Martin is 14. He reads on a 4th grade level. His writing is simple—not because he doesn't have complex thoughts—but because he often struggles to find the English word he wants, and 40 minutes simply isn't enough time to think, draft, and revise. He wants to graduate from high school and enter a demanding job-training program at a local light and power company. As his father points out, “It's the difference between $6 and $20 an hour all the rest of your life.”
But the entry test is no joke. To pass, you need the modeling skills to notice patterns and predict possible difficulties down the line in the machinery. That entails working with Boyle's and Charles' laws and algebraic equations, and diagnosing sources of possible error. And it doesn't end there. The company is looking for employees who are able to interview suppliers and examine product information and forms written in Spanish, Japanese, or German.
Access to High Outcomes
Gone are the days when graduation was a matter of going to school just enough to earn your Carnegie credits, or when any high school diploma could act as a passport. Public high schools, like those in San Diego, have as their major imperative helping all students prepare for postsecondary education—in colleges, in public service, or on the job, where the ticket is high-level competence, not attendance. The challenge is daunting. San Diego is an urban district of 125,000 students with diverse racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Sixty different first languages are spoken: 30 percent of the students are Hispanic, 19 percent are Asian (with large Indo-Chinese and Filipino groups), 16 percent are African American, 34 percent white, and 1 percent “other.”
In this context, we have had to rethink traditional approaches to equity. We can no longer be content solely with the simple arithmetic of inputs—racially mixed schools, racially diverse teachers, classes of equal size, and bilingual opportunities for learning. We now face the challenge of providing equity of outcomes. This is a tall order in American public schools, where there is a long-held belief that ability is distributed in a normal curve pattern and, consequently, tracking is not only convenient, but appropriate. To uproot such deep beliefs demands a program of serious and sustained change in attitudes, daily practices, curriculum, and assessment.
In San Diego, we began five years ago by instituting a common core curriculum. Today, to be graduated from high school, a student must take four years of English, three years of math, two of science, three of social studies, and must meet a fine arts requirement. At the same time, we eliminated lower-level elective courses in English, math, and science. In mathematics, we established a pre-algebra/algebra sequence for all students, dropping all general, consumer, and business math courses.
As promising as these innovations are, by itself, this educational architecture won't promise Martin the life he and his family hope for. As a district, we have to guarantee more than coursework. We have to ensure that Martin encounters mathematics that is more than blind calculation and formula juggling. However, no urban district of our size and diversity has the dollars to guarantee these outcomes single-handedly. To provide excellence for all demands partnerships. We have to build on the standards the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has developed, and we have to join hands with the social and natural sciences, as well as technology, to figure out the “big ideas” we ought to be concentrating on. But most critically, partners can help us think about the minute-by-minute invention of actual courses that can enable Martin—not merely remediate him.
A Push-Pull Strategy
If you say “College Board,” most people think of an elite gate-keeping organization that decides who should go where with how much scholarship money. Not so. For the last decade, the College Board has been an active, vocal participant in school reform. Ten years ago, the board published Academic Preparation for College to inform students, teachers, and families about the necessary pathways to post-secondary education. In the ensuing years, the Educational EQuality Project (E for equality,Q for quality) developed workshops and publications to get the word out that more students deserved to attend, and could flourish in, college. In a second decade, the College Board has launched even bolder steps that add up to what has been called a “push-pull” strategy for major school reform. For example, the board, working with major educational foundations and a national consortium of researchers and teachers, has developed EQUITY 2000—a demanding program of pre-algebra, algebra, and geometry designed to ensure that minority students thrive in vigorous high school mathematics programs.
If EQUITY 2000 accounts for the “push” of this strategy, then the College Board's Pacesetter initiative accounts for the “pull.” Through this program, the College Board is devoting major resources to determine how to make the high-standards curriculum, strong teaching, and performance assessment, long associated with its Advanced Placement Program, a part of every high school student's experience.
