"Everyone gets a gold medal in gold medal class!"
Middle school reform…what does it mean for GT instruction…where is this all headed? As noted before, the middle school landscape in MCPS is extremely confusing. Neighboring schools can be using different curricula, different grouping practices with the same curricula, different scheduling arrangements, etc.
To get some perspective, on April 22 the MCCPTA Gifted Child Committee hosted a meeting on the Middle School Reform Expansion Classes. I was not able to attend, but a GT liaison who did has posted her notes of the evening to the GT Liaisons listserv, and they’ve been picked up elsewhere. I know this is long–but this write up is excellent and I strongly urge you to read it in order to get some important insights into the MCPS view of “accelerated and enriched instruction” at the middle school level. There are some real “eyebrow raisers” here.
Because of the small group, the discussion was much more freewheeling than is typical. Marty Creel began with a brief overview of middle school reform that began 25 years ago with the national shift from junior high schools to middle schools. Initially, middle school philosophy was that middle-school aged children should not be pushed to hard; that the period should be used to build self-esteem; and that a good method for doing so was for each child to be assigned to a “team” of 5-6 instructors who would plan the child’s care and curriculum together.
About 10 years ago the leadership swung back to a more content-based approach; kids were viewed as more resilient and capable of learning more content. Middle school is now seen as an opportunity for kids to create habits of mind for the rest of life as well as prep for high school. The MCPS middle school reform initiative is trying to shift, through course development, to a more intensive delivery of content to advanced level learners. Significantly, the initiative does not address grouping practices which are still left to the individual principal in consultation with the school’s “community” (which may or may not include formal parent input.)
What the initiative does do is shift away from optional extensions to a written advanced curriculum which delineates what higher level learners should be learning and be tested on. It is different from extensions because extensions are meant as “enrichment” of regular curriculum and don’t allow for skipping content the student has already mastered.
Stacy Gray then started her PowerPoint presentation (note: Now available here. Susan Thomas has indicated this will be made available on the MCCPTA website but it is not there yet.). She went through the various MS’s that are part of the reform rollout, and explained that Phase I schools get extra staff resources to implement the new courses; Phase II schools get fewer extra resources; and Phase II partial schools get the curriculum but no additional staff. All of these schools were chosen from among schools that applied to be part of the pilot program; many MS’s did not apply.
There are two categories of MS Reform classes: core and elective. All MS’s will get the core 1 classes (eventually), but only the Phase I/II schools will get the new elective pathways, which are intended to replace “fluff” electives with pathways of courses that build on each other toward the possibility of HS credit in 8 grade. The inequitable distribution of new electives to some but not all schools is due to the initiative’s having run out of money. Schools that get the elective pathways will not be changing their schedules to allow for more elective slots, however, so students who elect to take them will have to give up an elective such as music or foreign language.
One other important topic addressed was the difference between mandatory “Tier I” training and school-based training. “Mandatory” means teachers must take it and MCPS must pay them their contractual hourly rate to do so. “School-based” means the school has to offer it but the teachers don’t get paid extra to take it (presumably it’s incorporated into existing professional development time) so the training costs MCPS much less.
The implementation of new core classes for “everyone else” (the 20 schools who are not Phase I or II schools) is limited by the training budget, because all schools must have mandatory Tier I training for the courses they choose to implement. However, training money is not an issue for schools’ decisions regarding whether to begin the three-year rollout of core classes in 2009-10 or later. Some middle schools chose to wait until 2010-11 to implement the first wave of core classes because of the late notice that funding was available for 2009-10. In theory the school 2 “community” is supposed to decide which courses to phase in when but staff already knows that some schools are not including parents in this decision.
Most of the rest of the evening (the meeting went very late, and Marty and Stacy were kind enough to stay until well after 10 pm) was devoted to parsing the guidance, or lack thereof, on grouping. Marty emphasized that this initiative was not designed or implemented to “solve” the grouping debate; each school gets to choose, first, whether to use the new courses to replace only existing GT classes or to replace the on-grade-level courses as well. (At Clemente, for example, every student takes IS 6 even though it’s an “advanced” class). The curriculum is written so that there are grade level objectives and corresponding advanced level objectives, and in a heterogenous-grouped class the advanced students would be expected to complete all of the objectives while the “regular” students would be expected to complete only the on-grade level material, although they could try more if they wanted. “Regular” students would get a unit test that tested only the “regular” part of the curriculum; advanced students would be tested on advanced material. Neither the instruction nor the testing is optional for advanced students.
I asked how the advanced students would be identified for this “service” and Marty explained that it would be a combination of prior GT designation (i.e., in 2 grade) and parent/teacher nd recommendations. Significantly, though, in a heterogenous “advanced” class, all students will have the same class designation on their transcripts regardless of whether they got the “regular” material/testing or the “advanced.” A “regular” student can get an A for completing regular course work and testing, and an advanced student would have to have A-level results on the advanced material to get the same grade in the same class. Parents pointed out that the advanced students would likely resent this. Marty responded with a parable about Michael Phelps’ gold medals being the result of his spending several hours a day in the pool despite his natural gifts and added that “to those to whom more is given, more is expected” as a justification for expecting advanced students to do more/harder work to earn the same grade.
I suggested that a more likely analogy would be if all swimmers were put in “gold medal class” and given gold medals if they did their best, even though Michael, by virtue of his above average ability, swam much better times as a result of doing his best. It seems clear that teaching advanced level content to only a subset of students in a class described as “advanced” on the transcript will end up being either meaningless or punitive to the advanced level learners. I (and several others – it wasn’t just me but we all asked the same question in different words) asked if there was anything on the transcript that would reveal that an advanced student who got a B in IS 6 had done more advanced work than a “regular” student in the same IS 6 class who got an A, and Marty explained that students who are identified as gifted in the second grade global screening would get an asterisk next to the course on their transcripts; that is the only designation on the transcript that the student was expected to do advanced level work.
Furthermore, MCPS has no system in place, nor any funding to develop one, that would monitor and document whether asterisked students were actually getting the expected advanced work. It will be ASSUMED that gifted-labeled students get these “services” but there is no way to track whether they actually do, apart from parent monitoring. I asked what would happen if the no-label pilot is expanded to get rid of the asterisk, and Marty had no answer to this. He went into a lengthy discourse about why middle school transcripts don’t mean anything anyway, other than to students’ immediate self-esteem (the importance of which was acknowledged.). Another parent pointed out that if a grade has no direct correlation to whether a student is receiving and succeeding or failing in particular identified content, how is a parent supposed to use the information to monitor a child’s progress?
We went around on this for a while but that was basically it; Stacy hurried through the rest of the PPT about the actual content of the courses, and the meeting broke up. From the time we spent on content it does appear that the curriculum has been designed for additional rigor and that the new components are written in a format parallel to the existing grade-level curriculum, which I understand to be an improvement similar to the development of written curriculum for the ES Highly Gifted Centers. Consequently, I think this is material that advocates for gifted education can work with. Having said that, I don’t understand how we can hope for anything close to consistent county-wide implementation in the absence of any plans to monitor delivery or success of these courses, especially where they are offered in heterogenous groupings in which teachers will be expected to teach both on-grade and advanced curricula concurrently in the same class.
