Research finds that small high schools deliver better outcomes than large high schools for urban students. An important outstanding question is whether this better performance is gained at the expense of losses elsewhere: Does small school reform lift the whole district? We explore New York City's small high school reform in which hundreds of new…

We evaluate the effectiveness of small high school reform in the country's largest school district, New York City. Using a rich administrative dataset for multiple cohorts of students and distance between student residence and school to instrument for endogenous school selection, we find substantial heterogeneity in school effects: newly created…

With the financial support of several large foundations and the federal government, creating small schools has become a prominent high school reform strategy in many large American cities. While some research supports this strategy, little research assesses the relative costs of these smaller schools. We use data on over 200 New York City high…

Since its inception as part of the 1965 "Elementary and Secondary Education Act" (ESEA), Title I has provided the largest amount of federal funding aimed at improving the academic achievement of poor children. In this paper, we examine the impact of Title I on school spending and school performance, using New York City public school…

Background/Context: High school reform is currently at the top of the education policy making agenda after years of stagnant achievement and persistent racial and income test score gaps. Although a number of reforms offer some promise of improving U.S. high schools, small schools have emerged as the favored reform model, especially in urban areas,…

Small size is often cited by reformers and parents as the key ingredient necessary to create an effective learning environment. In New York City, the new public secondary schools have consistently smaller numbers of students than most existing high schools. The literature is unambiguous that smaller schools show better outputs than schools of…