In the year I taught College Prep-level 10th grade English at Monument Mountain Regional High School, I was consistently struck by the almost perfect social class segregation between my room and Honors level “Fact and Fiction” down the hall. Of my 39 students, one was black, one mixed race, and four Hispanic, while nearly all came from families of non-college educated parents. Through a combination of my own ineptitude and their lack of readiness, not much college prep was accomplished. The only book I believe a plurality of them may have finished from cover to cover was Steinbeck’s 108-page “Of Mice and Men,” though even there several were betrayed by their reaction at the shocking climax of the film version.
On the “other side of town,” down the hall and a world away, was Fact and Fiction. I visited one fall morning and found a large, universally engaged group discussing “free indirect discourse” vis a vis Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Kitteridge.” I looked around and saw the son of a grant writer, the son of an investment banker, the daughter of a doctor, the daughter of a lawyer. I recognized the students’ names. The room was even less racially diverse than my own not very diverse room.
In CP English, I recognized only one of my students. Many of their parents worked in the trades, several in the health field, one mom cleaned houses, one dad was a cop, several worked in restaurants. Others were disabled and lived on public assistance. One girl was in foster care, another’s father had recently died in a drunk driving accident. Many lived far off in the hill towns and spent two hours or more each day on the bus.
It was clear. The children from more economically privileged, college-educated families took Honors, and the lower-middle, working class, and poor kids took College Prep — or, below that, Standard, which was eliminated in 2019 — with the distinctions extending beyond English. In the words of a school official from that time, “There are no poor kids in Honors Math.”
Since then, thanks to a nagging obsession with what went wrong, I’ve traced where my students ended up. It’s become clear that not only did their parents not attend college, they also had no understanding of what college entailed. They were unaware that a high school diploma does not necessarily translate to college readiness. They were unfamiliar with the perils of student debt, and anyway, many had been dragged against their will toward traditional higher education, because, as one of my former students put his options as they were presented to him: “It was college or nothing.”
Another former student decided that “college” could mean only a private four-year institution. She now has a degree in early childhood education that’s left her more than $50,000 in debt, with a low-paid job at a childcare center beside a co-worker who earns the same wage with only a high school diploma. My student does not foresee a time when she’ll be able to afford her own apartment, much less a house.
When we talk about “equity” these days at the national level, it’s usually in the context of racial justice, which is, rightfully, at the forefront of the public imagination. But, though our population is growing slowly more racially and ethnically diverse, our school district, Berkshire Hills Regional, is still more than three-quarters white. When we talk about equity here, in this resort, second-homeowner-dependent region, the most salient demographic differentiator is income.
The percentage of our student body that is economically disadvantaged has doubled since 2006. This year, for the first time, just over one in three Berkshire Hills students qualifies as “economically disadvantaged,” which refers to students who are eligible for free or reduced lunch, who receive supplemental nutrition assistance, or who are homeless, migrants, or in foster care. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve heard of professional parents here who commute to Europe. Our schools are, in financial terms, very diverse.
W.E.B. Du Bois Middle School Principal Ben Doren came here a decade ago, after running a New York City school that was overwhelmingly black, brown, and low-income, and he pushes back against peers who claim the diversity mantle for the city. “So, you’re white and wealthy and you get on the subway and you see black people, you see poor people, that’s diversity? Your kids don’t go to school with those kids. You don’t work with them. Schools are actually more segregated in New York City. In the Berkshires, we at least have this opportunity where everyone has to be here, and there is no poor school and rich school, no black school and white school.”
Social and racial divisions play out here not between school and school or town to town, but inside of one building, and while we get steadily less white, the economic chasm is widening at a much faster pace. If recent trends continue, we may one day approach the kind of economic inequality that plagues the most bifurcated regions of the country, like that of a town I know well, Glenwood Springs, Colorado. I regularly visit a close friend there and have always thought Glenwood could be a sister town to Great Barrington, with bigger mountains and wider rivers. It’s now #8 on a list of the most unequal metro areas in the U.S. (Jackson, Wyoming is number one.)
