June Jordan High School

June Jordan School for Equity has been touted as a shining star of San Francisco public high schools and a national example of how limiting enrollment and tailoring instruction to the needs of individuals can push struggling students into college.

The school, which opened seven years ago, boasts small class sizes and an adviser for every 16 students, plus a college counselor. June Jordan's funding of more than $11,000 for each of the 241 students, which comes from public and private sources, exceeds what most other district students get.

The school board loves it. So do many parents and students.

The trouble is, June Jordan is consistently one of the worst-performing schools in California on standardized tests. And student attrition is high, with a fraction of each freshmen class sticking around for four years.

The school boasts a 70 percent college enrollment rate - not far behind the district's top high schools, Lowell and School of the Arts. But that's based on very small numbers: Of the 37 students who graduated from June Jordan last spring, 26 of them headed to higher education. Four years ago, that freshman class had 144 pupils.

Depending on one's perspective, June Jordan is arguably a great school or a dramatic failure. Yet how can a school be viewed as so good and so bad at the same time?

That conundrum puts the small high school at the heart of a raging national debate over how to evaluate schools - and their teachers and their administrators - especially those that teach the most at-risk students.

Standardized tests have historically been the most efficient and quantitative way to do that, but some argue that a reliance on multiple-choice exams is overrated.

Brian Nuila, a junior, doesn't care what the school looks like on paper.

"I love it," he said. "It changed my life. I used to think I wasn't smart. I couldn't do stuff. Now I know I can."

Small schools movement

The school, which opened in 2003, is part of the district's "small schools by design" policy, a reform effort by the school board to create learning environments that offer individualized instruction for at-risk students, more independence in hiring teachers and a hands-off approach from the district.

The national small-schools movement that gave birth to schools like June Jordan was an education reform du jour several years ago, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But, in recent years, the effort has sputtered as school districts faced with substantial budget cuts could no longer justify the extra money required by such schools.

San Francisco remains committed to the idea - and to offering a portfolio of options to its high school students, said Janet Schulze, assistant superintendent of high schools.

"Some kids want and crave a traditional high school experience," she said. "Others want specific career programs. Others want a really small environment."

June Jordan is one of five small high schools in the district, including two that opened in the past few years and two others that have test scores surpassing June Jordan.

'Untouchable' school

Yet June Jordan basks in praise, including mentions in well-respected books on school reform. At the same time, the school is so small that it flies under the radar of state and federal scrutiny. High schools with higher test scores have landed on the state's worst schools list, a designation that forces them to turn bureaucratic cartwheels, get rid of teachers and principals, or even face closure.

Not June Jordan.

School district administrators and elected board members, who remain committed to the concept of small schools, publicly have avoided questioning June Jordan's lack of academic performance.