At its meeting on December 18, the School Board voted on its Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) Direction. I voted against approving this Direction, and my comments below explain why.  Although I am leaving the board this month, I think this particular issue is so consequential that I want to share what concerns me.


At our October meeting, I shared four words I hoped would guide our CIP work: Holistic, Strategic, Flexible, and Creative. But there's a fifth word—one that may be most important given our school division's values: Equity.

​The Oxford English Dictionary defines equity as 'the quality of being fair and just, especially in a way that takes account of and seeks to address existing inequalities.' The Cambridge Dictionary describes it as 'the situation in which everyone is treated fairly according to their needs and no group of people is given special treatment.'

What does that mean when we’re talking about school buildings?

We all know that school buildings—in the DC area and nationwide—vary greatly in condition and amenities. While Arlington's schools are in better shape than many communities', disparities exist here too. Our 2023 Facilities Condition Assessment, updated this year, comprehensively documents the differences and needs across all our buildings. The report identifies approximately $599 million in major infrastructure work needed over the next ten years. This figure is an estimate that could shift in either direction: lower if we can extend the life of roofs, HVAC systems, and other components (though some replacements are already overdue), or higher given that it's calculated in today's dollars and doesn't account for future cost increases.

Beyond infrastructure needs, some of our buildings offer lower-quality learning environments due to inadequate educational specifications—for example, classroom size, natural lighting, and insufficient common areas like cafeterias, gyms, and playgrounds. At our last School Board meeting, students and staff from Thomas Jefferson Middle School spoke directly to these challenges.

Addressing these deficiencies will require major renovations at TJ and several other facilities. The feasibility studies we completed for five schools earlier this year confirm the need for hundreds of millions of dollars in renovation work, with five additional schools likely requiring similar attention.

Given these significant needs, how we allocate our limited capital funding is critical. As the body responsible for directing and approving the CIP, the School Board must ensure that every project is absolutely necessary. This is fundamental to equity—our commitment to being fair and just while addressing existing inequalities.

I'm not convinced all our current projects meet this threshold, and I believe we need rigorous analysis to demonstrate they do. This is good financial stewardship.

Imagine you're unfamiliar with Arlington and hearing about another school division's capital plans. This district is building a new career and technical education center for high school students. It's also spending $45 million to convert its existing high school CTE center into an elementary school.
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You might reasonably assume: 'This district must need more elementary seats. And if they're converting a space clearly not designed for elementary students—at significant cost—this must be the most cost-effective way to add the seats they need.'

Under those conditions, the project would make sense. But Arlington faces very different conditions. We have a surplus of over 1,700 elementary seats—one that isn't disappearing anytime soon. Even after demolishing the Patrick Henry elementary building and losing its 463 seats, we'll maintain a comfortable margin of excess capacity. So why are we spending $45 million on a project we don't need?

​I've heard two rationales. First, we don't want to move this elementary option program further from where most of its students live. As a parting observation, I'll suggest that Arlington needs clarity on whether proximity applies equally to option programs and neighborhood schools, and I will gently suggest that it might make sense to create a clear understanding that when you sign up for an option program, you are enrolling in a program, not a geographic location. If proximity is the driving factor for families, their neighborhood school is probably the more appropriate choice. 

Second, relocating this program would require moving it into a neighborhood school building and rezoning those students elsewhere—a significant disruption. But how much disruption, and where? We don't know because the School Board has never directed that this analysis be done.

I've repeatedly asked for any analysis done before I joined the board, and none exists. During my tenure, we came closest to this analysis in our last CIP cycle. In December 2023, Reid Goldstein and I were the only School Board members who voted to include a study of alternatives to this $45 million project in the CIP Direction. With only two votes, it failed.

Yet despite this decision, materials were pulled together at the last minute in June 2024—the week of our CIP vote—at a former board chair's request. Most board members and the entire public saw this information for the first time during the meeting itself, moments before we voted. This isn't what I would consider robust analysis, nor is it how the School Board should conduct business. To be clear: this misstep belongs to the previous board, not our staff.

So we have no real analysis of alternatives to date, while evidence of facility needs across our division continues to mount. Now the board has another chance to request an analysis of alternative locations for MPSA—and is again choosing not to. This means spending $45 million on a project that may be unnecessary, while forgoing other projects that need investment.

