 
|
|||||||||
              
|
No cause for separation: Mt. Lebanon school district believes students of all abilities learn best together
Monday, June 11, 2001 By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Welcome to ground zero in the gifted wars. On a cloudless spring day in Sharon Abraham's sixth-grade English class at Jefferson Middle School, discussion is under way about "The Westing Game," a much-loved staple of the Mt. Lebanon School District's reading curriculum for sixth graders.
Abraham smartly takes them through the meaning of the word "inscrutable" as applied by a white male character to a young Asian woman in this whodunit.
"Why would he be called a bigot? Where are we going here?" she asks, watching her students' faces carefully while pointing to a list of the elements of literature: setting, character development, conflict, plot ...
"Stereotyping," a student says triumphantly, pointing to one of the words at the bottom.
During this exchange, three students are sitting at a separate table, not participating in the class discussion. They've already read the book, so while the others talk, these students have been given a different task: to go back over "The Westing Game" and identify and list the clues that eventually reveal the murderer.
This is a teaching practice called "differentiation," in which high-achieving students are given more challenging assignments without leaving the regular classroom.
But would these three sixth graders be better off reading a more difficult book and, perhaps, leaving the classroom for a discussion? Or should they be in a separate class with other advanced readers?
The answer, from Mt. Lebanon school officials, is a very firm no.
And the answer, from some parents of gifted children, is a very firm yes.
For the past 18 months, a quiet battle has been waged in this leafy suburban community known for its excellent schools, involving an unusually well-organized group of parents vs. an equally unified group of district officials who firmly believe in a policy of educating all children, regardless of ability, in the same classrooms.
In no other district in the region do the battle lines seem so clearly drawn. On one side, there are the parents -- a local branch of the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education representing 34 families, some with two to three gifted children each. On the other side is a school district of about 5,700 students that embraces "heterogeneous," or mixed-ability, classrooms for gifted children, to a degree not found in most other places.
Few separate programs
Unlike other districts, Mt. Lebanon has no separate "pullout" enrichment programs, no gifted resource room, no "gifted-only" field trips. Gifted students do get to participate in "academic events" -- brainteasers and competitions -- that take place once a month for six months, and in elementary school, they go to the library for 10 different sessions, usually over a two-month period, to research a project.
While state law mandates that gifted students receive an appropriate education, it doesn't require schools to provide gifted services, as long as these students' needs are being met in the regular classroom.
And Mt. Lebanon officials say that's what is happening in their schools, which use a rigorous curriculum designed for a population of students who average 117 on IQ tests, far above the norm of 100.
Kate Keane, supervisor of English for the district, notes that the curriculum has been carefully designed to accommodate students at various levels, but who are mostly grouped in the high end of ability.
"I think the curriculum is the lifeblood of this district. We pride ourselves on having one curriculum for everyone," Keane says.
"We really do have such an extraordinary clientele here," adds Superintendent Glenn Smartschan.
But the gifted parents' group doesn't agree with the school system's approach.
"An above-average curriculum doesn't begin to address the needs of a gifted student," counters Lourdes Castellanos, who has two children in the Mt. Lebanon schools.
She and other parents contend that gifted children are consistently grouped with slower learners, causing boredom and frustration; students who finish work early are given make-work projects; the district balks at accelerating students; and, contrary to district policy, children aren't pretested consistently to determine whether they need more advanced material.
Barbara Brunner, gifted coordinator for Mt. Lebanon's elementary schools, says that is a skewed picture.
Teachers are pretesting every child in math, Brunner says, and if students appear to have mastered the material, they're given more challenging work. In language arts, teachers can provide additional literature for more nimble readers.
"You'll never walk into a classroom and have all youngsters reading the same novel," says Brunner.
A bored child
Maybe not, but for gifted students like fourth-grader Julie Nascone, who reads 300-page novels every week at home, the books she received in class after finishing the assigned anthology were underwhelming.
While the rest of the class was reading "Sign of the Beaver," Julie was given "Forgotten Door," a book she found even less difficult.
Julie also says she has found little support for moving ahead at her own pace. When she finishes a test early, her teacher tells her to go back and check it again. After doing that, she is told to correct other students' papers.
"We had a test that no one did well on. I got a 91 percent, and everyone else's was 60 or below, but the teacher made me repeat the test along with everyone else.
"Everyone asked what grade I got, and I said I don't want to talk about it. I pretended I got a really bad grade because people will get mad at you if they know you did better than they did."
Today in Mt. Lebanon, there are fewer students labeled as gifted than there were a decade ago -- from around 20 percent then to between 3 and 4 percent today. By comparison, in two other affluent districts, 17 percent of Fox Chapel School District's students and 15 percent of North Allegheny's are labeled as gifted.
