Standards reform in the United States aims at providing all children with a more challenging curriculum and holding schools accountable for their achievement. High academic standards, proponents argue, will alleviate inequalities in curriculum, instruction, and expectations for students. Purportedly, standards will also bring excellence by requiring all students to demonstrate higher levels of achievement and by providing all students with equal educational opportunities while preparing a more informed citizenry and a better trained work force.
But what about the firmly entrenched system of tracking that exposes students to dramatically different and unequal levels of curriculum? Consider the daily experiences of many lower-track students—particularly low-income students of color—whose classrooms offer fewer resources, low-level curriculum, and less powerful learning environments. How can these students reach higher standards?
The Reform Possibilities
For three years, we have followed the progress of 10 U.S. secondary schools where administrators and teachers have worked to restructure their schools in ways that could bring all students to high academic standards. The schools, which vary in size from 500 to 3,000 students, have racially and socioeconomically mixed student populations. They are widely dispersed across the country, with one in the Northeast, three in the Midwest, one in the South, two in the Northwest, and three in various regions of California.
Faculties at these schools became disenchanted with their tracking systems, which had created academic, racial, and socioeconomic divisions among students. White and middle-class students were overrepresented in honors and advanced classes, while lower-income African American and Latino students were disproportionately represented in general and remedial classes. These educators saw detracking as way to pursue both excellence and equity. In addition to reducing or eliminating tracks, the schools created new schedules, reorganized teachers into teams, provided all students access to honors programs, instituted integrated curriculums, and created opportunities for students to get extra academic support—all in an effort to make standards-based education possible.
Toward Detracked Courses
For most schools, the first step was to do away with low-level classes. Union High School (all school names are pseudonyms) eliminated remedial tracks, leaving only one regular and one advanced track. Grant High School's English department eliminated its low-level 12th grade electives; all current electives are of equal rigor and offer an honors option.
Other schools required students to take a core of heterogeneous courses. Two middle schools, King and Explorer, developed a common curriculum for all students. Some of the high schools required all students to pass benchmark classes—English I at Green Valley, biology at Grant, and algebra at Union. At Central High, all students begin 9th grade on a college-prep trajectory in English, science, and math.
Many schools simultaneously opened the top levels by allowing almost everyone access to honors programs. Others provided honors activities within heterogeneous classes. Teams at Explorer Middle School offer either multilevel activities or pullout challenge classes, available to all students, several times a week. Traditionally low-achieving students and mainstreamed special education students frequently participate.
Green Valley also offers challenge projects within heterogeneous English classes. Students must complete at least one challenge class per quarter to receive an A in the class. Grant High's honors-option language arts classes allow any student who completes the work to receive an honors designation on his or her transcript. Plainview started a "Jaime Escalante" campaign that encourages minority students to enroll in advanced placement classes.
Double Doses of Curriculum
Many schools created opportunities for students to get extra help to master more challenging curriculum. Central High's faculty designed a customized calendar to provide a "double dose" of instruction for students having difficulty. The intercessions allow low-achieving students a chance to repeat classes they had previously failed, without affecting their course load during the normal sessions. Several schools offer resource classes for low-achieving students; students enroll in these classes in place of an elective. Union High encourages capable students to double up in math courses and offers a support class, Transitions to College Math, for students who need a review of algebra concepts while enrolled in Algebra II or geometry. Bearfield Middle's math teachers offer tutoring sessions before or after school.
Grant High operates a math homework center one day a week in which teachers, community volunteers, and upper-level students tutor students who need help. In addition, two math teachers offer a summer challenge program in which minority students can complete a year's worth of math in an eight-week course. Students who complete the summer challenge may then skip to a higher-level math class in the fall. The class has already produced increased enrollments in calculus among formerly underrepresented minority groups.
Accommodating Diversity
Many teachers adopted classroom strategies that allow students to demonstrate their ability in previously unrecognized ways. Teachers at Explorer Middle School use Socratic Seminars, where students discuss open-ended questions in a format described by one teacher as "analogous to a conversation around the dinner table. . . . It allows those kids who don't feel comfortable in other settings a chance to speak their minds . . . because they know they can't be wrong."
Grant High School developed a Marine Science curriculum that relies very little on textbooks; instead, students take frequent field trips and complete small-group projects. Students might make anatomical models of fish out of play dough, or collect and identify various forms of ocean plant and animal life. All Marine Science students are required to design and teach a week of science classes at a local elementary school and guide a group of children on a beach walk.
