|
|
|
The views expressed on this page are
solely
those of the author and do not
necessarily represent the views of County
News Online
|
|
Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report
The Hechinger Report
Getting rid of gifted programs: Trying to teach students at all levels together in one class
Districts are eliminating gifted and talented classifications to try
serving students of various academic abilities in integrated
classrooms. In some places, it’s working — but schools also face
unanticipated challenges
By Rachel Blustain
October 14, 2020
ROCKVILLE CENTRE, N.Y. — It was 7:58 a.m., and Bruce Hecker’s 12th
grade English class at South Side High School had the focused attention
of a college seminar, with little chitchat or sluggishness despite the
early hour. Students discussed the relevance of Arthur Miller’s play
“The Crucible” to the McCarthy hearings and to current competing fears
of terrorism and technological surveillance.
The conversation that morning in December 2019 followed the lead of the
seven or eight most vocal students. Occasionally, Hecker interrupted to
encourage participation from a handful of students who receive support
services to keep up with the class’s rigorous curriculum.
The students Hecker called on hesitated, cleared their throats and said
“um.” But when they did speak, their comments were clear and cogent.
“If you’re a kid and you break a vase,” one student reflected on the
theme of scapegoating in Miller’s play, “you don’t get these concepts.
But your first thought is still to blame the dog.” His peers laughed in
appreciation.
More than 30 years ago, Rockville Centre began a gradual but determined
effort to do away with gifted classes in its elementary schools as well
as many of the tracked classes at the middle and high schools. The goal
wasn’t to eliminate all tracking, South Side Principal John Murphy
said. Upperclassmen can still choose to take more challenging math,
science and foreign language classes. It was, instead, to avoid
creating a caste system by assigning students to remedial, average or
advanced classes before they’d had a chance to develop their academic
potential.
Those assignments often became self-fulfilling prophecies even though
they didn’t always accurately reflect students’ abilities. This can
have a long-term impact; the rigor of high school courses has been
found to be the No. 1 predictor of college success. In Rockville
Centre, tracked classes also led to racial and economic segregation in
a high school where a fifth of the nearly 1,100 students are Black or
Latino and the rest of the student body is nearly entirely white.
Early on, administrators found that many Black and Latino students and
students from low-income families avoided the most challenging classes
even after being given the option to enroll in them. So now, some of
South Side’s college-level classes, like Hecker’s 12th grade English,
are not only open to all, but also required.
Around the country, gifted and talented programs have come under fire
for exacerbating school systems’ already stark racial and economic
segregation. In 2019 in New York City, a group commissioned by Mayor
Bill de Blasio, The School Diversity Advisory Group, recommended doing
away with all gifted and talented programs, while that same year
Seattle attempted unsuccessfully to eliminate its programs as a
way to alleviate school segregation. Screens used to select students
for high performing schools and advanced classes based on grades and
test scores also face mounting criticism for exacerbating segregation.
Last winter, a district near Philadelphia agreed to reduce its number
of tracked classes at the middle and high school levels and increase
access to Advanced Placement courses in response to a discrimination
lawsuit brought by parents..
Should we screen kids’ genes to ‘predict’ how successful they’ll be in school?
But some educators, parents and students worry about what might replace
screened classes and accelerated programs. Is it possible, they wonder,
to teach all students at all levels together in one class? And, if it
is, will teachers receive the support they need to succeed?
“I have gone to a lot of conferences about educational diversity that
were held during the weekday during the school year,” said Amy Stuart
Wells, professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University,
and a proponent of eliminating gifted programs. (The Hechinger Report
is an independent unit of Teachers College.) “There were no teachers at
these conferences. There was a lot of talk about moving kids around.
There were a lot of recommendations thrown out there. But when it came
to how they’d really work, the attitude was, ‘Let’s let the teachers
worry about it.’ ”
Even when school systems do have a plan for how to bring students at
different academic levels together while supporting and challenging
each student, those plans don’t necessarily succeed at undoing
long-standing racial and economic segregation.
In Washington, D.C., new magnet schools based on the University of
Connecticut’s Schoolwide Enrichment Model, which aims to provide
special programming for students at all performance levels, have been
met with enthusiasm, but so far have produced uneven outcomes in terms
of improved school test scores, and have had little impact on school
diversity. And while educators at South Side have good reason to point
to their school’s academic success, students and parents say that
pushing students so hard to excel takes an emotional toll, and have
demanded less rigor. Some have even asked for a return to more tracking.
As school systems around the country work to address entrenched
educational inequities, these experiments provide insights into the
benefits and challenges of doing away with tracked classes and gifted
programs.
It was 1989, and as a new Spanish teacher in Lawrence, New York, Carol
Burris was assigned an eighth grade class called Language for
Travelers. Its students weren’t fooled by the elegant name. All had
taken a foreign language the previous year and failed, and they knew
that ending up in Burris’ class meant expectations had been lowered.
“There was a real culture that ‘We hate school and we hate language,’”
Burris said. Out of 29 students, 27 were boys. Most were Black and
Latino kids living in poverty.