I don't want to minimize the negative impacts of relocating MPSA. Converting a neighborhood school into an option school and rezoning students would be painful. We know this because over the past decade, APS has moved or closed nine schools and programs for various reasons. It has happened before and may need to happen again—if not now, then in the future.

​In two of these nine cases, we closed neighborhood schools so their buildings could house option programs: Patrick Henry and McKinley. Some bristle when I call these closings, but in both cases, the School Board approved plans to cease operating a neighborhood school at that location with the intention to rezone its students to multiple other sites. To me—and I believe to the general public—that's closing a school.

If we now believe this approach is inconsistent with our values and would never repeat it, then I implore this board to codify that in policy and PIP. Otherwise, this board and future boards risk applying this logic inconsistently or not at all—and when the goalposts appear to shift from decision to decision, public trust erodes.

The inconvenient truth is that we do close and move schools and programs. This board contemplated closing Integration Station, an APS preschool, earlier this year. At the other end of the age spectrum, consider Arlington Community High School: by the time it moves into its new home at Amazon HQ2, APS will have relocated that school community five times in 20 years—including moving it off the Career Center campus. It serves the highest percentage of economically disadvantaged students of any APS school, and it troubles me to wonder if it might have enjoyed greater stability with a more affluent, well-organized parent advocacy base.

Four years ago, we relocated the Escuela Key elementary option program. At the time, Key's student body was 56% Hispanic and 34% economically disadvantaged. We moved it three miles farther from where most of its students lived, into a building operating at 133% capacity. Mold contaminated some relocatables. When teachers arrived in August, many classrooms lacked basic furniture—teacher desks, student desks, tables, bookshelves. The cafeteria remained unfinished for the first three months of school. While most issues have since been resolved, Key still operates at 124% capacity.

Equity.

Equity means the quality of being fair and just, especially in a way that takes account of and seeks to address existing inequalities. Addressing existing inequalities will take investment—a lot of it. That may necessitate some very hard choices.

​It’s important for the board to have every bit of available information and analysis to make the hard choices in front of us, and to make choices in a way that applies our values consistently over time. To be good financial stewards, the board must explore alternatives before investing in specific projects with tunnel vision. For these reasons, I am voting no on this CIP Direction.

​Of course you don't live in a small, fictional country, and nobody is testing your yard or your blood for lead levels. But something very similar is happening in the state of Virginia to our public schools.

Recently, the Virginia Board of Education approved a new School Performance and Support Framework to evaluate how well schools are meeting academic expectations. The new Framework replaces the current accreditation system, which critics have charged is not rigorous or transparent enough.  The Framework will  rate each school as Distinguished, On Track, Off Track, or Needs Intensive Support. The Department of Education will publish these ratings next fall. School divisions with a certain percentage of schools rated "Needs Intensive Support" will be required to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the state. 

Whether or not you believe we need a more rigorous accountability system, you've got to admit (I hope) that we need one that's fully built. 

What assessments will the state use to gauge academic performance? Well, some of them exist today but some of them haven't been created yet. Even the most familiar, the Standards of Learning, will be changing this year as new standards for Math and English Language Arts have rolled out. (It's worth noting that Virginia is introducing the new math standards and the new math SOL test in the same school year; normally, teachers get a year to familiarize themselves with the new standards and the related test rolls in the following year.) 

What funding and resources will the state be providing to schools that are rated Off Track or Needs Improvement? We don't know yet.

What will the Department of Education put in the MOU it will require for the lowest performing schools and districts? No one has seen it yet. 

It's a little like not knowing if you're actually going to earn your college degree because the university hasn't figured out its degree requirements--even though you're starting your senior year and you have less than 12 months before you're supposed to graduate. 

Or like the lead testing in my imaginary country. Similar to the less affluent neighborhoods in my example, there are schools and school divisions in the Commonwealth that will be disproportionately affected by the new academic accountability system. 