The gifted parents' group in Mt. Lebanon doesn't think the district's numbers reflect reality. It believes the district is bending over backwards not to identify children as gifted, and in some cases, is using criteria that were meant to broaden the number of children in gifted programs to actually keep children out.
Max Hutchinson is a case in point, his mother says. Max, now in fifth grade, was tested in second grade and his IQ score was far above the 130 cutoff, Mindy Hutchinson says.
But the district refused to identify him as gifted, because his grades weren't high enough and his teacher didn't recommend him. The gifted parents' group argues that those criteria and others should be used to include a child who doesn't meet the IQ cutoff. Instead, Mt. Lebanon uses those factors as a reason for excluding some high-IQ children.
And even though Max was later identified as gifted and is now allowed to take math classes one year ahead of his grade level, he still isn't challenged enough, his mother says.
There has been some movement by both sides on small issues.
The district did start a pilot program to identify highly gifted math students in elementary schools, and it has stepped up efforts to train teachers to "differentiate" in the classroom.
And after her daughter was placed in an English class this year with no other gifted students, Castellanos persuaded the school to start a monthly supplemental reading and discussion group for a handful of 8th grade students, featuring more advanced material.
Honors English?
One unresolved issue involves a request by the gifted parents' group for an honors English program for middle school students, similar to the existing honors math program.
But George Wilson, Mt. Lebanon's deputy superintendent and director of curriculum, says that math lends itself more to advanced classes because it is a linear subject, with a scope and sequence that's very clearly based on a certain level of skill, unlike literature and language arts, which are far more fluid.
He said that's why teachers have students -- even advanced readers -- spend so much time on lauded children's books like Lois Lowry's Newbery Medal-winning novel, "The Giver," the story of a young boy's discovery of the secrets behind his utopian society.
"It's a very complex text, in fact, with many levels of meaning inherent in it. Students, unfortunately, sixth graders, tend to read for plot. They've read the story, they understand the plot, and it's ho-hum, let's move on. But one can read the same text over and over again and quite frankly gain much as a reader, depending on what you as a reader bring to the text."
Wilson said the proposal for an honors English course would "impact the instruction for 1,500 students in order to address the specialized instruction ... for maybe 70 students at the middle school."
Asked how an honors English program would negatively affect the non-honors students, Wilson replied crisply:
"Because it creates tracking. What you get when you create a second level of pullout -- separated, segregated programming -- is de facto tracking."
And there it is: the "t" word, the word that makes some educators shudder.
Tracking was a practice first identified by Jeannie Oakes, a researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, in her influential 1985 book "Keeping Track." She described it as a segregated system of relegating students to a low, medium or high achievement "tracks." The poor and minorities usually were sent to vocational education, while the white middle classes were sent to basic or college preparatory tracks.
A touchy topic
While many urban and some suburban schools abandoned "tracking," the debate about it lives on, and is now focused on "ability grouping" -- a somewhat less pervasive practice in which children are put into groups based on ability, usually by subject.
Some educators say ability grouping allows advanced students to learn much better. Others say it should be avoided because it hurts those who are left in lower-ability groups.
Tom Loveless, an education researcher with the Brookings Institution and author of the 1999 book "The Tracking Wars," says it's not surprising that a district like Mt. Lebanon has gone to mixed-ability grouping in most classes.
In affluent, tightly-knit communities, Loveless says, "it's in these districts' self-interest not to have special gifted programs.
"If you have one, it means you have to have a cutoff. You have to tell parents their children aren't in. And in upper-income areas, with a lot of high achieving children, there's a political risk to that. Any time you draw the line somewhere, you are going to get parents who object loudly because their kid didn't make it."
A recent survey of Mt. Lebanon parents found plenty of sentiment along those lines, with parents of average students complaining that gifted and special needs students already get more attention, and parents in those other groups saying they don't get enough.
"The population of Mt. Lebanon doesn't want any segment of students to get something they don't get," says DeDe Greenberg, a parent of a gifted child.
Moreover, there is no evidence that gifted children do as well in mixed classes as they would in separate ones, some of their parents say.
"It is true that I am not an experienced English teacher," says Carol Baicker-McKee, a child psychologist who did her undergraduate work at Yale University. "Nonetheless, I am, like most of the parents of gifted students in this district, a bright, generally well-read and well-educated person. I would be happy to look at any research the district can find that demonstrates that heterogeneous grouping would benefit my children or that honors classes would harm them. To date, they have produced none."
But school officials remain unmoved, convinced that their approach is the right one.
Brunner, the gifted education coordinator, says she once led a pullout program for gifted students in another district and "it was fun, and boy, those parents loved me and those children loved me. But it wasn't connected to what youngsters do every day."
Keeping gifted students in the same class as other students, she firmly believes, has meant "I was helping teachers give these children a better education. I'm very confident of that."
TOMORROW: Quaker Valley and Greene County
|
||||||||
