By Marc Fisher
Tuesday, April 25, 2006

In the next few weeks, the D.C. school system will announce which schools will be closed because they are small. Meanwhile, parents are falling over one another to find places for their children in charter, parochial and private schools, in good part because those schools are small.

Something is wrong with this picture.

With the right leadership, small schools can do wonders by giving children the gift of intimacy. I am forever meeting teenagers who have dropped out of public schools because, as they always put it, "no one knew who I was." Those kids likely had other problems -- drugs, pregnancy, a tattered home life -- but they knew in their gut that if only someone had bothered to connect with them, they might have found school to be transforming.

Yet one of the enduring tragedies of the D.C. schools is this: Smaller is not better. Here's how the Council of the Great City Schools put it in a recent study: "Nothing in D.C.'s data indicates that the system's small schools get better academic results than do its larger ones, or that the district has thought about how to take advantage of its small schools."

The District has more small schools than any other big-city system in the country. But rather than provide kids with the close attention they crave, too many tiny D.C. schools apply the system's standard, depressing industrial model: silent hallways, empty bulletin boards, lessons submerged in education jargon, low expectations, teachers who openly say, "These children cannot learn."

It's no secret that the D.C. system has too many big buildings, left over from when the schools served more than twice as many children. In one school after another, entire wings are closed off in a losing effort to gain control of maintenance costs. The District spends $1,083 per child on building operations, compared with a big-city average of $603 per child, the council found.

"Everyone knows we have to drop square footage," says Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century Schools Fund, a nonprofit that has studied the system's buildings. But she fears the system will attack the problem with a hatchet rather than the appropriate scalpel: There will be pressure to close equal numbers of schools in each ward. What a foolish approach that would be, considering that kids in Ward 3, in upper Northwest, are crammed into tiny buildings, while kids in upper Northeast float around in vast ones. (Average number of square feet per student in Ward 3: 143. In Ward 5: 359.)

"If it's just about efficiency, we could all go into RFK Stadium, because the kids could actually fit there," Filardo says. Instead, she'd like to see the system make better use of buildings by closing some public schools and moving charter schools into those facilities.

Whatever the system announces, the public response is predictable: People who ordinarily can't be bothered to advocate on behalf of the schools will suddenly pack public hearings to demand that their local schools be saved. The debate will descend into poisonous accusations about race and class as activists argue that their city is being stolen from them by newcomers.

It's no wonder the beleaguered school system -- always defensive about any assets it controls -- has tried to place an invisibility cloak over its acres of empty classrooms. I called the principals of nine schools asking to come by and see the up and down sides of running a small school in a big building. Six did not return my calls or said they wouldn't allow a reporter in their buildings. Three said they'd talk if I got permission from downtown. For two weeks, I spoke daily to schools spokesman Leonie Campbell, who kept saying she'd get me the green light to speak to a principal "tomorrow." I may be thick, but eventually I get the point.

The system's effort to hide its space problem is sad because, in fact, not all small schools are created equal. Schools must close. Many should have been shut down years ago. But the trick is to close the right ones -- not simply according to enrollment numbers, but with a careful look at available space, neighborhood growth and what other schools are nearby.

Some small schools deserve to close because they are every bit as anonymous and antagonistic toward kids as the biggest schools.

But some schools -- for example, Ross Elementary in Dupont Circle, with just 156 children in a tiny building -- take advantage of their size: Teachers make it their business to understand students' home lives and connect with a parent. Teachers know each child's obstacles so well they can effectively demand higher performance.

In Thursday's column, I'll visit a school that sets out to restore ambition and performance in kids who were discarded by the D.C. system. Edgar Melendez, a student at that school, dropped out of Wilson High School because, he says, "I felt like I wasn't known. They knew me only in a bad way, as a troublemaker."

Now, he's in a school where everyone knows his weaknesses and excuses. As a result, they don't let him get away with anything. It has turned his life around.

E-mail:marcfisher@washpost.com