each school will be able to use their data and improve their practice. Further, the tools that are created in this project-the surveys and the on-line reporting system-will be available for use by other CES affiliates.

Analyzing the efficacy of CES practices

To understand the effectiveness of implementing CES practices, we will use a multiple measure approach and collect a wide variety of data through administration of surveys, collection of student and teacher work and student outcome data, tracking of student's college experience, and documentation of school practice.

1. Students and teachers will complete surveys which ask them to reflect on their school's classroom and assessment practices, curriculum, teacher and student expectations, school culture, organizational practice, family and community connections, leadership and governance, and commitment to and achievement of equitable practice and outcomes.
2. Teachers will complete surveys that address the school's implementation of CES principles and the degree of autonomy the school has to implement those principles to address the needs of their students. The Small School Project Benchmarks, which describe what the work of the Coalition "looks like", guide each school's implementation and form the basis for understanding a school's CES practice.
3. We will also collect teacher assignments and student work from our schools, which will allow is to examine students' opportunities to construct knowledge, communicate clearly and well, do work with authentic purposes, and use language and mathematics conventions accurately and effectively. Research conducted in the Chicago Public Schools by Fred Newmann and colleagues suggests that assignments that demand higher-order thinking skills, deep understanding of content, elaborated communication, and activities that are similar to real-world tasks elicit work that is intellectually more complex from students. Measuring student achievement through the collection of actual student work, as opposed to reliance on state standardized tests, provides us with an authentic measure of student achievement and intellectual ability.
4. Another authentic measure of student outcomes are high school graduation rates, college matriculation, and college persistence and graduation. Do graduates of these high schools-which serve mostly students of color and low-income students-prepare their students for success in college? This study will attempt to follow graduates through their college experience.
5. To help understand the impact of implementing CES principles in schools, we will also collect documentation of school practices, such as the school's daily schedule, the professional development calendar, school course list with enrollments, schedules for typical core academic teachers (middle and high schools - English and math, especially those who teach algebra classes) and for some students chosen at random, and the school's graduation requirements.
6. We will also collect student level data from each school and appropriate comparison schools that address student engagement (attendance, transfers, discipline) and achievement (promotion, graduation, state standardized test scores). We collect state standardized test data because these are the assessments used by the state to determine school probationary performance and student high school graduation. CES believes that high stakes state standardized test are a test and not a comprehensive assessment system; that a single score on a test should never stand as the sole measure of a student's knowledge, understandings, performance, and intellectual habits; that the use of a single test for high stakes decisions is not educationally defensible; and that more appropriate accountability systems are possible. Further, we believe that such tests have limitations as research instruments, and should be used in conjunction with multiple measures of authentic assessment.