This year, teachers at James Ford Rhodes High School in Cleveland had a choice.
Mary O'Neill: Do you want to maintain the small schools or do you want to go back to a comprehensive high school?
Mary O'Neill, who teaches math there, says the choice was clear.
Mary O'Neill: We chose by 90% vote to return to a comprehensive high school.
O'Neill is the union chairperson at Rhodes. That means when teachers have an issue, she's the first to hear about it. And, she says she got an earful.
Mary O'Neill: If you could see how dejected the faculty was, how it had just disintegrated.
Deborah Howard: I think you can point to problems at every single site.
Deborah Howard is the director of education strategy at KnowledgeWorks. With significant support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, KnowledeWorks is the Cincinatti-based organization that, since 2002, has funded nearly 80 small schools in Ohio. Howard acknowledges that some schools have hit some speed bumps.
Deborah Howard: Many of the urban districts are in fiscal crisis. So certainly layoffs have impacted the work, and it means that schools are unable to fully implement the design as they dreamed they'd be able to in the beginning.
That's what happened at Rhodes. In 2004, when the school was dividing up, the Cleveland school district was in the red. Over a thousand teachers were laid off. With fewer teachers, O'Neill says, Rhodes found itself with small schools and huge classes.
Mary O'Neill: We had a teacher last year teaching 10th grade, she had 52 in one class.
And, there have been other complaints. The boundaries between schools were not clear. There were turf battles. At Rhodes, O'Neill says principals and guidance counselors would fight to get the best students into their schools.
Mary O'Neill: it developed a lot of jealousy between principals. Really, they didn't get along that well.
Cleveland Teachers Union president Joanne Demarco has heard a lot of these complaints from her members. She says small schools didn't work at Glenville, JFK and Rhodes because they were never implemented properly.
Joanne Demarco: Conceptually, it's a wonderful idea to have a unit of 400 kids, with the same teachers, and they would get to know each other, and there would be structural changes in instruction. It never happened!
Mary Lou Prescott is the vice president of senior high and special schools at the union. She says the experiences in Cleveland confirm what many experts say: converting big schools into little ones is no recipe for success.
Mary Lou Prescott: Small school concept works when you have individual small schools, say Success Tech in Cleveland. But when you take a building that already has a school climate, and you try to divide it, it's difficult to work.
Even Cleveland Metropolitan School District CEO Eugene Sanders is lukewarm on small schools now.
Eugene Sanders: Parents won't remember if it was small or large, or what the curriculum concept was. Did my kid graduate? Did he get into college? Are they moving in the right direction? And, hopefully at the end of the day we'll be able to say yes.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation still funds small schools projects around the country, but it's taking a broader approach, concerned that too much focus has been on size, and not enough on classroom reforms.