Can Small High Schools of Choice Improve Educational Prospects for Disadvantaged Students?

America's public high schools have been struggling for decades, especially with respect to serving economically disadvantaged students. Several approaches have been used to address this concern. Some approaches offer vouchers to attend private schools or create charter schools. Other approaches create small learning communities within existing schools and re-arranging instructional programs. Another approach creates new small public high schools. This talk presents rigorous evidence (for 12,130 participants in naturally-occurring lotteries) that a large-scale small-school reform initiative in many of New York City's poorest neighborhoods has consistently increased high school graduation rates without markedly increasing annual school operating costs. At MDRC Dr. Bloom leads the development of experimental and quasi-experimental methods for estimating program impacts. Previously, Dr. Bloom taught research methods, program evaluation, and applied statistics at Harvard University and at New York University. Dr. Bloom received the Peter H. Rossi Award for Contributions to the Theory or Practice of Program Evaluation from the Association for Public Policy and Management. http://www.mdrc.org/about/howard-bloom