Under the new system, students who are English Learners will "count" towards a school's overall accountability rating after just three semesters. Federal law requires that school divisions test all EL students after three semesters, but until now in Virginia we've used those tests to check for growth of content knowledge, not mastery of the content. After just three semesters, an EL student's science SOL score may say more about the student's understanding of English than their understanding of the science content being assessed. For this reason, many states that count EL scores after three semesters will test students in their native language; Virginia does not allow this.*

In APS, 27% of our students are English Learners. The state average is 9%. In several of our schools, EL students comprise 50% or more of the student body (Carlin Springs and Randolph are highest at 75% and 59% respectively). What will those schools' ratings look like when compared to schools like Jamestown (2% EL) or Discovery (4% EL)?  EL students and families are also often economically disadvantaged. The extra support that more affluent families tap into, like private tutoring, disability screening, occupational and speech therapies, and more, are beyond the reach of many immigrant families, which exacerbates the gaps across and within school communities.

In Arlington, most of our school funding is locally generated, with the state kicking in just 14% of the school division's revenue. In other, less affluent counties in the Commonwealth, the state contributes two-thirds or more of the school division's operating funds. 

I imagine that if the state does not appropriate additional, dedicated funds to support schools labelled Off Track or Needs Intensive Support, school divisions like Arlington will figure out another way to finance the extra staff and resources we'd need for these schools. But what if you are Lee County in Southwest Virginia, and 70% of your education funding comes from the state? Or the City of Petersburg, which is 63% funded by the state? (It's worth noting that Petersburg schools have been operating under an MOU with the Virginia Department of Education since 2004. The state's involvement for 20 years has not yielded significant improvement.) 

I'm all for accountability (just like I'm all for lead-free neighborhoods). There are parts of the new school accountability framework that I believe could be beneficial. And in our country, state, and community, we do need to act with greater urgency to close chronic opportunity and achievement gaps that can have lifelong consequences for English Learners, students with disabilities, and our Black and Brown students. 

But "getting the lead out", if the solution is not crafted with care, is in a best-case scenario blundering and ineffective. In the worst case, it will do real damage to those we had ultimately set out to serve.



*The issue of when and how to test English Learners on subject area content knowledge is complex, and (at least in my study of it) does not lend itself to blanket guidelines that dictate how "all" EL students should be assessed. Variables include the language in which instruction was delivered; whether a student is fully literate in their native language, which is not the case for many students whose formal education was limited or interrupted before coming to the US; a student's English language proficiency (e.g., are they at WIDA Level 1 or WIDA Level 3?); and more. It's also not clear to me that a blanket "number of semesters" rule makes sense. Three semesters may well be too soon for some EL students' scores to "count" as a measure of how well a school is equipping students with content knowledge. Eleven semesters (or five and a half years) feels to me like it would be too long in many cases.

I note in WestEd's 2019 independent evaluation of APS's English Learner program that a large percentage (44%) of middle school English Learners had been classified as English Learners for five or more years, and a large percentage (40%) had been English Learners since Kindergarten. Since that time, of course, APS has made significant changes and investments in English Learner instruction as part of its 2019 settlement agreement with the Department of Justice. 
​

​OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman shared this tweet at a conference earlier this year, and it's a great example of how artificial intelligence is going to change the way we teach and learn. Here's another example, in a headline from Education Week:

*Note: ChatGPT is only one manifestation of AI. I highlight it here because it's been in the news and because it's easily accessible for those who want a test drive.

**I am grateful to TED, my former employer, for creating opportunities to learn about AI via TED Talks. I relied heavily on the knowledge shared by TED speakers in creating this piece. I promise I did not ask ChatGPT "Hey, write an overly-long article about how AI will change education using only information in TED Talks" -- though I could have done so. :) ​

In America, nearly one in five graduating seniors (19%) leave school with only marginal reading ability. Despite decades of investment in reading research, curricula and teacher education catalyzed by the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, we haven’t made much progress.

​Here’s what test data from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) show:

In Arlington, there are two ways we measure high school reading ability. First, juniors take a state-required Reading SOL test at the end of 11th grade. Second, APS just began using the  HMH Growth Measure, which students in grades 3-12 will take three times each year.

In APS, 97% of white students passed the 11th grade Reading SOL test last year. The pass rate for Black and Hispanic students was 20% lower, and nearly 30 percentage points lower for students with disabilities (69% pass rate). Less than half of our English learners (45%) passed this test.