Several high schools adopted programs that provide low-achieving students access to a broad span of math concepts. Interactive Math at Central and Liberty and Integrated Math at Grant interweave concepts from algebra, statistics, geometry, probability, and logic, with the conceptual demands increasing each year. Bob Jackson, math chair at Grant, credited the Integrated Math program for enabling a diverse group of students to learn math well:They're the kind of kids who probably would have been doomed to spending two years in arithmetic and not doing anything substantive. And with the new mathematics, I can't believe the type of things and level they've achieved right now.The math chair at Central High, Faith Jacobs, told us that you can't detrack in a traditional curriculum. Her colleague Christie Jeffries summed up their new curriculum: "We teach problem solving, writing, and communicating your mathematical thoughts." She also emphasized problem finding as an important dimension of mathematics: "They have to figure out what problems to do before they can even do the problems."
A Green Valley team of teachers piloting an integrated math and engineering program were excited about the content of combined mathematics and vocational studies. Math teacher Gloria Pedroza said,It is really good math. It isn't watered down, and it is very much applied. You won't ever get this question from a kid: "When will I ever use this?"
Many schools developed multicultural curriculums, such as Grant's required 9th grade World Cultures course and Liberty's Ethnic Studies class, which engage students who show little interest in traditional curriculum and allow low-achieving minority students to display their culturally specific knowledge. Many schools offer African American or Mexican American History, African American or Latin American Literature, Ethnic Literature, and Women's Literature. As an English teacher at Green Valley stated, "We have got to find ways for all kids to find entry and go as far as they can."
King Middle School's Project Equal incorporates multicultural literature into the curriculum and the library. Last year, several 8th grade teachers attended a course on how to teach a unit on the Holocaust. Teachers at other schools studied culturally related learning styles.
We also found teachers who based their curriculum and pedagogy on theories of the multidimensional nature of intelligence and giftedness. Plainview English teacher Olivia Jeffers developed an interdisciplinary, individualized course that a multiracial group of both high- and low-track students take to help satisfy college-entrance English requirements. Students choose much of their own reading and work on research projects at their own pace. Jeffers does not feel that she is holding the high-achieving students back by having them in the same room with low-achieving students. In fact, she sees it as quite the opposite. She described the benefit of the detracked classroom for a high-achieving white student from a wealthy suburban family:In class discussions, this girl not only contributes her ideas, but she also gets insight from somebody else who hasn't had her experience, or doesn't own a horse, or a place out in the country—a kid who gets on the bus every day and lives in two rooms. She listens to kids who've had to struggle just to survive.Jeffers says she has constructed a learning environment for students where she can find "the genius within them." She finds that when students develop insight into their own ways of knowing and learning, they become highly motivated students in the broader sense of the word, thirsty for a greater understanding of the world around them.
Like Jeffers, other teachers changed their conceptions of ability after creating environments in which all students could be smart. One teacher told us, "Heterogeneous grouping has made teachers think differently about all kids; they see more potential."
Another teacher stated, "The program has done amazing things for standard-track kids. All of sudden, somebody says, You can do this!'"
A Cautionary Note
Most of the educators we studied changed their practices in the belief that colleagues, families, and students would happily support reform that enhanced the achievement of students previously in the low track, without harming—and perhaps even enriching—the experiences of students who would otherwise be in high tracks. Yet they quickly learned that their challenges were compounded by formidable cultural and political obstacles. They ran headlong into deeply held beliefs and ideologies about intelligence, racial differences, social stratification, and privilege. Conventional conceptions of intelligence, ability, and giftedness combined with the local community culture and politics around race and social class to fuel enormous resistance.
In the end, none of the schools achieved the extent of detracking and curriculum reform hoped for. Their promising efforts toward high standards for all students were cut short by fears that the advantages of high-achieving students would be compromised.
The experience of the gifted education specialist at Explorer Middle School, which offered challenge courses to all students, captures the essence of the battles. Parents of identified gifted students severely criticized her for not offering their children separate enrichment classes. What upset the parents most was not the quality of the curriculum. It was that their children were no longer being singled out and treated differently:They didn't ask, "Well, what are our kids learning in your classes?" I found that really dismaying, because I was prepared to tell them what we do in class. I had course outlines. I send objectives, goals, and work requirements home with every class, and nobody asked me anything about that. . . . I'm dealing with their egos, more than what their kids really need educationally.This political battle was ostensibly fought over which kids—gifted or not gifted, and according to which definition—would have access to which curriculum and which teacher. The cultural underpinnings of such battles, however, are far more profound. At risk for the families of high-track students is the entire system of meritocracy on which they base their privileged positions in society. As this system begins to crack, these parents often employ tactics that make reform politically impossible. Given that detracking is basic to standards-based reform, policymakers and educators stand forewarned.
