Kenneth Baum approached the podium to accept the award.

His students watched closely from their seats on the floor of the school’s central hall, and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein stood near the improvised stage. It was Oct. 28, three days before Halloween, and the lectern was flanked by two “Pumpkin πs” – jack-o-lanterns carved with the famous mathematical symbol.

“First of all,” began the principal, before stepping forward and thrusting the silver trophy aloft. “Yeah!”

Principal Kenneth Baum raises the trophy after being presented with the Intel Schools of Distinction Award. Photo: Sasha Chavkin

From their makeshift seats, the students responded with a burst of laughter and then cheers. The Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science had just won the Intel Schools of Distinction Award for its innovative teaching of mathematics, one of six schools in the nation selected for the prestigious prize.

The school seemed an unlikely candidate for the honor. The 6-year-old public school is located in Morrisania in the South Bronx, one of the country’s poorest neighborhoods. The area’s students got their biggest headlines recently, when a 15-year-old girl was struck by a stray gunshot fired by a 16-year-old boy. Between 81 and 90 percent of Urban Assembly’s students come from families receiving public assistance, with 94 percent eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, according to 2008 data from the New York City Department of Education.

Chancellor Klein called the improbable honor proof that the Bloomberg Administration’s policy of creating new small schools was working. Urban Assembly admits less than 100 students per grade, and according to a June 2009 report by the New School, it is one of 200 new small schools opened under Klein’s tenure since 2002.

“It’s so clear to me these schools are effectively creating options in places where there are very few options,” Klein said following the awards ceremony.

The chancellor’s embrace of small schools like Urban Assembly in Morrisania – one of 22 Urban Assembly schools, each with its own theme – indicated a dramatically different phase for a vision that began as a radical grassroots movement. The idea of creating small schools was first championed by leftist educators and community activists, who envisioned these schools as hubs for social change in poor communities. Mayor Bloomberg seized upon this idea in 2002, when he first took office and placed educational reform at the heart of his legacy.

As small schools have sprouted up across the city, some activists say that the movement’s original ethic of innovation and empowerment has been lost. Roughly 58,000 of the city’s 300,000 high school students now attend small schools, according to a report by the New School.

“The bureaucratic proliferation of small schools feels more like a management strategy,” said Michelle Fine, a Distinguished Professor of Urban Education at the City University of New York and longtime small schools supporter.

Advocates such as Fine doubt that a citywide decision to establish small schools can produce the sense of community that she said is essential in order for these schools to succeed.

Fine’s misgivings point to a broader concern: whether Urban Assembly represents a model of the small schools initiative, or an exceptional case trumpeted by the chancellor to mask a policy that has lost its moorings.

Bringing Math to Morrisania

In a 10th grade Alegebra II section at Urban Assembly, teacher Tim Jones taught his class about piecewise linear functions.

“As you know, I am Senator Jones,” he said. “You are my advisers and you need to tell me which is the best tax policy.”

The class was split up into two rows, preparing to face each another in debate. One group advocated a flat tax, an unchanging linear function, while the other promoted a progressive tax, a piecewise function for which the formula changed in each tax bracket. To get points in the debate, students had to back up their claims with references to graphs handed out by the teacher.

The students’ arguments were longer on social policy than on algebra. “The money from the rich can be used to help the poor,” said one student on the progressive side.

Still, Jones kept bringing them back to the graphs.

Assistant Principal David Krulwich said that the approach showed the school’s broader strategy for teaching seemingly abstract concepts such as piecewise functions.

“This is a really boring topic that no one wants to learn,” said Krulwich. “But tax policy debate is what makes it interesting too. To teach kids to think about a graph and make a logical argument based on it, we would argue, is much more important than learning to manipulate variables.”

The school has introduced a number of these types of innovations to spark students’ interest in mathematics. The key program is the school’s unique, internally developed curriculum that pairs math with a more traditional liberal arts subject such as architecture or social justice. This allows the students to think of math outside of its usual confines of equations and graphs and to see how it’s applied to real world settings.

The school has also adopted block scheduling to allow math to be taught in 102-minute periods. These longer classes provide laboratory-style lesson plans with more time for hands-on learning.

“We get to do activities to help you understand the math,” said 7th grader Iliana Lopez, 12, at the Intel award ceremony. “As you hear it, you can also visualize it.”

In addition, the school tries to build its community by sending teachers on home visits to the families of all incoming students.

Recent test scores and city assessments have shown that Urban Assembly’s approach seems to be working. Roughly 82 percent of its students scored at or above grade level in math, with 92 percent of parents attending parent-teacher nights, according to the Intel Foundation. The school’s most recent assessment from the New York City Department of Education also cited “a dynamic and talented principal,” “hard-working and fully committed” teachers, and a “challenging and stimulating” curriculum.

In Tim Jones’ algebra class, he stopped his students on several occasions as they tried to interrupt each other in the tax policy debate. The material seemed to have captured their interest – even if the enthusiasm was not devoted just to piecewise linear functions.

The Small Schools Movement

In New York City, the movement for small public schools first picked up steam in the 1990s. The campaign, said CUNY’s Michelle Fine, was a grassroots effort driven by parents, educators and community groups who wanted to promote equal opportunity and civic engagement in poor neighborhoods.

Deborah Meier, who created a network of small schools in East Harlem and was a founding figure in the movement, emphasized that school size was a means to creating communities where teachers can learn from experience and develop new practices accordingly. “Small schools give teachers the opportunity to use their minds,” said Meier.

As small progressive schools reached a critical mass in New York, the idea caught the eye of a new mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, who had pledged to apply the management acumen that earned him billions in the corporate world to improving city government. In 2002, Bloomberg won mayoral control of the schools and launched a sweeping initiative to open new small schools to replace failing high schools. The campaign was backed by outside funders, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation has since contributed more than $78 million to the program.

For many of the movement’s initial backers, the victory was bittersweet. The centralized initiative seemed to undermine the spirit of local empowerment that their movement had advocated.

“Somehow Bloomberg and friends and Gates took small as though it were the point rather than a vehicle,” said Fine.

The Urban Assembly School in Morrisania was founded as part of the wave of new schools launched by Bloomberg and supported by the Gates Foundation, in a program called the New Century High School Initiative. Serving in his first job as a principal, Baum has led the school since it opened its doors in 2004.

Baum is a strong believer in the virtues of small schools. He said that the current system has not inhibited him from developing a creative curriculum.

“This award by Intel is outside recognition that not only are we doing things that are innovative, those things are working,” he said.

So far, the data has suggested that small schools have been getting results. An Oct. 2007 report prepared on behalf of New Century Initiative Schools found that the small schools graduated students 78 percent of the time, 17 percent more often than comparable larger schools. New Century schools also graduated students on time at a 20 percent higher clip than city high schools generally, at 78 percent rather than 58 percent.

But questions about their sustainability and their mission remain unresolved.

“A lot of the new small schools have been sort of splashed together without the critical elements of having educators and parents shaping and owning the school,” said Fine.

A 2006 report by the New York Immigration Coalition and Advocates for Children also found that small schools were not providing equitable access to English Language Learners or legally mandated bilingual services.

As the debate on small schools continues, the Department of Education is forging ahead. Department spokeswoman Ann Forte said that all 13 high schools that the city opened in 2009 were small schools. At the Intel award celebration, Chancellor Klein vowed to expand the program during Mayor Bloomberg’s third term.

“There is no question in my mind that it has improved graduation rates,” said Klein. “We are going to continue to create small, rigorous schools.”