A consulting firm has been hired to determine why the results of the first stage of the small schools' initiative begun four years earlier were so inconsistent. The main metric for determining success was the high-school graduation rate. Two of the district's high schools, Langston Hughes High School and Julia Alvarez High School, had been converted from single large high schools to multiple small schools within the original buildings. While Langston Hughes experienced an increase in graduation rates under the new school-within-a-school (SWS) model, the graduation rates at Julia Alvarez were worse. Both high schools had undergone the transition to small schools at the same time and had implemented the same SWS format, so it is up to the consulting team to find out why Langston Hughes was thriving and Julia Alvarez was not.
