ABSTRACT
Many of these small-school ideas emerged from the theories and practices of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s,
its Freedom Schools and Citizenship Schools and the notunrelated explosion of alternative schools during that same decade. Among the big ideas of that period were the notions that access to a purposeful, high-quality public education for all children was a democratic right worth ghting for and that the de nition of public was contested territory; that teachinglearning was and always had been organically tied to social change and social justice. It was no accident that many of the new wave of school reform and urban small-school leaders during the next three decades would come from the ranks of the civil-rights movement. Nor was it surprising that a large contingent of these new small schools would explicitly de ne themselves as “schools of social justice.” Like many of the themed small schools, social justice high schools o ered a way of connecting the core curriculum with the passions and interests of students, especially those from inner-city schools who, almost daily, had to confront issues of inequity, war, and violence, and who sought ways of reshaping the world in which they would grow to maturity. e movement’s impact was felt from the plantation South to urban communities in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