The recent influx of wealthy urban dwellers to South County has skewed our real estate prices dramatically and could help push us onto that list sooner rather than later. Consider this eye-popping statistic. In 2020, the average sale price of a home in Southern Berkshire County was $543,804, a 65 percent increase over 2019.
The median household income in Great Barrington has not, needless to say, kept pace. It is $52,000, about 3 percent lower than the state average. To say that the average Great Barrington (including Housatonic) resident cannot afford our median home prices would be a cruel understatement. They’d need to earn nearly twice as much as they currently do.
This, then, is the inequitable academic and economic reality against which Monument has recently presented its ambitious Equity, Access, and High Expectations for All plans. The most immediate step to impact local families is the doing away with of traditional, academic ability-based groupings, or “tracks,” creating instead a heterogeneous makeup of classes for incoming freshmen this fall. All 9th graders will simply take English 9 — rather than CP or Honors English — with a random assortment of their peers who have not decided ahead of time to which track they belong.
This plan is called for because most of the air in our collective room has gone to the conventionally determined “high-flyer” portion of the student body. The class of 2017, for instance, included three seniors who gained admission to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which accepts less than 7 percent of applicants. I must have heard this impressive news half a dozen times. Yet 20 percent of that same graduating class did not intend to go to college of any kind, and 4 percent of the high-needs cohort dropped out of the class of 2017. We did not hear about those kids at garden parties.
In her comments during the three School Committee meetings that have addressed this plan, high school principal Kristi Farina, often in impassioned tones, has pointed out that the foundation for bad student outcomes is laid long before high school. Kids get stuck with labels through assumptions made in elementary or middle school. “They pre-sort themselves, and then the ability to un-sort themselves, if they want to, is incredibly difficult … When we label a student CP, it just does something to their self-esteem, and has impacts on socialization within student groups in the building.”
History, and Fact and Fiction teacher Matt Wohl acknowledges that the “center of gravity” has never been with students who don’t fit the selective college-bound model. Historically, he said, “We are not there to serve them. We’re there to lecture them, house them, give them failing grades, hire SPED teachers, do crisis management … have meetings with parents, for crises we create. Because ‘This is what you’re supposed to do, and this what you’re supposed to be. And since you’re not it, it’s a problem.’… But they come to us not as we want them to be, but as they are. The question is, are we truly a public school?”
Another goal of the plan is, in the words of Superintendent Peter Dillon, to “redefine what advanced work means.” In the new configuration, an Honors distinction in English would carry the same credit weight and therefore, on paper at least, be considered equally valuable to an honors distinction in Automotive. Parent Joshua Briggs pointed out in the April 15th school committee meeting that there’s data to suggest that academically strong kids like his will also benefit from “not being tracked into a particular group.” They will come to learn a broader definition of intelligence, by seeing first-hand the myriad ways there are to learn, and so experience education at its most “holistic.” In this way, the school will send a very different message — that it celebrates and values the strengths and talents of every student, not only those who successfully fit themselves into an increasingly exclusive definition of success set by a zero-sum, winner-take-all society.
But, surely the most dramatic and challenging shifts will have to take place outside the school building. Achieving true Equity, Access and High Expectations for All is not the work of Monument Mountain Regional High School. It’s ours, and it will take generations. It will require a cultural reimagining of success, and even what a good life itself entails.
As Superintendent Dillon described it, education is not a blueberry pie. We can only grow from expanding our vision of “high achieving.” How sad that we cannot conceive of the possibility of our child learning something valuable from sitting next to the kid our small minds have labeled the “lowest common denominator,” nor conceive of a world, or a town, or a school, in which there is simply enough to go around. As Matthew McMahon, an alumnus of Monument, put it in his remarks at the school committee meeting, “Giving up privilege isn’t really giving up, it’s sharing.”
