I suppose I should be shocked speechless, but after several years of paying particular attention to gifted education in MCPS, not much shocks me anymore. Still, to have it all laid out so clearly and succinctly by a new-to-the-beat writer on a nationally read education blog was, well, startling.
I speak of back-to-back posts today by Mary Ann Zehr over on Curriculum Matters, one of EducationWeek.org’ s blogs. Zehr recently attended a seminar on “detracking” and wrote about it in her post, The Problem of Tracking in Middle Schools. When a panel was asked how to end tracking (“apartheid”)
Kati Haycock, the president of the Education Trust, replied that combating tracking, where students are placed in classes according to their level of academic performance, “is about calling it malpractice and acting on it.”
Deep breath. We’ve all heard this before from MCEF.
Zehr then shares the anecdote of another panelist, an MCPS middle school assistant principal.
…her school made a move to reduce tracking in English-language arts classes. The school decided to do away with a remedial class in English-language arts for the lowest performing students, and mix the students from that class in with students from two other classes of gifted and talented students. So the school blended the lowest-performing and highest-performing students in classes to learn English-language arts together. She said that each class was then taught by a team of two teachers. In one of the classes, one of the teachers who was part of the team was a special education teacher. Kopnitsky said that test scores show that the change benefited the students who had been in the remedial class.
Left unasked, of course, is the $60,000 question: What of the impact on the high performing students? (For the moment we’ll table the question of how many MCPS middle schools allocate *two* teachers per class to ensure differentiation.)
Zehr quickly realized this, and followed up with another post two hours later: Tracking Is a Hot-Button Issue—Follow-Up to Recent Post
I just called Stacey A. Kopnitsky, the assistant principal at Cabin John Middle School, to ask her what happened to the performance of the gifted and talented students at her school after they were mixed in English-language arts classes with the low-performing students.She says that those students scored “advanced,” the highest of three levels, on the Maryland state English-language-arts test both before and after the change in policy. “They were maintaining and doing as well as before,” she said.
But she also acknowledged that the teachers and administrators in the school didn’t look at the test-score data in any more detail than to make sure that the top-performing students were staying within the advanced level. She said they were more focused on the progress of the students with basic skills.
Okay, so those advanced students were… “maintaining.” Yeah, read that again. “They were maintaining and doing as well as before.” On the grade-level MSA. And that second paragraph…read that one again. No, read it three times–especially the last sentence: “She said they were more focused on the progress of the students with basic skills.”
See? I haven’t been making this stuff up. And the kicker?
Kopnitsky added that no parents have complained about the policy change.
Did the parents even have a clue??
Welcome to the neighborhood, Mary Ann.
That has always been my complaint about inclusion. Kids are taken out of full-time support classes and dropped in the regular classroom with maybe 30 minutes of help from their special ed teacher. The rest falls on the classroom teacher. So two things happen: either the teacher leaves the smart kids to do “independent” work, or the smart kids end up leading a group and essentially teaching some kids, all while the teacher helps the low kids. When we ask administration, “What about the high kids?” and they just smile, shrug, and tell us we need to raise the test scores of the low kids.
Inclusion does have great benefits for students who are behind, but at what cost? Why should smart kids be held back? They deserve to advance and excel, too.
We always say the only way it will change is if parents complain en masse, because admin surely doesn’t listen to teachers. (Though I guess they’d have to admit you’re calling, eh?
)
Nice to meet you, Institutrice! Checked your blog and will add you to my reading list. (lovely, stylish design, btw
) I always appreciate when teachers stop by to comment to lend a perspective born of training and the classroom. I’m just a mom who’s been trying to pay attention, but if you care about the brighter lights among us, you are often made to feel like you have no right to say anything. There was an excellent post on this topic yesterday (which of course veered into math) here: http://11d.typepad.com/blog/2009/06/on-criticizing-schools.html
Thank you for your kind words! The article was great. I know what you mean, though – you don’t want to offend anyone by demanding service for your smart, capable child. But why not? That’s what (some) parents of children with learning disabilities do. They take the schools to due process over things like having a personal care assistant or air conditioners in the room, and all you’re asking for is for an accurate curriculum.
All children are guaranteed a Free, Appropriate Public Education. (FAPE) I keep reading different articles, books and blogs about how public education needs to change. It’s time for a revolution. But where to start?
We would complain if we knew. I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to posit that most smart kids have smart parents. With exceptions, these parents have not been trained in education, though; we chose different career paths. Because we value training and education we assume that those who have followed the Education path have some expertise.
And because parents who have careers cannot often easily volunteer for those classroom hours (in the early years when your child will tolerate such parental behavior) we do not know what actually happens in the classrooms unless we are told. My gifted kid rarely tells me what’s going on because Kid likes to keep that realm to kidself. Has done that since preschool. Just how Kid is wired.
That is why we do not complain; not because we do not care but because we do not know and because we assume that no harm is being done. Until there is harm done, and then we start to focus on lifting the curtain. And then we become PIAs.
Newbie, you clearly are not a newbie. You are “spot on.” I guess my hope here is exactly that, to “lift the curtain,” to alert parents that yes, harm is being done, and at minimum they should be vigilant and ask a lot of questions. It is your right–our right–to know and receive straight answers.
Inhaling in, exhaling out. Trying to forget the sneers of derision used when teachers uttered that awful word, “tracking.”
I was one of those moms who volunteered in the school all the time, to the point where I was asked if I was getting paid by our Upstate NY district.
Yes, lack of tracking or even real differentiation, Reason #212 why I’m homeschooling the 2nd child.
Deep breath indeed. You know the discouraging thing? I’ve actually crossed paths with Ms. Kopnitsky when she was the gifted program coordinator at one of my kid’s schools. If a person like her, who I would hope to God somewhere along the line got some training in giftedness, feels that this is perfectly fine, where does it leave us?
Hat’s off to you, Sandra for your dedication as a school volunteer. In lefty liberal areas, “Tracking” is used as a cudgel to cow parents into silence. I refuse to play along.
But what does it mean not to play along? Way out here on left coast Seattle, (some) high school teachers/departments equate self selecting honors or AP courses with the evils of tracking — so instead of choosing a harder AP course, everyone as a group gets to take an easier one, and no separate Honors for LA courses. Sure, I can (and do) protest and whenever possible point out the inappropriate use of the term, but other than that? (well, on a personal level, we are leaving. my 10th grader got into early entrance program, so he’s off to university. I’ll probably remain active on school issues, but some things — like this one — seem futile.)
I know we should count ourselves lucky in that respect–schools here offer oodles of APs, we have IB programs…that train has left the station and I don’t see any way that can be rolled back. There is some backlash (which I’ve written about) among people who dislike the pressure, the elimination of honors options so that kids are forced to take an AP class or grade “regular”–but the county’s ethos of achievement at the high school level is here to stay. The tracking folks here know they can’t win that one (and we already have more or less open AP participation), so instead they are focusig on the preparation leading *up* to high school. The real battle is in middle school and elementary school.
Anyway, you ask, “what does it mean to not play along.” I think it takes continuously calling these folks out, thankless and futile-seeming though it may be. But also what you are doing, opting out. Publicly. And then forging a new path–I’ve got some ideas brewing on that. Look, each of us has 18 years per kid and then they’re gone. We can’t hit a pause button while the school system takes a decade or more to sort itself out. Sorry. I’m not willing to sacrifice my kid. Maybe if enough of us raise a ruckus, there will be some change.
[...] show that he is, at a minimum, “maintaining and doing as well as before.” (See Can It Be Any Clearer? to find out why I’m laughing [...]