Critical Small Schools: Beyond Privatization in New York City Urban Educational Reform reviewed by Karen Hunter Quartz — July 26, 2013 Michelle Fine introduces this edited volume using the concept of pentimento, the layer of paint that an artist adds when she changes her mind. With time, the layer becomes transparent revealing the artist’s original intention. The authors in this volume, muses Fine, have added a “translucent gauze over the contemporary small schools to induce a conversation between then and now” (p. xi). The “then” is New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, led by progressive reformers such as Deborah Meier, Ted Sizer, and Ann Cook. The small schools they and others founded—Central Park East, Urban Academy, El Puente, Humanities Prep and many more—were intentional democratic school communities that launched a national Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) to advance personalization, inquiry, and social justice. The “now” is New York City after a decade of small school proliferation and private investment, its current focus away from small and towards charter. The volume’s editors, Maria Hantzopolulos and Alia Tyner‐Mullings, argue that the abandonment of small schools as a reform focus is in part due to “a misguided emphasis on size only in a political context that privileges neoliberal and standardized educational policies over innovative school cultural reform” (p. xxxi). The ten chapters they have assembled shine a light on the cultural reform work of “critical small schools” that have remained true to their roots. Divided into three parts, the book offers a range of perspectives on the work of critical small schools. The first section focuses on the start‐up and sustainability of three schools in different contexts: City Prep (a pseudonym) in the Bronx that opened in 2002 under the Gates‐funded New Century Schools Initiative; Bronx Bridges Institute that opened in 1994 as part of the Coalition Campus Schools Project that broke poorly performing comprehensive high schools into smaller schools; and, a “replication” small school, The James Baldwin High School, founded in 2003 by the faculty of Humanities Prep as part of the CES Small Schools Network. Written by Jessica Shiller, Rosa Rivera‐McCutchen, Jay Feldman, and Anne O’Dwyer, these school stories are well told, based on a variety of data, and together they offer valuable insights into the complexities of establishing new school cultures and keeping the original critical visions of these schools alive over time. Part Two of the volume focuses on the particular practices that define critical small schools. Looking inside El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, Anthony De Jesus details what culturally relevant pedagogy looks and feels like from students’ perspectives, in the context of a set of norms and practices the school calls the “Holistic Individualized Process.” Lesley Bartlett and Jill Koyama echo this strengths‐based or additive approach to schooling by looking inside a newcomer small school, Gregorio Luperon High School, to detail the bilingual teaching practices and the deliberate efforts to create a family‐ like school culture. The practice of student‐led work is profiled by Liza Bearman and Nora Ahmed in a chapter on the TC Student Press Initiative, an effort to engage educators and students at Pablo Neruda Academy in studying the small schools movement based on student‐generated essential questions, such as: “How are small schools preparing students when they do not offer a lot of opportunities like different types of classes?” And the final chapter in this section focuses on the practice of assessment by describing the groundbreaking work of the New York Performance Standards Consortium. This chapter, authored by Martha Foote, will be of particular value to readers interested in understanding or acting upon the assessment autonomy that undergirds the success of critical small schools and is especially timely given the alignment between the Consortium’s standards and the Common Core State Standards. The final section of the book tackles the question of impact: do critical small schools result in better outcomes for students after high school? This question is reminiscent of the Progressive Education Association’s Eight Year Study, launched in 1933 to track the longitudinal outcomes of 30 “experimental” schools. Despite a powerful set of findings about the success of graduates from these schools, the Eight Year Study failed to impact the course of public schooling. Now, in this book, we have another set of findings, albeit much more modest in scope, about the success of critical small schools and their graduates. And in this contemporary context, the findings, written by the volume’s co‐editors as well as Janice Bloom, help articulate the school structures, norms, and beliefs that support first generation college goers, 21 st century workers, and active and Title: Critical Small Schools: Beyond Privatization in New York City Urban Educational Reform Author(s): Maria Hantzopoulos & Alia R. Tyner‐Mullings (eds.) Publisher: Information Age Publishing, Charlotte ISBN: 1617356832, Pages: 268, Year: 2012 Search for book at Amazon.com