The experience stayed with Burris, and when she became South Side’s
principal in 2000, she found like-minded educators worried about the
damage tracking could cause and who, over the past decade, had started
to dismantle it.
Rockville’s administrators knew that removing academic tracks would be
fraught. So, the district started by replacing separate gifted classes
in elementary school with individualized, project-based “talent”
classes for all students.
Those classes proved popular. Once parents bought into the idea that
there didn’t have to be winners and losers, it was easier to move
academic integration into higher grade levels.
The district also planned how to help students with weaker skills
manage accelerated classes. Before Rockville Centre detracked math in
the ninth and 10th grades, for example, it added support math classes
in middle school so that all students graduated eighth grade having
completed algebra.
At each step, the district used outcome data to guide its reforms and
convince the community that the efforts were working and, in
particular, that the strongest students weren’t being shortchanged.
Today, the school requires subject teachers in each grade to teach the
same content at the same time. Such coordination facilitates support
classes that meet every other day during the school day, with one
teacher for every six or seven students. Students in these classes are
pre-taught material, making them better prepared to understand material
in their mainstream classes.
Taking such a systematic approach to shrinking the achievement gap may
sound obvious. But around the country, efforts to broaden access to
accelerated classes and, in some districts, to mandate Advanced
Placement classes for all students have been implemented without
ensuring that students have the background material necessary to
succeed.
South Side also turned to the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma,
a Swiss-based program that offers a demanding high school degree.
(Forty-three percent of South Side students earn a full IB diploma,
according to the principal.) The model was chosen as South Side’s main
honors program in the mid-1990s not only for its rigor, but also for
its flexibility. Compared to Advanced Placement classes, which require
students to master a large and specific body of factual knowledge, the
IB program focuses on depth of analysis.
So, for example, South Side replaced Dickens’ ”A Tale of Two Cities”
with James Joyce’s ”Dubliners,“ both of which provide students the
opportunity to analyze a complex and canonical work of English
literature. Russ Reid, who taught English at South Side for more than
40 years, explained: “If you take ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ out of the
curriculum, there are those that go, ‘Oh, my God, you’re not teaching
Dickens.’ But a reluctant learner sees that 450-page novel and says,
‘The hell with it.’”
“It’s hard to argue that ‘Dubliners’ is an easy read,” Reid added. But
each story is relatively short. “If students read 12 stories and blow
off the other three, they’re not going to be lost. I don’t think we’re
teaching to the middle when we’re talking about ‘The Dead.’ But we have
made it more manageable.”
As academic integration advanced, students’ test scores improved
— not just for weaker students, but also for students already
achieving at a high level.
Nothing was simple about the experiment undertaken at Rockville Centre,
but having only one high school with a relatively low-needs population
did make it easier. Just 15 percent of the roughly 1,000 students at
the school receive free or reduced-price lunch, a federal marker of
poverty.
By contrast, in Washington, D.C., 77 percent of public school students
are economically disadvantaged. Many students from higher-income
families go to private schools or move to the suburbs to avoid
attending schools where a large proportion of students perform below
grade level.
This trend intensified when, in 2005, D.C. Public Schools closed its
gifted and talented programs. So, in 2012, the district created an
office of advanced and enriched instruction to keep more middle-class
families in the system and simultaneously serve the learning needs of
its high-performing, low-income students. Like Rockville Centre, the
goal was to provide enrichment without exacerbating racial and economic
inequity or further segregating an already segregated school system.
In 2019, 98 percent of South Side High School students graduated with a
New York State Regents diploma, while 89 percent of all students and 67
percent of economically disadvantaged students earned a New York State
Regents with Advanced Designation
To achieve that tricky balance, D.C. turned to the Schoolwide
Enrichment Model (SEM), used in more than 4,000 schools
nationwide, and internationally. Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis,
professors at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education,
created their model to help diversify accelerated classes and gifted
programs by encouraging school systems to broaden their concept of
giftedness and ferret out student potential beyond what’s measured by
standardized tests. The method assesses qualities such as
motivation, curiosity, empathy, creativity and self-regulation, and
exposes young students to a wide range of enriching experiences to
discover what excites them.
Renzulli and Reis are proponents of diversifying gifted programs, not
eliminating them. In fact, they believe it’s unreasonable to expect one
teacher to teach students at all levels effectively together. “A lot of
lower-achieving kids feel even worse about themselves when they’re
forced to be in classrooms where the content is consistently above
their level,” while the learning needs of higher performing students
are regularly ignored, Reis said.
Despite this, Renzulli and Reis do encourage the use of their model in
systems like D.C.’s that don’t offer gifted programs because they
believe that discovering and deepening students’ individual passions —
a mainstay of gifted education — is useful for all students.
To accomplish this in mainstream schools, their model calls for
flexible small group instruction within classes — based at times on
ability, at times on interest — as well as a focus on project-based
learning so students can pursue their passions. They also encourage all
SEM schools to have a full-time talent specialist so that the burden of
differentiating instruction doesn’t fall entirely on the classroom
teacher.
