Monument Mountain Regional High School’s (MMRHS) Equity and Access For All plans, including the “de-leveling” or “open enrollment” of classes, along with a gradual move toward a Proficiency Based Learning (PBL) approach, are inspiring both pushback and support. Supporters, including, first and foremost, the district administration and high school and middle school principals, say the district has not been serious about meeting the college and career preparation needs of all students, including those who are economically disadvantaged, the number which is growing year by year, and that it is time to address those inequities. Detractors, including parents and some teachers, say the changes will degrade the quality of education for all, are being “foisted” upon an unprepared teaching staff and public, and, without parental support, will be dead in the water.
Principal Kristi Farina and Berkshire Hills Regional School District (BHRSD) Director of Teaching and Learning Jonathan Bruno stressed in an interview that these efforts are not coming out of left field, and have actually been in the works since 2017, during the brief tenure of then-Principal Amy Rex. Rex had come from a progressive district in Vermont and was shocked by what she saw as an antiquated tracking system of categorizing students into Standard, College Prep (CP), Honors, and Advanced Placement (AP) level classes. The good reputation of the school was resting on the good, even impressive, outcomes of students in the two advanced categories, with those placed in the other two categories being, in the words of longtime History teacher Matt Wohl, “kind of an afterthought.”
Rex also called out the shortcomings of the traditional fixed-time-based system of promoting students from grade to grade. In that system, students and their families are made to believe, as she put it in an interview at the time, “that if they go through a course sequence they will graduate prepared.” Measuring a student’s high school graduation readiness by the amount of time spent in a given course, she argued, makes no sense, as this system does not tell us whether a student has actually learned anything.
As it was, many students weren’t learning much. Rex and Farina, who in 2017 was serving in the Director of Teaching and Learning role, dug into that year’s Math MCAS data, the same numbers Farina recently shared with the school committee. Looking at the color-coded graphs, a student’s Advanced or Failing score correlates almost perfectly with their status as an Honors or CP level student.
Taken together with class enrollment and demographic data, these numbers starkly demonstrate that the school was not expecting much of a significant proportion of the student population. Only 11 percent of low-income students were enrolled in Honors classes. Zero Special Education students, those with Individual Education Plans, were enrolled in Advanced Placement courses, and only two percent in Honors courses.
[Full disclosure: I taught one year of 10th grade, College Prep-level English at MMRHS in 2011-2012, and have discovered through my own research that, of my 39 students, only 10 have graduated from a four-year college.]
These disparities, along with the sobering fact that the percentage of poor students at the high school has more than doubled in the last 14 years, explains why, as Farina has framed it in the past, “If the question is equity, the time is now.”
She’s been met with the argument that there will always be a certain subset of students who will just not enroll in advanced classes, and to that she responds, “Yes, I agree. But are we really okay with a system where, if I’m a parent of a second grader in Berkshire Hills and my child gets a diagnosis of ADHD, I can pretty much guarantee they’re never going to take an AP course?” Only big, systematic shifts will address that basic injustice, she argues.
She and Bruno also hope the proposed changes will also address concerns about student engagement. On the 2019 Prevention Needs Assessment Survey [see chart below], fully 70 percent of students reported that they “hated” being at school either “sometimes,” “often,” or “almost always.” That was true of students across the board, regardless of the level of classes in which they were enrolled. The hope is that the Equity and Access for All plan will encourage students to think more broadly and creatively about their interests and options in the first two years of high school. Then, perhaps in junior and senior years, to zero in on a selected pathway, when opportunities open up for internships, college credits, and other community partnerships.
Though the district does not technically need the school committee’s approval in order to implement the proposed changes, Farina and Bruno have presented them at two meetings, and will again at tomorrow night’s meeting, in the hopes of earning it. “It would be better to move forward with the school committee’s blessing,” said Farina.
Incoming sophomores, juniors, and seniors will be grandfathered into the old system and will retain their tracking designations, though all teachers will, starting this fall, be receiving professional development in how to shift to a proficiency-based learning system. But what will open enrollment mean for an incoming 9th grader this fall? Their core courses will feature heterogeneous ability groupings, undifferentiated by level. Students will have the option of earning an “honors distinction” within each class, which would involve extending and deepening the work at hand. For example, if the class is reading Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” and Jane finishes it early and wants to do more, she can request, or the teacher can propose, that she read another book with similar or contrasting themes. Farina and Bruno stress that the honors distinction is not about racking up “extra work” to build up points or credits for a better grade. It’s about the quality of learning, not quantity of points.
Report cards will not, however, look any different in the coming year, and any overhaul of the grading system will be longer in coming. Farina’s goal for the 2021-2022 school year regarding the move away from the traditional model to proficiency-based learning is for each class to include at least one unit of study through which students are taught and assessed using a PBL approach.
Parent reaction, as measured by the handful who spoke up during the April 1 school committee meeting, is mixed.
One parent of three Monument Mountain students is upset about all aspects of the proposal, especially the lack of parental input, and the fact that the administration has painted a rosy, unrealistic picture that does not acknowledge or address what the likely downsides of implementation would be, especially judging from the enormous unanticipated hurdles the districts has met with trying to implement remote learning in the past year.
“This [Equity and Access For All plan] is almost a religious document and there’s no suggestion that there could be hiccups or other points of view. If it is poisoned by lack of participation and there is no internal introspection about what they’re suggesting and their infallibility, then we are in for a tough ride.”
