For at least the past half-century, Polytechnic Institute, City College and Western High School have easily attracted the best minds in the city. But today, gifted students like Brian Eggleston see opportunities elsewhere.

"I had good grades so I could have gone to Poly or City," the senior said. But he chose Digital Harbor High, which was developing a good reputation. "I heard about the technology [courses]," he said.

Baltimore began upending the structure of its public high schools in 2002, and today's middle-schoolers can pick from nearly four dozen schools across the city rather than being assigned to a comprehensive high school in their neighborhood. Digital, which is in Federal Hill, is the second-most-popular choice among the city's eighth-graders, even though it didn't exist seven years ago. Neither did Coppin Academy in West Baltimore, but it has four times the number of applicants as open places.

On the forefront of a national trend, the city began replacing its large, chaotic high schools seven years ago with smaller schools of 500 to 800 where it was believed students would get more attention and a better education. With a declining enrollment that gave the district the flexibility to quickly create new schools in underused buildings, Baltimore moved fast. New schools of all types have blossomed across the city.

"Most kids in the district are in a school of their choice that is not just a default school," said Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins education researcher at the Center for Social Organization of Schools. "I don't think many other cities have gotten to this tipping point yet."

Today, 10,687 students are attending a school that didn't exist in 2002 and 8,038 students are in the old, remaining comprehensive or vocational high schools. Another 5,400 students attend selective high schools such as Poly, where students must meet attendance and grade requirements to be accepted.

Whether the newly minted schools have produced better results is difficult to determine because there has been no reliable study done yet. However, the city's graduation rate is up, its dropout rate is down and some educators who have been watching the process closely say high-schoolers are better off today than they were a decade ago.

"What Baltimore is doing is remarkable. It is eliminating the ZIP code victim," said Christopher Maher, chief academic officer for the Friendship Academy of Engineering and Technology and the Friendship Academy of Science and Technology.

Each spring, eighth-graders sign a form listing their top three choices for high schools. If more students request a school than there are places, which has happened at Digital, ninth-graders are chosen by lottery.

Data released by the school system show parents and students appear to be quickly adapting, becoming savvy shoppers who pick as their first choice the highest-performing, safest schools while eschewing the least successful. Applications to the lowest-performing schools, such as Dr. W.E.B. Dubois High School, Reginald F. Lewis and the Institute for Business and Entrepreneurship, are declining.

Many observers are cautious about the change, however, saying the work that is going on in these high schools to get students to graduation is still very difficult. Some of the schools are criticized as having no new vision or ideas behind them and as remaining just smaller versions of the large, failing schools.

And large numbers of students still fail ninth grade. Last year, 37 percent of ninth-graders, or 2,600 students, did not earn enough credits to move on to 10th grade. Those students who do move on are still having difficulty passing the High School Assessments that are required for graduation.

'Huge and impersonal'Just a decade ago, students in Baltimore, as in most cities and large suburban districts, went to their neighborhood high school unless they qualified for a place at the selective schools such as Poly, City, Western, Dunbar or School for the Arts. A two-tiered system existed that siphoned off the most promising students into the higher tier while everyone else was assigned the lower tier of big, comprehensive high schools that held 1,500 to 2,500 students. At least half of the students at the comprehensive high schools dropped out by senior year. The schools became unruly, with fights, drugs, sexual activity and gambling commonplace in the halls.

"We knew size mattered," said Jennifer Green, who taught at Lake Clifton High School and went on to direct the high school reform from 2005 to 2007. "The schools were huge and impersonal. It would reek of marijuana in lots of hallways."

In 2003, encouraged and supported by $20 million from local and national foundations, the city began dividing its largest high schools. Northern High School was first. During the summer of 2003, it was closed and then divided into three schools with three principals.

Nearly every year since then, at least one comprehensive high school was shuttered or divided. Lake Clifton, Southwestern and Walbrook were all broken up.

Southern was gradually phased out as the school was renovated and turned into Digital. Northwestern, Frederick Douglass, Patterson and Forest Park survive, but their enrollments have shrunk significantly. Patterson, for instance, has gone from 2,700 students a decade ago to 1,637 today and is now the city's largest high school.

