New York City is in the forefront of a national movement aimed at converting large, factory-style schools that often have thousands of students into smaller public schools where students have closer contact with teachers. The small-schools movement got a big boost yesterday, when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it would provide seven nonprofit organizations across the city with $51.2 million, with the aim of creating 67 new schools along those lines.

Since the late 1990's, the Gates Foundation, which lists $25 billion in assets, has made an impressive mark on philanthropy, giving extensively in the areas of health, library services and education — where its interests have clearly turned to promoting the small-school model.

Nearly three-fifths of the grant announced this week for small schools will go to New Visions for Public Schools, a pioneering group that has already started 41 small public schools in collaboration with the New York City Department of Education, its union partners and a philanthropic consortium consisting of the Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Institute. These schools are run with public dollars.

National data on small schools shows that they tend to be quieter and safer, with fewer dropouts and higher graduation rates. This trend held true last year in poor areas of the Bronx, where ordinary high schools, some with enrollments of 3,000 or more, had lower success rates on state exams — and drastically higher dropout rates — than the New Visions schools, which have enrollments ranging from roughly 75 to 150 students.

The Gates grant has given new momentum to this promising movement.