​The HMH Growth Measure categorizes performance as Far Below Level, Below Level, Approaching Level, On Level and Above Level. Looking just at “Far Below Level” and “Below Level,” here’s what the most recent testing reveals:

What does research tell us about the problem?

I spent some time earlier this year reading the research and talking with two local experts: Dr. Olivia Williams, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland and adjunct professor with the Goucher Prison Education Partnership Program; and Dr. Carrie Simkin, a UVA professor and the director of AdLit.org. Here’s what I’m learning from my reading and my conversations:

1. There’s not a lot of research on high school students who struggle with reading.

In the decades since the National Reading Panel released its report, researchers have published thousands of studies on reading. Yet when I looked online, I could find very few that looked specifically at students in grades 9-12.

I found only one literature review focused on high school reading. Olivia Williams, the author of the review, searched for studies that a) examined interventions conducted on or after 2002; b) measured reading performance both before and after the intervention; and c) studied native English-speaking, general education high school struggling readers. Only 26 studies met her criteria.

Williams notes that even this small group of studies lacked consistent terminology. What does “comprehension” mean? How are we defining “struggling reader”? In the studies she reviewed, “struggling reader” meant everything from being at least one grade level behind to failing an 8th grade state assessment to being at least five years below grade level. “There’s a difference between kids who are significantly behind and those who are just a couple of years behind,” comments Carrie Simkin. “The approaches have to be different.”


2. There’s a disconnect around phonics.
It’s commonly believed that students have mastered phonics by the time they get to high school unless they have specific diagnosed learning disabilities. There’s some research, however, that suggests this might not be true.

As Williams recounts in her review, a 2015 study of reading comprehension among 9th grade struggling readers showed no effect until the researchers looked separately at students with high- and low-level decoding skills. Doing so revealed that the students with higher-level decoding abilities did in fact make statistically significant gains in comprehension (Solis et al., 2015). This is complicated, however: Williams comments that because publishers usually design phonics materials for younger students, their use with teens can be “stigmatizing.”

I asked Carrie Simkin whether high school struggling readers are really students with learning disabilities that have gone undiagnosed. Simkin concedes this is a reasonable explanation for some students, but not all. “Maybe,” she counters, “they have an instructional disability. Our first impulse is always to look at the student, when maybe that student just didn’t get great instruction.”


3. Sustained support may be needed.
Some research suggests that short-term interventions may not be particularly effective. For example, in one study, researchers evaluated the effects of two different reading programs during an intervention year and the year that followed. There were gains in GPAs, grades and performance on state exams during the intervention year—but the benefits disappeared the year following (Somers et al., 2010). Olivia Williams notes that we can’t be sure whether this points to flaws in the interventions themselves, or whether it says something about the need to work with struggling readers over multiple years; more research is needed.


4. Executive functioning plays a role.

Recent research (not specific to high school students) demonstrates how executive functioning skills contribute to success in reading. These skills include cognitive flexibility (shifting), maintaining attention, using working memory, planning ahead, controlling impulses, and more (for a recent literature review, see Duke & Cartwright, 2021).

In one study, researchers looked at students who had poor reading comprehension despite adequate word recognition ability. The study revealed that a third of the students (36.8%) showed weaknesses in executive function but not in their component reading skills, like receptive vocabulary. In other words: for a third of the students in the study, weaknesses in executive functioning appeared to be the primary cause for their reading difficulty (Cutting & Scarborough, 2012).  

This suggests that what some students may need are interventions focused on executive functioning and the root causes of executive functioning delays or impairment, which include things like trauma, autism spectrum disorder, ADHD and depression.


5. Identity is important.

Only one of the 26 studies Olivia Williams examined factored in the social and emotional needs of high school students who struggle with reading (Frankel et al., 2015).  Williams writes: “The repeated experience of failure [by the time students reach high school] takes an emotional toll… Noncognitive aspects of academic development are important at all ages, but especially so in high school, where students with a history of “failure” may struggle with self-efficacy, motivation and engagement.”

