Newsweek ranks the top one thousand public high schools in the country--or the top 5 percent of all U.S. high schools. Say what you will about rankings--and there is much to be said. They are still interesting, and still useful as indices. It's also good to be reminded that there are still high-performing public high schools out there. With all the criticism floating around, that's easily forgotten. So check it out. Is your school on there? Mine is. And I am happy to see it there.

When I was enrolled (over twenty years ago!) North Central High School was a huge, teeming place. There were about 4,000 students there, and our graduating class of nearly 1,000 had, for space reasons, to do commencement at the state fair grounds. We lined up in a massive, aromatic cow barn, the shorter people taking care not to let their white graduation gowns drag in the hay and attendant muck. Then we filed into a hall where, on other occasions, tractor pulls and livestock shows were the order of the day. We sat alphabetically in rows of metal folding chairs, and filed across the stage to get our diplomas when our names were called. Most of us never saw one another again--most of us didn't know one another anyhow. But that was and is fine.

The conventional wisdom is that good schools have to be small schools. Effective classrooms should be small classrooms. Schools have to be communities, we say, and we assume that "community" is a synonym for intimacy and--even, presumptuously and problematically--family. The working educational ideal today is rather like that of the bar in the 80's sitcom, Cheers: School should be a place where everybody knows your name.

I like the ideal as much as the next person. I've seen it work wonders. But it's not always practical, and it doesn't always work. Small can be intimate and communal--but it can also be insular and stifling. And there is a lot to be said for schools where you can belong to multiple communities (the track team, the math geeks, the stagecraft kids) and where you can also fade into anonymity at will. Anonymity can be a very good thing, and very freeing. It relieves you of pressure to be the person everyone who has always known you expects you to continue to be. When you are a teenager aching with the weight of peer pressure, the option of anonymity--and the opportunity for reinvention of self that it offers--can be hugely sustaining.

My high school had that quality. It was big and impersonal and ugly. It was filled with all kinds of kids from all kinds of backgrounds. The halls were so packed between classes that you had to elbow your way along. You lived by the bell and caught hell if you were late to class or found in the halls when you should not be there. The food sucked and you only had 20 minutes to eat your prefabricated lunch in a deafening and grubby cafeteria. You packed your life into narrow lockers and heaved your books around in oversized backpacks and lived with the inevitable cliques and cruelties of teenaged existence.

My high school was so advanced in its cliquish cruelties that it actually had a hierarchical system of sororities that girls pledged in their sophomore years. This was a major status sorter for girls. Boys then established their status according to which sororities their dates belonged to.

But within all that, you still had a small knot of close friends, and you could study and do just about anything and take it to just about any level. If you wanted to take college-level calculus in your senior year, you could, providing you had prepared for it. If you wanted to be on a championship soccer team, you could, provided you had the skills. If you wanted to sing, or act, or weld, or paint, or write poetry, or repair cars, you could. You could do any of these things in any combination and no one would bat an eye--few would know entirely what you were up to but yourself. And, if you wanted to do nothing at all, you could do that, too, for better or worse.

Sometimes I google people I knew in high school. I can't find most of the girls, because most of them have married and changed their names. But the boys are doing all kinds of cool things. Some are physicists and chemists and doctors. Some are musicians and artists. Some are journalists and teachers and entrepreneurs. And some parent full time--something that often gets discarded as "not working" but that I think is a very meaningful line of work indeed.

All of which is to say that there is a lot to be said for the much maligned huge high school. It's not at all perfect. But neither is the alternative. And it has certain virtues that smaller schools just don't. I suspect that basic fact is getting lost in the current well-intentioned wave of reform. Improvement is needed. But improvement should not always automatically be equated with compression.