In San Diego, we have long used the AP Program as an equity tool. Unlike gifted and talented programs, these courses do not require cutoff scores or special certification: any willing student can enroll, and any teacher can take up the challenge of teaching a rigorous and inventive course. Characteristically, such courses focus on ideas and concepts and on helping students display their understanding in performance assessments (for example, applying physics principles to a novel situation and predicting possible outcomes). AP teachers often form professional groups, exchanging syllabi and teaching strategies and acting as readers when the open-ended portions of exams are graded. Not surprisingly, we have found these courses work toward equity, not elitism. They turn out to be laboratories for thinking through how excellent work might be demanded of a full range of our students.
Consequently, when the College Board proposed Pacesetter, we were more than interested. The project called for developing yearlong courses and associated assessments, along with detailed plans for teacher training, in mathematics, English, world history, science, and foreign language. Some courses would be keystones designed to integrate and deepen what students had learned throughout high school. For instance, in 12th grade science, students might conduct projects about complex issues that involved the merging of concepts and problems from earth science, biology, chemistry, and physics (for example, situations in which the chemical composition and the direction of flow affect how toxic waste takes its toll on the plant and animal life in a particular ecological niche). In 12th grade English, students might draw on their reading and insights from American, British, and world literature to trace the evolution of literature written in English from its origins to the present.
Other cornerstone courses, such as those in intermediate Spanish and world history, would suggest the kinds of knowledge and skills students should have midway through their high school careers. These worthwhile outcomes that addressed the chronic problem of differential access to knowledge would be worked on with national committees of skilled teachers, researchers, and members of national curriculum organizations. At the same time, as part of Pacesetter, we would be linked to six quite diverse pilot sites: Broward County, Florida; Prince George's County, Maryland; Battle Creek, Michigan; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Irving, Texas; and Rutland, Vermont.
From Declaration to Realization
San Diego already has a history of innovation and a wealth of partners. Why take on more?
We are in the midst of a vigorous national effort to set standards. We have national educational goals for the year 2000. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has published widely regarded content standards. Social studies, foreign language, arts, and language arts teachers are headed in the same direction. Clearly, there is no shortage of statements about what we ought to do. What we lack is a clear, concrete vision of how to reach those goals. The issue for us as an urban district is not more declaration; it is realization.
Pacesetter is centrally about realization. At this moment, national committees of classroom teachers are designing specific course frameworks. English teachers are hotly debating how to give students entry to the major “cultural conversations” of our evolving culture. They are deliberating how to provide a background knowledge of writers like Shakespeare, without ignoring the fact that contemporary performances of Othello—set in Haiti or Los Angeles—could give new meaning to the play. Mathematicians are struggling to design a course that can offer pre-calculus students what they need and teach other students how to be critical consumers and become skillful at quantitative reasoning. World history teachers are grappling with how to use the concepts of climate, migration, and technology to make the study of history increasingly more global.
- an outline of subject content and anticipated learning outcomes developed by leading teachers and specialists from professional subject-matter associations and universities (for example, in the case of mathematics, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the Mathematics Association of America);
- teacher-training and support activities keyed to the content outline for each course, including in-school assessment techniques, summer institutes, workshops, and publications illustrating successful approaches to teaching diverse students;
- classroom assessments that help teachers monitor and shape instruction while providing ongoing feedback to students;
- end-of-course assessments (such as projects or portfolios);
- a valid system for scoring end-of-course assessments on a state, regional, or local level.
But realization—even at this early stage—has to get beyond lists of ingredients to new visions of learning, collaboration with teachers, and assessment.
Learning Outcomes for Students
Although the dust has hardly settled on the outcomes for Pacesetter English 12, early collaborations between the College Board and the National Council of Teachers of English are sketching a lively picture of what's to come. Students will read both classic and modern works in order to understand how we have framed and currently think about major human issues. Literacy, in this context, becomes not just the ability to decode and record, but to interpret and create a wide range of cultural texts—speeches, performances, written literature, documents, and even films.
At the outset of the course, students might introduce themselves, then play back what they have said about themselves and their lives—analyzing how words, images, and performances create specific impressions. Turning from their own oral expression, students will read short works from literature written in English, examining similar issues of self-presentation and representation through language. Moving on to larger works, students might read and watch productions of The Tempest, thinking about how self, familiar, and other (Prospero, Miranda, Ariel, and Caliban) are created through their own speech and what others say of them. Working in independent reading groups, students will investigate this legacy by looking at works as diverse as Othello or Toni Morrison's Beloved. Throughout the course, students will explore focal works that have shaped the way English speakers make sense of the world, British works as diverse as The Tempest and Heart of Darkness, American works that could range from early settlers' journals to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—as well as African, Caribbean, and Indian literature. Throughout, students will take on the active roles of authors and critics, in addition to the familiar role of reader.