Ida B. Wells Middle School, D.C.’s newest SEM school, opened just last
year. Although roughly two-thirds of its students entered the school
performing below grade level in math and three-quarters below grade
level in English, according to the city, the school said it was able to
recruit a small group of high-achieving Black and Latino students,
including a handful from private schools and gifted programs in
neighboring states. They came for the enrichment, as well as for the
school’s low teacher-student ratio, made possible by having all classes
inclusive of students in special education, a quarter of the school’s
population, and English language learners. The model means that there’s
funding for every class to have two teachers, and for English and math
classes to have three, with abundant opportunity for small group
instruction.
In addition, Ida B. Wells’ talent specialist Nila Austin provides
pullout classes for both struggling and accelerated students, as well
as enrichment classes that all students can choose to attend.
A speech elective that Austin offers called Soap Box is open to all. In
class last December, each student performed a speech on a topic of
personal importance. One sixth grader decried colorism, explaining how
darker-skinned slaves worked in the fields while lighter-skinned slaves
worked indoors, and described “bizarre tests” later used to determine
“how Black” a person was, like the pencil test in South Africa, which
judged the kinkiness of people’s hair.
Students in need of extra academic support also receive this kind of
personally meaningful enrichment. Before Ida B. Wells’ sixth grade
English class began reading Mildred Taylor’s “Roll of Thunder, Hear My
Cry,” Austin assigned her small group of struggling readers Kondwani
Fidel’s “Hummingbirds in the Trenches,” which explores similar themes
of race, class and trauma, but is more accessible in language and
setting. They also studied the psychology of trauma, wrote their own
trauma narratives and had the opportunity to meet Fidel. When
asked if students in her support class feel stigmatized, Austin said,
“Students ask me all the time how they can get into that class.”
And yet, eight years in, it’s not clear how much impact D.C.’s SEM
program has had on the kinds of outcomes most commonly used to measure
academic success.
Students at most SEM schools in D.C. are more likely to perform below
grade level than at or above it. A couple of SEM schools have seen
striking improvement in their standardized test scores in just a few
years, even though most students haven’t reached grade level, but other
SEM schools have seen minimal or no improvement. (Ida B. Wells is too
new to provide such data.)
The model has also failed to create greater racial or economic
diversity in D.C.’s schools. At more than half of D.C.’s 11 SEM
schools, nearly all of the students are economically disadvantaged.
Ida B. Wells’ Principal Megan Vroman acknowledges that there are
benefits to racial and economic integration, but she said she also sees
advantages when students attend schools like hers that aren’t
integrated and instead “reaffirm their identity.”
But the schools’ overall low academic performance concerns some in the
field. “All education should be enriching. But in some cases, all
students getting enrichment may mean that no students are really
getting opportunities to take on more advanced work,” said Adam Tyner,
associate director of research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who
co-authored a report on ways to increase the representation of Black
and Latino students in gifted programs.
Renzulli and Reis themselves have noted that teachers don’t always
implement SEM in ways that serve the learning needs of their
highest-performing students. Much of the research done on SEM, which
has been in schools for decades, has shown positive results, including
increased math and literacy skills, increased creative output from
students and even long-term impact on college and career choices. But
Renzulli and Reis conducted many of the studies, while others were
written by administrators who’d had success with the program.
Still, Renzulli and Reis are impatient with the idea that all progress
can be measured in a few years by standardized tests. “Creative
productivity, which is the ultimate goal of the model, isn’t always
something you can measure in achievement scores one or two years in.
Students first have to develop interests. They have to develop habits
of mind over time,” Reis said.
Matthew Reif, director of extended learning and academic recovery for
D.C. Public Schools, believes SEM has helped D.C. create a more
engaging and challenging learning experience, even if that’s not yet
captured in test scores. The most important SEM outcome to date, he
said, is an ever-growing number of D.C. educators who want to bring SEM
to their schools.
The results in Rockville Centre are more concrete. In 2019, 98 percent
of South Side students graduated with a New York State Regents diploma,
while 89 percent of all students and 67 percent of economically
disadvantaged students earned a New York State Regents with Advanced
Designation. Statewide, a third of the students received an advanced
designation diploma.
But 10 students interviewed in a group last year at South Side High
School also said that the school is a competitive pressure cooker and
that they feel pushed to take advanced classes. A white student whose
parents both have advanced degrees said she feels stressed, as did a
Black student who is on track to be one of the first in his family to
attend college.
When the experiment at Rockville Centre started in the late 1980s,
Principal Murphy said, it was families of the highest-performing
students who were skeptical. Today, resistance comes from parents who
believe the academic pressure is not good for their children. In 2018,
parents demanded that the school lower its graduation requirements. In
response, though every student must still take the IB English and
history classes in 11th and 12th grades, this year the school removed
the requirement that they sit for the IB exams. Students can also
exempt themselves from some of the longer writing assignments that the
IB requires.
Hecker, the English teacher, said he sees that requiring high-level
classes does have its costs. But he believes the cost of segregating
students based on academic performance is far greater.
“I think it’s better for struggling students to be in my classroom and
not in some other room wondering what’s going on in those classes where
the real learning is happening,” he said. “I think that is completely
demoralizing.”
|
|
|
|