Green said the lack of planning and attention given to the schools that were quickly divided is still evident today. "It didn't give the leadership time to really think about the unique characteristics of a new school and then for the leadership to pick their staff. ... They still have never caught up," she said.

Innovation schoolsIn the meantime, the school district opened five small "innovation" high schools run by outside operators who had a particular design or plan for how to help urban students, the majority of whom come to high school with fifth-grade skills. The district rigorously reviewed each operator's plan before allowing the schools to open. Each school had a year of planning and started small with just a ninth grade, then added another grade each year. Attendance and graduation rates have all been better for those schools, according to a report done by the Urban Institute two years ago.

But things still were not easy at the innovation schools. Maher, who was the first principal of the Academy for College and Career Exploration, said the first year at his school was difficult because it was housed next to an existing school that had constant fire evacuations and fights. As his school was opening, parents begged him to let their children into ACCE even though it had no track record.

Maher said what the system was asking would have nearly required a miracle: take students four years behind and get them to accelerate their rate of learning so that they could make two years of progress in one year.

"The test scores came out the same day my second child was born and my voice mail was filled with congratulations, not for the birth of my child but for the scores," he said. Only 38.7 percent of students had passed. "Three-fifths of my kids failed and that is considered a raging success. That was a very challenging thing to come to terms with."

But ACCE has a better track record so far than the large neighborhood schools: Its graduation rate is higher than the city's average and a high percentage of its kids go on to college.

Realizing that he could never improve the high schools if students continued to come to school unprepared, city schools CEO Andrés Alonso took the next big step two years ago by promising to open 24 new "transformation schools" for grades six through 12. As this school year began, 11 transformation schools had been created, many by outside organizations, and more are expected to open next school year.

Strength of bigger schoolsWith the opening of these schools, the enrollment has declined at some of the larger schools. For instance, the two large vocational schools, often viewed as safer than neighborhood schools, have seen a decline in the number of students who put them down as their first choice.

But the neighborhood schools fill a role for some students who want a larger environment that offers what some of the small schools can't: a variety of sports teams, many extracurricular activities and wider course offerings such as Advanced Placement classes.

Jason Hartling, the principal of Northwestern High, said that is the strength of the remaining neighborhood schools, which are now open to everyone in the city. "I think structure and size are low-level moves, emergency moves. Long-term, it is about getting the right teachers and staff that are committed to doing the work that is necessary."

Hartling believes the old schools, such as his, are improving, but that they have difficulty shaking off their old image as "bad schools."

"I can't tell you how many people come in here and say, 'Oh, this is really nice.' "

Hartling said his school has shrunk from 1,301 students in 2002 to 964, 60 percent of whom are involved in extracurricular activities. Students produce one of the few school newspapers in the district, he said.

"In the 1990s, it was cool to go to a bad school," but that is changing, Hartling said.

Students 'flourish'Brian Eggleston, the Digital student who is now applying to the Johns Hopkins University and Carnegie Mellon University, said there are still students at his school who don't take their academics seriously, but they are not the majority. And, he said, students look up to those who strive to work hard and do well rather than putting them down.

With its newly renovated building, Digital is popular, Principal Brian Eyer said, in part because it is in a safe neighborhood, offers courses in technology and has been able to build a collaborative culture. Students also like the fact that it is still large enough to have sports teams and lots of clubs.

Parent Joyce Agresott helped agitate for change when one of her children was attending then-Southern High. "We took 10 seniors and sent them in with disposable cameras" to document the chaos, she said. Today, she said the new school is completely different. "Children flourish out of here," said Agresott, whose daughter attends Digital and loves it.

Alonso said he is not planning to continue closing neighborhood schools unless, like Southern, they are performing poorly. He noted that he closed three schools last summer because they weren't effective.

"The goal is to have a portfolio of schools that provide different options to every student in the city. But every single one of them needs to be an effective option," Alonso said.

Balfanz, the Hopkins researcher, said that as more options become available, he expects that schools will need to aggressively recruit students in order to keep their enrollments and their funding up.

The change in high schools is still a work in progress, but Balfanz said students are better off.

"There are more schools that are well-organized and having an impact. There are more places where you can get a decent education," Balfanz said.