What’s more, only one study among the 26 presented findings within the context of race, gender and class (Vaughn et al., 2015).  Williams writes: “Since we know that struggling readers are disproportionately minority, male and poor, it is worth exploring whether different reading interventions are more or less effective with these groups and whether the origins of their struggles demand different remedial attention.”

This is not just about the need to develop culturally-responsive curricula and interventions: it’s about the student’s overall experience of school. Students who are on the receiving end of any kind of “ism” in their school environment (racism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia, religious intolerance, and/or others) are less likely to be comfortable taking risks academically and more likely to be focused on shielding themselves from bias and aggression.



What can we do?

Based on my understanding of the research, here are some of my takeaways:

1. Avoid “one-size-fits-all” fixes. Carrie Simkin counsels, “Struggling readers shouldn’t be lumped together in a single, catch-all remedial class. Instead, through assessment, we can discern what kinds of support students need and, to the extent possible, treat them as individuals.” This might involve a combination of approaches, including special reading classes, tutoring services, virtual programs that students could take advantage of at home or in advisory periods, after school programs and more. Olivia Williams adds, “You have to know what’s available and have the time to plan and differentiate across reading levels.”


2. Look for authentic opportunities in core content classes. With proper support, every high school teacher can help strengthen students’ reading skills. This is particularly true when we think about “disciplinary literacy” and “academic literacy.” Disciplinary literacy involves developing the ways of thinking and communicating that are specific to a particular discipline. Academic literacy involves acquiring the skills needed to read, comprehend and learn from texts dealing with particular subjects (e.g., medical information; financial analyses).

Beyond academic and disciplinary literacy, core content teachers can help strengthen students’ general reading skills, but it has to be done with care. Carrie Simkin shares that we need to focus on “authentic opportunities” to do this—for example, decoding unfamiliar words in a biology class and understanding them by breaking them down into component parts (e.g., omnivore, ectotherm). Simkin suggests, “A literacy coach in a school can help a math or science teacher do this.”

In core classes, we can also apply universal design principles, normalizing audio access to content (and required subject-area assessments) for all students. This accommodation would ensure that students who are struggling readers can access the core content they need to know in an age-appropriate way while they are working in other settings to build their reading proficiency.


3. Build a bigger library. In reading intervention classes, teachers should use a wide range of texts that reflect student interests: it’s “literally anything they care about,” says Olivia Williams. Carrie Simkin adds, “Trust teachers’ professional judgment to curate resources. Give them time to know students and make personal connections.”

This speaks to the essential ingredient of student motivation. Hailey Love, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says, “Often when children are perceived as being behind, they’re subject to practices that are actually found to decrease motivation.”


4. Set goals with students. In reading classes, teachers should establish daily purposes for instruction that connect to week-long, month-long and year-long goals created collaboratively with students. Carrie Simkin advises, “We have to ask kids, ‘What’s your goal?’ You have to give a purpose to everything, and kids have to buy into that.”


5. Let students lead. Add in opportunities for peer-mediated group discussions of texts, invite students to generate their own questions, and create other opportunities for students to play meaningful roles in classroom activities. Research supports the positive impact these practices can have (Vaughn et al., 2015; Balfanz et al., 2004; Frey & Fisher, 2014).


6. Recruit and retain exceptional reading teachers. In one study, comprehension gains from the same intervention were twice as high in classes taught by the most effective teachers (Balfanz et al., 2004). Olivia Williams writes, “The success of a reading intervention may not lie exclusively in the strength of the intervention materials or process alone, but may also depend upon a number of outside, less-tangible factors like a teacher’s ability to maintain engagement.”


7. Design special programs that offer struggling readers unique opportunities.  “If placement in remedial reading classes is a tangible reminder of the label of deficiency and serves as an affront to identity,” Olivia Williams observes, “then students may understandably choose to disengage with remedial strategies.”

When we spoke, Williams described with enthusiasm one program in which ninth grade struggling readers tutored second- and third-grade readers who were experiencing their own reading challenges. The ninth graders, who initially reacted with “anger and outrage at being categories as remedial,” grew to view the experience as a privilege. They practiced with the children’s books they used in the program—thus bolstering their own reading skills—so that they would be prepared to work well with their tutorees. The ninth graders scored an average of two grade levels higher on the program post-test and reported higher levels of motivation and attachment to reading (Paterson & Elliott, 2006).

