As our country’s population grows as never before, high schools in many of the most densely populated areas (and areas with the highest concentration of social ills) have become, in my opinion, “failure factories.” With upwards of 3 to 4 thousand students, those who aren’t lost in the shuffle are much more likely to stand out due to disciplinary problems than they are due to outstanding academics, sports prowess, or leadership.

In New York City, some leaders have recognized this phenomenon, and have responded by replacing over 20 failing high schools (each with student enrollment of around 4,000) with much smaller schools focused around a vocational theme. For example, the “Academy of Health Careers” and the “Law, Government, and Community Service Magnet High School” each have fewer than 550 students, and have proven to have higher graduation rates than the old “factories.”

While I am not a proponent of federal intervention in the particulars of education, I would like to see some type of federal incentive for districts that make extraordinary efforts to reduce class size and overall school size at the high school level. For every thousand “more” kids enrolled, the chance of the individual students thriving plummets substantially as they, quite literally, get ‘lost’ in the crowd.