STOCKBRIDGE — A major change proposed by Berkshire Hills administrators on how high school students would be grouped in individual classes has prompted an outcry from some parents who feel they were left out of the loop.
Administrators had previewed the proposal at the Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee’s last meeting but, at the committee’s April 1 meeting, about 30 teachers and parents turned out to sound off on a proposal that would end the practice of “tracking” at Monument Mountain Regional High School. Tracking groups students in classes according to ability. The new proposal would favor the more inclusive approach of heterogeneous classes.
Click here to see the proposal, “Equity, Access, and High Expectations for ALL,” explained by Jonathan Bruno, director of teaching and learning at the Berkshire Hills Regional School District, and Kristi Farina, Monument Mountain Regional High School principal. The Powerpoint presentation can be found here.
Click here to see video of the April 1 meeting courtesy of the Community Television of the Southern Berkshires, or see the video below as shown on Facebook Live. Fast forward to 32:00 for the discussion of the proposal:
“It’s time for us to be a little bolder and to address inequities head on,” Superintendent Peter Dillon explained. “This proposal raises the bar for all students, shifts how students learn and teachers teach, and will significantly improve student engagement.”
Tracking, Bruno explained, is the “enrolling of students in particular classes, curricula, and courses of study based on perceived ability.” Bruno said the administration’s recommendation to move away from leveling, as tracking is also known, is based on “decades of research” revealing “the damaging effects of long-term ability-level segregation in schools and demonstrates​ that students in heterogeneous classes perform better academically and socially.”
Click here to read the material provided in support of the move to heterogeneous classes. Most of it is academic research but some of the links take readers to opinion pieces supporting the concept.
Bruno also showed a video, entitled “Portrait of Graduate,” featuring Monument students, teachers and administrators and enumerating the educational challenges the district faces currently and in the future.
The plan to end segregation by ability grew out of the district’s 2019-2022 District Improvement Plan, which was centered around Portrait of a Graduate and called for “improving equitable outcomes for all students within the district.”
Dillon defined Portrait of a Graduate as “a community-driven process that will define success for Berkshire Hills students, including the values, knowledge, skills, and work habits they will need to thrive as learners, workers, and leaders in the 21st century.”
More generally, Portrait of a Graduate is “a collective vision that articulates the community’s aspirations for all students” that “serves as a North Star for system transformation,” according to Battelle For Kids, a nonprofit educational consultancy. Click here to see the video presented by Bruno and Farina.
Dillon insisted that in making the change, Berkshire Hills would be aligning itself with some of the best public and private schools in the nation” and that the plan is “deliberate and in phases.” As further evidence that he is committed to ending tracking, Dillon, who holds degrees from Bowdoin, Harvard, and Columbia, said one of his children will be entering Monument in the fall.
“I believe in it and I’m supporting it as my own youngest son enters 9th grade,” Dillon said.
If approved by the school committee, the plan would be phased through 2025. Only incoming 9th graders would be subject to the new program of studies when students return for school in the fall. These students will enroll in unleveled courses with an opportunity to earn an Honors distinction.
Beginning with the class of 2025, all courses will have equal weight, with the exception of advanced placement courses, which will be weighted at 1.1. Students may still earn an honors distinction “through exemplary and rigorous work via predetermined expectations set by the department,” the proposal states.
Most members of the school committee were generally supportive, including Bill Fields of Great Barrington, who retired in 2009 after teaching history at Monument for 40 years. After the presentation, Fields appeared willing to make a motion to approve the proposal but was rebuffed by chairman Steve Bannon, who urged more discussion.
“I think this is a well-needed step for the district,” Fields said. “I ask those people who say we need a lot of study and we need more input to do what Martin Luther King did in his Letter from Birmingham,” Fields said, recalling the words of the civil rights leader. “If not now, then when?”
School Committee member Bonnie Bonn-Buffoni of West Stockbridge, herself a Monument graduate, said when she was a student there, it was clear that students on the lower track “didn’t feel too good about themselves.” Bonn-Buffoni did, however, add a note of caution.
