Number 8 Challenging the Status Quo Pages 8-15 Having It All David J
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ASCD Page 1 of 8 Association for For the Success of Each Supervision and Learner Curriculum Educational Leadership May 2006 | Volume 63 | Number 8 Challenging the Status Quo Pages 8-15 Having It All David J. Ferrero May 2006 Two Chicago-area high schools demonstrate that educators don't have to choose between innovation and traditionalism. The house lights dim in John Hersey High School's black-box theater. One hundred twenty sophomores sit in the dark, fidgety with anticipation. After several seconds, a teacher-made video starts playing—a disturbing, in-your-face multimedia distillation of the ethical debate around genetic experimentation, set to the music of Peter Gabriel's “Shock the Monkey.” The lights go up again. For several minutes, the students write about their reactions to the video. Two teachers then step forward to debate: Should governments regulate genetic research in the name of human and animal dignity, or would such regulation impose undue restrictions on the pursuit of scientific knowledge? Pro. Con. Rebuttal. Students pose their own questions, issue their own challenges, and debate one another and their teachers. The entire sophomore class will spend the next three weeks in English, social studies, and science classes unpacking ethical issues in science and exploring their origins in the 19th century Romantic reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and the Industrial Revolution. Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein , about a man cobbled together out of spare parts and brought to life by an overzealous scientist, will anchor this unit examining both the historical era that the novel represents and the contemporary issues that it foreshadows. Meanwhile, these same students will spend time in ability-grouped classes, where they will learn the core content through materials adapted to their ability levels and specially designed to help them master basic and advanced literacy skills aligned with the decidedly unromantic ACT College Readiness Standards and standardized diagnostic assessments. These standards anchor skills instruction across the curriculum, and the assessments pave the way toward the ACT college entrance exam itself, which forms a part of Illinois' mandated state assessment. Students' skill deficiencies will be exposed and addressed. Here's the surprise: Hersey's teachers and administrators do not regard this grouping and skills drilling as a distraction from the higher-order, integrative pyrotechnics of the Frankenstein unit, but as the unit's foundation. Educators in this middle-income suburban school, located 20 miles outside Chicago, are committed to ensuring that all students master the basic skills that give them access to higher-order content and controversy. Conversely, these educators believe that exposure to interesting content and controversy will motivate students to master basic skills. According to students, the combination works. “I feel like I'm getting a life skill, something file://C:\Documents and Settings\justin vorel\Desktop\Having It All.Hersey HS.ASCD.htm 9/23/2009 ASCD Page 2 of 8 I can use outside of any test, ” says senior Scott Black. When Black entered Hersey as a freshman in 2002, he scored in the 51st percentile on the reading sections of ACT's EXPLORE test. Three years later, his ACT scores placed him in the top 5 percent nationwide, and as a senior he is enrolled in college-level courses. “I feel a lot more comfortable, a lot more prepared. The curriculum's effects were really powerful,” he notes. The data confirm Black's testimony. Since 2000, when Hersey began to implement the hybrid model, student achievement has soared: The school's average ACT score rose from the 60th percentile nationally (21.8) in 2000 to the 75th percentile (23.4) in 2005—even as the percentage of students taking the ACT increased from 80 percent to 100 percent as a result of Illinois' requiring all 11th graders to take the ACT exam. This shift might have been expected to drive average scores down because more low-performing and special education students were taking the test. From 2003 to 2005, measured student growth in performance on ACT-benchmarked assessments (10th grade PLAN and 11th grade ACT) exceeded predicted growth by approximately 71 percent. Value-added growth gains were most dramatic for students most at risk, including low-income and special education students. For every 100 students who enter 9th grade at Hersey requiring remediation, 50 to 75 are enrolled in college prep or honors courses by the beginning of 11th grade. Gains are strongest in reading and writing, where the model is most fully developed. From the Suburbs to the City Hersey's early success caught the attention of the Chicago Charter School Foundation (CCSF), which was looking for a high school model that would effectively serve low- income and minority urban students. With a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chicago Charter School Foundation established Civitas Schools. It recruited Charles Venegoni, Hersey's English/Fine Arts division head and the Hersey model's chief architect, to lead the organization. In fall 2002, Civitas opened its first school, Chicago International Charter School Northtown Academy Campus, in a shuttered Catholic school building on Chicago's north side. Although operating Northtown on less than half of the per-pupil expenditure that Hersey enjoys, Civitas had the advantage of creating the school from scratch. Venegoni screened prospective teachers for a commitment to the model's dual emphasis on standards and student engagement and adopted a lottery-based admission system in compliance with Illinois' charter law to ensure a diverse student body. Northtown Academy students are about 50 percent Hispanic, with white, black, and Asian students making up roughly equal shares of the remaining half. Approximately 50 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and most students enter 9th grade reading two to three years below grade level. In 2004, Northtown's juniors scored an average of 19.4 on the ACT component of the Illinois state assessment, ranking the school at the top among nonselective schools in Chicago, even though that cohort of students had not had the benefit of the freshman-year foundational work. As at Hersey, gains have been most dramatic for lower-income students and students who enter lagging the farthest behind academically. file://C:\Documents and Settings\justin vorel\Desktop\Having It All.Hersey HS.ASCD.htm 9/23/2009 ASCD Page 3 of 8 The success of this approach at Hersey and Northtown has encouraged the Chicago Charter School Foundation, with Civitas Schools, to expand the model to other schools under its Gates Foundation grant. Next year, it will open a campus in an all-black neighborhood on Chicago's south side. And Township High School District 214, where Hersey is located, is poised to implement the model in four of its other five high schools. Innovative Traditionalism Two schools: one suburban, middle-class, and mostly white; one urban, low-income, and racially diverse. Both have deployed a student-centered instructional model to move the needle decisively on those measures that have proven most difficult to improve: standardized achievement test scores. Both have accomplished this through a combination of test prep, classical content, and collaboratively developed thematic projects grounded in controversy and designed to cultivate student voice and civic engagement. Any educator knows that those things aren't supposed to go together. So what gives? It may seem paradoxical at first to use the term “student-centered” to describe a model that focuses on building students' skills in alignment with standardized assessments. In conventional professional usage, the term usually refers to curricular practices that start with individual student interests and aim to cultivate diverse individual talents. In contrast, schools in which teachers determine the content and pacing of the curriculum tend to be derogated as “teacher-centered.” But at Hersey and Northtown, these terms have a different resonance. There, “teacher- centered” refers to school policies that permit individual teachers to teach idiosyncratically without a collective plan for ensuring that all students succeed according to measurable criteria. “Student-centered” means that teachers coordinate and align their efforts to ensure that students master essential skills and knowledge. Understand that shift, and you're well on your way to comprehending the genius of the Hersey/Northtown model. That genius begins with a willingness to disregard the ideological divisions that educators have erected between themselves and to reconcile competing principles into an integrated whole. The accepted division between traditional and innovative principles and practices (see “Education's Ideological Divide”) virtually defines the professional identities of working educators. Each of us knows which side we're on. Even when our practices prove less pure than our principles, as so often happens in workaday instruction, the identities and ideals remain entrenched and divisive both within individual schools and throughout the profession. Education's Ideological Divide TRADITIONAL INNOVATIVE Standardized tests Authentic assessment file://C:\Documents and Settings\justin vorel\Desktop\Having It All.Hersey HS.ASCD.htm 9/23/2009 ASCD Page 4 of 8 Basic skills Higher-order thinking Ability grouping Heterogeneous grouping Essays/research papers Hands-on projects Subject-matter disciplines