Issue of the Day: Multi-Level ClassesThis is a topic that’s brought a lot of attention in the local media, most recently through an opinion piece in the Boston Globe, and it’s the #1 topic I’m asked about in my canvassing. There is nuance and complexity but the core concept is that high school classes that had traditionally been taught in a leveled manner (ie, grouping students with similar skills in classrooms) started to be taught with two levels in the same classroom. Students at different levels shared the classroom experience but received different assignments and tests. Traditionally, once students get assigned to a level, it’s very hard to move up because the classroom they are in is being outpaced by the more advanced classroom and there’s no mechanism to catch up. So they are stuck. This program is meant to solve that problem. The academic literature on this concept is mixed. There is data that supports the idea and data that says it doesn’t work. The concept seems intuitively flawed to me. I think about the educator standing in front of a classroom with such a wide set of skills and I wonder how that educator can feel like s/he is serving all the students well. And it turns out, a lot of the educators are unhappy too - they took up a petition, spoke out to the School Committee, and even wrote their own opinion pieces to the Globe last year. Most of the students I’ve spoken with don’t like the setup either. I’ve heard students say that the less advanced students don’t participate because they are intimidated, and the more advanced students don’t participate because they don’t want to make anyone else feel bad. All of which makes sense, especially when I remember how my high school brain worked. Beyond anecdotes, the MCAS data we have says that scores in these classrooms have declined and achievement gaps have widened. Unfortunately, when this initiative was launched under the prior administration there were no targeted outcomes and no data-oriented measurement protocols put in place, so it’s hard to use the numbers to draw a simple conclusion. But what we have looks bad. Superintendent Nolin and her team have been studying this issue. I am convinced that what we are doing now isn’t working and I’d like to see us move on from it. There are arguments that maybe it works better in certain places, like subject areas that are less sequential - it may be easier to pull off in humanities or social sciences than STEM or foreign language. Classrooms with two educators are more likely to make it work. But what we’re doing now is broadly unpopular and needs to be corrected. I’m looking forward to seeing Dr. Nolin’s plan for moving on from a system that isn’t serving our students well.
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