“I do worry that it is such a large change with kids having so much to deal with [during the pandemic],” she said. “I worry that it is too much at once.”
Member Jason St. Peter of Stockbridge said he wanted to see data on how heterogeneous groupings improve student performance. He also wondered how much extra time it would entail for teachers, though he added that a more personalized approach “might improve equity.”
“What will teacher-student ratios be in the new system?” St. Peter asked. “Does that mean classes will be added or cut? What exactly are those changes, or do you know at this time?”
Several Monument teachers spoke in favor of the proposal, including art teacher Krista Dalton, special education teacher Arielle Pink, and history teacher Matt Wohl. However, as St. Peter noted, heterogeneous class groupings in school can have staffing implications.
No one from the Berkshire Hills Education Association, the union representing the district’s teachers, spoke. Nor did anyone from the union respond by publication time to a request for comment from The Edge. Labor issues were not addressed in the proposal, beyond increased professional development to train faculty and improve pedagogy and curricular development.
Bannon opened the floor to public comment from parents. Initially, he limited the comments to three minutes in length, but allowed the parents to speak longer. Most parents questioned the process, including Great Barrington’s Brian Grossman, who called elements of the proposal “huge changes” and wondered why more stakeholders hadn’t been sufficiently notified.
“About 15 years ago, some of the smaller schools were closed and there were a series of public hearings on that where stakeholders and parents were allowed to share their opinions and thoughts on this,” Grossman recalled. “None of this has occurred.”
Grossman, who was a critic of the way the district handled the reopening of the schools last summer, was referring to 2003, when Berkshire Hills decided to consolidate its local schools with a new regional elementary- and middle-school campus on Monument Valley Road in the northern part of Great Barrington. Muddy Brook Elementary School and what was then Monument Valley Regional Middle School opened in 2005.
Grossman also questioned the lack of balance in the presentation: “I’ve read through this and it seems like, the way this is being presented, that this is a slam dunk. I can tell you, if my kids were in school and only one side was presented in their classes, I’d be extraordinarily worried about this.”
Click here to read Grossman’s written reaction to the proposal, which he had prepared for discussion and provided to The Edge (in red text). Grossman’s wife Karen added that their two children at Monument won’t be impacted by the change because they are old enough to be grandfathered into the existing leveling policy until they graduate. She, too, recommended caution.
“I really hope there is more research, deep research, into what is done,” Karen Grossman said. “Take a more gradual approach.”
Steve and Stacey Schultze, along with Stephen Boyd, also questioned the process.
“I’m a supporter of proficiency-based learning … but I have some pretty serious concerns about the process around which we are implementing this plan,” Boyd said. “Most schools that do proficiency-based learning have started in the lower grades. To do this at the high school first seems like the reverse order.”
Stacey Schultze said only about 400 schools had moved toward heterogeneous groupings and that, “out of the entire world, that is a very small percentage of schools.”
“I’m all for allowing everyone to succeed at every level,” Schultze said, while cautioning that “this is a huge shift.”
School Committee member Rich Dohoney of Great Barrington said that he, too, was supportive of the goals of the proposal but that he felt frustrated as a committee member.
“I love being on this committee, but I’m sick of being the buffer between the administration and the community when the administration chooses to ignore them,” Dohoney said. “It’s just grueling.”
Bannon suggested putting off a vote on the proposal and asking administrators to come back to the committee’s next meeting on April 15 to answer additional questions.
“I don’t purport to be an educator … so I need to listen to Jon and Peter and Kristi and they need to make sense to me, and what they have said — that every student in the school needs to have equal access — really strikes a chord with me,” Bannon said. “The devil is in the details; that’s why we’re giving the superintendent more time.”
In other business, Dillon announced that grades 6–12 at Du Bois Middle School and Monument Mountain Regional High School will start fully face-to-face, in-school learning five days a week on April 28.