This example reminded me of my own million-years-ago time as a high school English teacher, working with one class of students who were reading below grade level (in some cases, far below grade level). At the time, I wondered what experience I could create for them that would really engage them and reinforce their sense of themselves as worthy and capable. I ended up asking them if they’d like to create an online magazine full of their own writing and artwork—something no other students in the school were doing. They wrote, read each other’s work, peer reviewed, rewrote, created companion artwork, and then hand coded HTML to create the magazine’s website pages. We invited friends and family members to an after school launch party (because it was 1998 and not many of them had computers and internet access at home). The experience was painful for me as a teacher (dial-up modems, only sporadic access to the school’s computer lab…) but highly motivating for my reluctant readers and writers.
Fast-forward 25 years and I’m now a school board member in Arlington. I wonder what we could design, today, that would feel like a privilege and not a punishment for our high school students who are struggling readers.

For example, could we pair reading instruction with corporate/community job shadowing and paid internship experiences? Students would be incentivized to improve their general, academic and disciplinary literacy if they had the opportunity to spend part of their time in “real world” settings where the relevance of their reading skills was immediately evident. Are there summer learning experiences we could offer that look radically different from traditional summer school, combining environmental study (involving reading) with outdoor activities? How could we engage students in the social justice work that so many of them care about and layer in reading instruction?

I’m interested in this subject because it’s creative work—but also because it’s a moral imperative. In one of the articles I read, former NPR reporter Claudio Sanchez recalled visiting a public high school in Tennessee. There, a vice principal told him, “Having a high school diploma does not mean that you can read and write.”

​The United Nations, together with most of the humans on the planet, considers literacy to be a fundamental human right. It’s the very heart of public education. We must do more—and do better.

When we left off in Part One, Shelley Moore’s student had just pointed out that this illustration doesn’t really represent inclusion.  Can you see why?

Shelley’s student pointed out that this illustration is really about assimilation, not inclusion. It subtly suggests that green is the majority and the norm to which we should aspire.

Wouldn’t a more realistic rendering look something like this?

​Another student then chimed in: doesn’t each of us have multiple identities that we’d like to see welcomed and valued in our schools?

​The challenge for us, in operating any kind of community we want to be inclusive—as public education surely must be—is this:

I have many thoughts about how we show that we value all colors, what Shelley calls “teaching to identity”—too many thoughts to list here. There are educators inside APS and in other school divisions who are doing this exceptionally well, and they are my teachers.

Our APS superintendent talks about knowing every student “by name, strength and need.” We have an obligation to identify and address the needs, to be sure. But we’d be doing our students a great injustice if we don’t also help them name and build on their individual strengths and identities, and assure them that our school communities are better because of their presence.

Last Saturday I went to Baltimore to attend an education conference and hear a talk by Shelley Moore, a Canadian educator, researcher and storyteller.

Shelley asked us to define for ourselves each of these terms:

• Exclusion
• Segregation
• Inclusion
• Integration

​Next, she showed us this slide:​

What do you think? Which one of A, B, C or D represents inclusion? Which one shows integration? How about exclusion and segregation?

(You think about it for a minute while I eat a quick snack. :) Then scroll down a little for the Big Reveal.)

What’s the difference between “exclusion” and “segregation”? According to Shelley, exclusion is when the people inside the circle decide that individuals can’t be part of their community. Segregation happens when the people inside the circle decide that a particular group (or groups) don’t belong.

Shelley distinguishes between “integration” and “inclusion” in this way: integration happens when someone decides that it’s a good idea for those outside the circle to be brought in—but it’s often not by their own choice. She says it’s like a mandatory all-staff meeting: you know you have to attend, but when you get to the meeting you’ll likely sit next to your closest co-workers and you may not be all that interested in the updates from other teams or departments (particularly if you’re thinking, “This meeting could have been an email!”)

FYI, this tendency to prefer the company of your own group is perfectly natural, and at times necessary and comforting: Shelley calls it “congregation” when we are birds of a feather flocking together. (As a side question, Shelley asks: do our schools offer spaces and opportunities for congregation?)

