That more intimate high schools are superior is the assumption underlying two school reform concepts: charter schools and "small learning communities." The highly touted Green Dot company, for instance, has opened 10 new charter high schools, each limited to 525 students…. The small learning community idea is to divide up large high schools into 300-student clusters, each with an academic focus and its own group of teachers….  That's small. Too small?

For teachers, it sure can be. One teacher I know at an SLC campus… has to prepare for four classes every day…. For students, SLCs or small charter schools mean being trapped with a small pool of teachers for four years — which isn't necessarily good.

(Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School, which has 1,750 students) being neither too small nor too large, has avoided many of those problems… Bravo's teachers typically teach two or three subjects each day and can specialize more. My nine-person social studies department easily breaks into subcommittees to hone lessons for world history or a government/economics class. Our entire faculty is about 75 teachers, very manageable compared to 250 or more teachers at some of the huge, multi-track schools. …

Bravo is small enough that few students fall through the cracks. Counselors — even the clerks in the attendance office — know students by name. Yet we also are able to offer a dizzying array of electives: jazz band and modern dance, Latin American studies and art history, nursing and computer digital imaging. We have honors or advanced placement classes in languages, history, literature and science. …

Last year, not one of our seniors failed to graduate because he or she hadn't passed the state's mandatory exit exam. Our Academic Performance Index score — a number between 200 to 1,000, based mainly on state tests — is 818, the fourth highest in the LAUSD. Beverly Hills High School, by comparison, scored an 820…. Almost 90% of the students come from immigrant families, and 85% qualify for the federal free/reduced lunch program…. 

Opinion: Carlos M. Jimenez, teacher, Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School, Los Angeles Times, March 10.