New Opportunities for Teachers
The 12th grade mathematics course focuses on what happens when we confront complex quantitative data sets with the need to understand patterns, continue research, or reach conclusions. In this setting, teachers' roles shift dramatically. They become researchers constructing rich “case studies” in which linear, exponential, and logarithmic functions can be applied to problems in fields like industrial design, economics, and demographics. For example, one member of the mathematics committee has proposed that students use mathematics to model the impact of major historical events. For instance, one problem might be “How different would contemporary Europe be if the Black Death had not occurred?”
Teachers are also designers, as they try these novel, more demanding approaches with students and assess how the materials work with a full range of students. What, for instance, does it take to get a student with a shaky mathematics background to apply reasoning capacities and questioning abilities he or she may have developed elsewhere?
Already by the summer of 1993, mathematics teachers from all seven sites will address the question of teachers' learning. Joining with teachers from the College Board's EQUITY 2000 project, they will examine what teachers need to know in order to become strong coaches and diagnosticians for students working in challenging mathematical environments. Subsequently, participants will assume the dual roles of instructor and critic, as they field-test a proposed sequence of applications that call for simple linear through complex logarithmic functions.
What is emerging from these efforts? A radically different view of professional development—no shrink-wrapped, teacher-proof materials to be swallowed whole the night before. If teachers are to become inventive users of the course frameworks and skilled assessors of student work, they must be actively involved in all stages of implementation.
New Questions About Assessment
Two conflicting purposes often criss-cross assessment programs: the responsibility to use any assessment to respond to student work and encourage growth and the demand that assessment provide reliable, quantifiable information about student learning. As a nation, we have a long history of downplaying the first and highlighting the second. So consuming has our demand been for accountability data that we have often allowed rote and short-answer testing formats to obscure the potential richness of assessment. But if students like Martin are to realize their dreams, we need a more complex view of student assessment.
Pacesetter will allow urban districts like San Diego to take part in a broader national discussion about combining these two aspects of assessment. While we clearly want to value authentic work and acknowledge student growth, as a school district, we also have serious obligations to conduct student and program assessment responsibly. As we move toward more open-ended and authentic forms of assessment, no one should be allowed to fall through the cracks.
Moreover, as our approaches to assessment move in this direction, serious questions arise about equity and costs. Fortunately, Pacesetter allows our teachers to work with an extensive team of researchers and assessment experts from Educational Testing Service. They are proposing new ways of combining our need to assess students' knowledge with our interest in recording their progress toward valued outcomes.
Unanswered Questions
- When fewer than half of our students sign up for fourth year math or science, how can we get all students to a level where they can take Pacesetter courses in 10th or 12th grades?
- Particularly in hard financial times, how will we give teachers the time they need to teach and sustain the extra demands of Pacesetter courses?
- How can we use Pacesetter courses—which are still taught within traditional subject-matter boundaries—to move toward a more integrated high school experience?
- Pacesetter courses are supposed to be designed for all students. How will we include students with weak academic histories, special education needs, or languages other than English in such demanding courses?
- The College Board produces other forms of student testing, such as the SATs and the Achievement Tests. How will Pacesetter's more open-ended approach to student assessment affect these other tests?
There are no simple answers. Pacesetter is a “work in progress,” just as the College Board is involved in rethinking its mission as a major educational institution. At the turn of the century, it was a tremendous move toward equity to insist that all students be eligible for college on the basis of a common exam. No longer could your last name, and your father's occupation and education, be the gatekeepers to education after high school. A hundred years later, we have learned that equity demands additional tools. We cannot claim to have “done our job” when we have not offered instructional and assessment opportunities that prepare students for college or the world of work. In that light, we are going to have to reinvent our means. Pacesetter provides one laboratory in which to do so.