Inclusion is different from integration because instead of thinking “I have to,” we think “I want to.”  That’s why the community in Shelley’s top circle looks different from the one on the lower right.


Except… after she’d shared this slide dozens if not hundreds of times, one of Shelley’s graduate students told her, “Shelley, I don’t think that this diagram [the top circle] is inclusion either.” And once her student pointed out a few things, Shelley realized the student was absolutely right.

Can you figure out why? There’s more than one change Shelley made; I’ll share them in Part Two next week.

Over the winter break, I’ve been thinking a lot about our APS students who are ready for advanced work. These students have been on my mind because of a recent report-out from the Gifted Services Advisory Committee and the recommendation currently under consideration by the School Board to expand intensified course offerings in middle school.

During my campaign and in my first year as a board member, I’ve talked a lot about every student getting the right level of support and challenge. This includes students who are testing and performing above grade level: they deserve their year's worth of academic growth, too, and to argue otherwise would mean accepting the idea that public education can only serve certain kinds of kids. I don’t believe any of us are well-served by a scarcity mindset.

So, how do we educate students who are ready for advanced work? (Note that I use the term “capable of advanced work” instead of “gifted” intentionally; these are separate but often related groups.) In broad strokes, the approaches have included separate magnet schools; acceleration by skipping grades or particular subjects; separate classes within a school; ability grouping within a general ed classroom; and personalized instruction. It’s a question with a complicated history and no perfect solution (yet).

I was one of these students and experienced all of the approaches mentioned above. I’m the parent of a student who craves more challenge and has on more than one occasion pleaded to be homeschooled or attend private school. And I’m a former teacher.

​
In 1992, I was a first year high school teacher and in my school system, like most across the country, tracking was accepted practice.

​“Tracking” was the pre-Harry Potter version of the Sorting Hat. Teachers and guidance counselors determined whether a student should be sorted into a vocational track, a college track, or honors-level coursework.

In my first year I taught two sections of “Tech Prep 10” and three sections of “College Prep 9” English. The Tech Prep English curriculum was very different and emphasized the kinds of real-world reading and writing tasks that students going straight into the workforce would be most likely to perform: interpreting lease agreements and employment contracts; filling out applications for jobs and bank accounts; writing resumes and cover letters.

Leaders in our school system launched Tech Prep with good intentions: the idea was to make the curriculum more relevant to students’ lives after high school. The problem, of course, was that the adults in charge got to determine each student’s life trajectory before they’d turned 14, and that often these decisions were colored by implicit (or sometimes explicit) bias.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, groups like the National Governors Association, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Children’s Defense Fund rallied to end tracking, correctly arguing that it perpetuated racial and economic inequity by setting up segregated school experiences within single school buildings.

Mixed-ability classrooms then became the norm. Teachers were tasked with meeting a wider range of student interests, abilities and needs, as had been the case decades before in the days of one-room, mixed-age schoolhouses. In modern mixed-ability classrooms, “differentiated instruction” (which had always been a part of teaching, even in the days of tracking) became even more important.
​
In her book The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners, Carol Ann Tomlinson writes that teachers who excel at differentiated instruction

​There’s a whole body of literature describing the strategies that teachers can use to do this well; three overriding considerations are training, class size and time.

I mention training because most often, teachers themselves weren’t taught this way. In their undergraduate schools of education, professors may have talked about differentiated instruction, but they weren’t modeling it in a large lecture hall. And once they’ve started teaching, educators’ ongoing professional learning is all too often a one-size-fits-all affair.

Class size is a factor because it’s harder to be a “student of your students” when your average high school class size is 29 (California) versus 15-16 (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire).

And last but not least, teachers need the time to design differentiated learning experiences and continually assess student progress. But in reality, teachers’ time to plan and collaborate with colleagues on this most essential task is often insufficient, because there are too many other competing demands.


Perhaps due to the challenges cited above, or the top-down pressures created by federally-mandated school accountability and accreditation measures, ability grouping is again on the rise, though in different forms than 20th century tracking. These new forms of ability grouping are more flexible and (ideally) give students and families more say--but they still draw criticism. The debate about how to meet the full range of student needs continues.

