Tom Toch, Beacon Press
2003
Veteran education journalist Tom Toch authored this 140-page book for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of the latter's effort to promote and support small schools. It profiles five small (or multi-part but small scale) schools in various parts of the country, several of them already famous in high-school reform circles (and two of them charter schools). This clear and nicely written volume offers a good introduction to the world of small high schools, though it's a tad boosterish and doesn't always make clear how difficult this is to do well. [To get a sense of the difficulty, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=21#136.] Toch's short epilogue ("Scaling Up"), however, is worth the price of admission, for it concisely sets forth some of the central challenges in turning small high schools from fad into a serious education improvement strategy and cautions those who may suppose that size is all that matters when it comes to high-school reform. The ISBN is 080703245X, the publisher is Beacon Press, and you can get more information at http://www.beacon.org/sp03cat/toch.html.