This parent sees damage being done far beyond the walls of the high school. “We could have settled anywhere and we settled here because of Monument Mountain and some of the amazing success stories we’d heard. To see that thrown away in this way … I feel a responsibility to speak up for all these kids. We need to have a good school system to attract people here, to keep people within the district. We could get into a really bad cycle that could cause flight from this area, that could impact the economy in this area. When schools falter, it has disastrous effects for the community.”
Another local couple had an “inkling” of what was coming based on the removal of Algebra from the 8th grade curriculum, and their fears are informed by the difficulties faced by teachers and students during the pandemic. “The lack of transparency is giving us caution because of this major shift. Teachers have not been given enough time to master teaching online. We anticipate that the next year will require a huge lift for parents. Whatever they choose, they need stakeholder involvement to be successful.”
They see the primary problem with reduced student engagement as resting with problems at home. “The secret sauce is our involvement as parents. If we want these disadvantaged students to do better, we need to have a deeper engagement with their families. If there is a DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] problem they should start with the middle school. I’d like to see a more holistic view.”
Ben Doren, principal at W.E.B. DuBois Middle School, points out that the lower and middle schools have already made big strides in de-leveling. “They [high school students] have been in heterogeneous groupings since kindergarten if, and only if, they came through the Berkshire Hills system, which is only 60 percent of the entering freshman class of Monument Mountain.” (The other 40 percent come from the Montessori School of the Berkshires, The Berkshire Waldorf School, Berkshire Country Day School, and by choicing in from other districts.)
On the other end of the parent opinion spectrum is Erica Mielke, mother of a 6th grader at Dubois Middle School and coordinator of the Family Advisory Council there, who is “totally supportive” of the Equity and Access for All plans. The reason parents are upset, she believes, is due to the uniquely difficult circumstances of this school year. “I think the problem is that we had a year of lost potential, with what would have been a more informed rollout. We are following the district improvement plan, but because of the lost year, it feels sudden, and people feel like they’re out of the loop. These conversations could have been happening with less time urgency except for COVID. All the meetings necessarily have been focused on health concerns.”
Monument Mountain art teacher Krista Dalton is also supportive of the move, and especially stresses the need to even out the attention playing field.
“The parents who are showing up to school committee meetings have kids who are being treated really well; we need to give voice to the students who don’t have a voice — English as a Second Language students, people of color, and students who come from working-class backgrounds whose parents don’t show up to these meetings — because they don’t have time or don’t feel comfortable because we have such high-powered intellects here, who can talk about this stuff.”
History teacher Matt Wohl is clear-eyed about the cultural forces that have brought the school to this point, and firmly and unequivocally supports the new plans, saying the status quo simply cannot stand. According to him, “the center of gravity” at Monument used to rest with aspirational, professional parents who saw that they could send their kids to Monument and “get a prep school education on the cheap. That was the word on the street, that’s the deal that they were counting on. The town fathers said, ‘Come here, move here, if your kid is in that top tier, you’re gonna have this team of teachers who can teach at Deerfield or Hotchkiss. Send ‘em our way and we will do right by them.’ Now, Kristi is saying, ‘That’s not what we’re going to do anymore.’ It doesn’t mean those kids won’t be able to have an experience, but it does mean they will be one cohort of many we are going to give equal care and focus to.”
Wohl acknowledges that he has colleagues who, like some parents, are frustrated and angry, who feel that the Equity and Access for All plans are coming without preparation or long-term consensus or coalition-building. “I get that there was a lack of due process,” he said, “AND I think it’s a good idea.”
Veteran science teacher Lisa Baldwin is one of those colleagues upset by the lack of due process. Over her 26 years at Monument Mountain, she has taught every science course at every level. These days her “jam” is Honors and AP Chemistry, 10th and 11th grades, with an occasional senior. Now, she said, she’s so disillusioned with the path the high school is taking that she’s decided to retire early, at the end of this year.
She is, she says, “in mourning.” “It’s very difficult to leave places you’ve invested so much into … I feel very sad about a lot of changes we’re going toward.” She is also quick to add, though, that she has “real respect for the challenges that our principal, superintendent, and school committee face.”
But communication over the past few years, she lamented, has made her feel as though she’s “living in a Twilight Zone here, with no information coming to me.” Changes were made and she was left wondering, “Why do I feel like I have no idea what’s going on, as a veteran teacher?” The beginning of the end for Baldwin came last year when she was presented with a schedule that did not include time for laboratory work, work that, she argues, actually meets the proficiency-based standards the administration wants to implement. “It’s ironic to me that I’m looking at the PBL standards and thinking, ‘Wow. We can’t do that anymore.’”
The final straw was when she got word that the school would be moving toward open enrollment. “That was it for me … I’m not convinced that the research they’re using is in line with the uniqueness of this school and district. My colleagues have visited some amazing schools, where this is working great. Like charter schools, where you start from scratch, Kindergarten to Grade 12. It’s very difficult to see it working here the way the research says it can work.”
Despite the challenges, Berkshire Hills Superintendent Peter Dillon is convinced that the status quo cannot stand and has put his full-throated support behind the new initiatives. “I don’t think it is conscionable to do great by the top and the bottom and ignore the middle. The pervasive problem is kids who skate by and are not well prepared for college or work or anything … There is a subset of people who say we need to go back to the way things were and I think the opposite. Why go back to a false sense of security? Why not go in a better direction?”
