The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace

I had long heard of The Shopping Mall High School and been a little put off by the name (my training is in Philosophy, a discipline which eschews clever titles). But in fact the title is perfect. The conceit, obviously, is that the large comprehensive high school is a shopping mall; it is attempting to cater to a variety of consumers, some of whom want very high quality goods, others of whom want a kind of "life and let live" approach, and others still have niche needs, like children with special needs, athletes, etc. In an added twist, schools differ in the composition of their clientele (I don't think they mention the idea of the strip mall at any point--but they must have been in those schools too!), so different schools resemble different malls. By allowing students to select classes by schedule and even teacher, the school prompts a sorting process the effects of which are nicely explained here; by establishing "electives" within departments, the school ensures that students will choose their way into college-prep, vocationally-oriented, or non-demanding classes depending on the attentiveness and aspirations of their parents, the peer group they are in, and their own perception of their own abilities. The texture of school life is beautifully placed on display in the book, and way that "empowering" students to choose classes ends up sorting them more effectively even than tracking would is nicely...well, tracked. The book was published in 1985, and seems to have been out of print for quite a while but you'll be lucky if you don't recognize your local high school in its pages.

This is the best book I've read on secondary education. Most educators would agree that small schools--where teachers and students know each other well and cooperate on meaningful work--are incredibly effective. However, standard high schools are large and chaotic places where students and teachers go through the motions and not much of great intellectual significance ever happens. Rather, they are like shopping malls, where customers (students) go into stores (classrooms) and are offered goods (knowledge) by merchants (teachers). We convince ourselves, though, that large, shopping mall-style high schools provide a "choice" for students, and grant them numerous "opportunities" to achieve. (Customers can choose whether they want to buy what the merchant is selling.) Writing in a similar style as "Horace's Compromise"--what Ted Sizer calls "fictional non-fiction"--the authors challenge the notion that big is better, and that more content equates to more learning. They demonstrate how truly ineffective schools are when they force teachers to see 160 students a day for only 50 minutes at a time. The book wraps up with a detailed history of secondary schooling in the United States that demonstrates how we got to a place where we expect schools to do so much that they cannot do any of it well. If you are a secondary teacher in a large high school, I highly recommend this book.