The Difficulty of Identifying Rare Samples to Study: The Case of High Schools Divided Into Schools-Within-Schools

Abstract

This note has two purposes: (1) to describe a process used to identify a rare sample of U.S. public secondary schools, those that are completely divided into smaller subunits that we call “schools-within-schools” (SWS); and (2) to provide descriptive information about the schools of that kind that we identified in our national search in Fall 1998. The procedures that we used to locate “full-model” SWS high schools in the United States involved snowball sampling and telephone interviews, in which we used a two-stage screening strategy. Although we searched extensively, we located a modest number (n = 55) of full-model public SWS high schools. Beyond spelling out our methodology for locating this unusual sample, we provide descriptive information about the schools along several dimensions: their regional location, the type of communities in which they are located, the size of their school districts, how many students they serve, their racial or ethnic compositions, and the themes on the basis of which their subunits are organized. We offer tentative conclusions about the SWS reform based on our research.