School districts across the country are redesigning their portfolios of high schools to include more small high schools. Over the past three years, Education Resource Strategies (ERS), with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, partnered with both schools and districts to understand spending in small high schools and document how these schools leverage all of their resources—people, time, and money—to best support student learning. ERS’s work demonstrated a clear and consistent pattern: districts spent 10-20% more per pupil on small high schools than they did on large high schools, for two primary reasons:
This report explains why this is happening and how schools can optimize their spending on small schools.
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