Short of a serious overhaul of our Industrial-era public education system (which I’ve written about before, here and here), we need to continually question our assumptions and fine-tune our practices. Former school principal and author Peter DeWitt says it well:

At Harvard, Rose founded the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality. In 2016, he combined his personal story and his research in The End of Average--a book that rocked my world. (And no, that’s not hyperbole.) It’s changed the way I think about education.

​Rose opens the book with a problem that puzzled the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s: multiple, mysterious accidents that could not be explained by pilot error or mechanical malfunction in the aircraft.

They eventually discovered the cause: the cockpits had been designed using the average range of 10 body measurements from a population of approximately 4,000 pilots (e.g. height, thigh circumference, arm length, etc.). But zero pilots were “average” across all ten measurements. If a cockpit was designed for an average pilot, the cockpit fit no pilot. So the Air Force banned the average and forced jet manufacturers to design “to the edges,” meaning a cockpit that would be adjustable for even the tallest, shortest, thickest and thinnest.

What does this mean for education?

Think of a classroom or school designed for “the average.” It would likely feature

• One style and size of student desks
• Lots of whole-group instruction
• One way for students to demonstrate what they know—e.g., a multiple-choice end-of-unit test that every student must take
• Seat time: a standard number of hours all students must log to get a class credit.
• One-dimensional, high-level reporting against an average: “I am a B student in math because I am above average.”
• You’re gifted. Or not.
• Rigid tracking systems where students are sorted based on performance relative to an average (that is, you are “honors track” or “remedial track” in most or all of your classes)
• Standard operating procedures: all students are expected to eat at an assigned table in the cafeteria, walk silently in a straight line, and take notes in a certain way.

​This was Todd Rose’s K-12 school experience (and maybe yours, too). It wasn’t until college, when he discovered an honors program built around inquiry and the Socratic Method, that he felt inspired and challenged. Rose says, “I gradually realized that if I could just figure out how to improve the fit between my environment and myself, I might be able to turn my life around.”

In The End of Average, Rose explores the ways that none of us is really “average.” Instead, he argues, each of us has “jaggedness”— a unique set of strengths and weaknesses that all too often get obscured when we use overly simplistic, one-dimensional measurements.

Here's an example. Which man is bigger?

​Here's another example: Which 9th grade English student is smarter?

​Rose says, “If we want to know your intelligence, we give you an IQ test that is supposed to tap a range of abilities, but then we merge that into a single score. Imagine two young students have the same IQ score of 110 — the exact same number. One has great spatial abilities but poor working memory, and the other has the exact opposite jaggedness. If we just want to rank them then we could say the students are more or less the same in intelligence because they have the same aggregate scores. But if we wanted to really understand who they are as individuals enough to nurture their potential, we can’t ignore the jaggedness.”

"Right now because we believe in the myth of average, we believe that opportunity means providing equal access to standardized educational experiences,” Rose says in a Harvard interview. “However, since we know that nobody is actually average, it is obvious that equal access to standardized experiences is not nearly enough… it requires equal fit between individuals and their educational environments.”

What would a school or classroom committed to equal fit include?

• Flexible seating
• Dynamic grouping of students based on the level of support they need to master a particular skill or topic during that day/week/month
• Multiple ways for students to demonstrate what they know
• Multiple styles of instruction: project-based learning; workplace apprenticeships; virtual learning; etc.
• Self-assessment and reflection: helping students understand their own strengths and weaknesses
• Multiple categories of giftedness
• More nuanced assessment and reporting. Instead of “I am a B student in math because I am above average,” a student could say, “I worked on these six math standards this quarter and here’s information about how well I understand each one.”
• Flexible pacing: students can take the time they need to master a particular concept or skill. As soon as they’re ready for something more challenging, they move on.
• Advancement based on competency instead of seat time.

School doesn’t have to feel like a 1950s Air Force fighter jet cockpit. Indeed, it can’t. For Rose, this is a social justice issue, it’s an economic imperative, and it’s deeply personal. “I know what it feels like, at least in my context, when you don't fit into the current system. Like the kid who is always feeling … worthless. And I also know what it means to find your fit—to actually find your potential and your calling in life. It leaves me with this sense that from the so-called bottom to the top of our academic system, there's an enormous amount of talent and potential and contributions waiting to tapped.”