Sheela Clary

Author’s Note: This is the first in a series of stories that will explore equity from various angles, including proficiency-based learning and assessment, selective college admissions, and the approach of Career and Technical Education courses.

“There’s the Social Emotional Learning … the proficiency work, and talking about how that’s going to shift our grading practices, and there’s the alignment for curriculum, and all the work we’re doing in CTE [Career and Technical Education] … To do this work well, we have to feel like there’s a reason behind why we would try to tackle all of this … so, what’s the ‘why’?” —Monument Mountain High School Principal Kristi Farina

This past March and April, Berkshire Hills Regional School District School (BHRSD) Committee meetings were dominated by debates about the proposed implementation of an ambitious “Equity, Access, and High Expectations for All” plan for Monument Mountain High School. The most immediate and also controversial aspect of the plan is now in place, upending 60 years of precedent, addressing what the administration laid out as the social segregation and unequal educational outcomes that have resulted from “tracking,” or “leveling,” students by perceived academic ability along Honors, College Prep, and Standard tracks.

Starting this fall, the freshman class (the class of 2025) has been “de-tracked” or “de-leveled” and grouped heterogeneously into their classes, without the perceived ability designations of Honors or College Prep. (The third-tier Standard track was eliminated in 2019.) Whereas before the paths of students aspiring to a career in the trades and those aspiring to elite higher education might never have crossed during four years together under the same roof, today they’re sitting beside one another in English, math, social studies, and science classes.

The community, as measured by public reaction during the virtual meetings last spring, was initially more skeptical than supportive of this move. Parents shared concerns that teachers would be overwhelmed and overtaxed after a year and a half of pandemic schooling, that their own high-achievers would not be challenged, and that the overall quality of the high school educational experience at Monument — the rigor of which had drawn some parents to live in the district in the first place — would be degraded.

The first time Equity, Access, and High Expectations for All was discussed at length in public, March 11, both student representatives on the committee and parents expressed surprise with the “out of left field” quality to the idea, which led high school Principal Kristi Farina to preface her comments with a clear reminder of what had brought the district to it. The core problem, she said, was with the messages the school sent to students through tracking. It’s “the labels we use regularly to describe who can and who cannot.”

When it comes to equity, she asserted with conviction, “we need to take it on, and we need to do it now.”

The next meeting, on April 1, had about 50 attendees, with four parents expressing concerns, and one support. One father said he felt he was “being sold.” He said there were two sides of the de-tracking question, but only one had been presented. He urged patience. “Let’s have some balance, let’s wait, and I’m sure the community can get together and all agree on an approach that will knock it out of the park.”

The parent speaking in support referenced the New York Times podcast Nice White Parents, implying that opposition to the equity plan might conflict with the progressive values the community claims to hold. If we care about equity and inclusion, she said, “we have to put our money where our mouth is.” (These comments in turn led at least one parent to think twice about speaking up and asking a question of the administration that might come across as less than supportive of equity and inclusion.)

Things came to a head on April 15, which attracted, again, twice as many attendees and about 20 speakers, with the lion’s share of commentary falling on the side of impassioned support for a new way of doing things at Monument Mountain. Perhaps the single most persuasive argument in support came in the form of a letter drafted by Monument alum Nico Roskowski and signed by more than 40 others.

The letter stated: “The distinctions made between Standard, CP, Honors, and AP classes do not reflect an achievement gap; they create an achievement gap … How is it that in grades of roughly 150 students, some of us rarely or never took classes together? … Many of us saw teachers teach with a ‘low floor, high ceiling’ approach to accommodate everyone in their class … Many of us did Independent Studies or Projects that allowed us to pursue curiosities and passions. We all would have been empowered to seize these opportunities if we were taught that all students are equally worthy of exploration and self-discovery. We know the plan in front of you honors different intelligences, learning styles…”

In the end, the School Committee unanimously approved of the plan, with Chairman Steve Bannon summarizing the previous month’s debate. “Change comes hard to some of us … this is a change that can make a difference … We’re not only talking about programs and rooms and teachers, we’re talking about individual students … and I know some of the fear is, ‘Will the top students thrive?’ I’m being assured that they will and not only will the top students thrive, but the ones in the middle and the ones who are disadvantaged will thrive as well.”

I was one of the parents of an incoming Monument freshman who spoke up on April 15 in favor of Equity, Access, and High Expectations for All, but it was a professional, not personal, experience that firmly established my stance on the subject. I taught College Prep level sophomores at Monument a decade ago, and what I saw revealed in stark relief the difference between the students the school and its community valorizes and “honors,” and those who are, for all intents and purposes, off our radar. There was a sharp, undeniable distinction in socio-economic class, and in expectations of effort and output and engagement, between my students in College Prep level Sophomore English, and the Honors level Fact and Fiction class just down the hall. I was so struck by that distinction that I’ve been obsessed since then with the question of how and why our school became so inequitable and what can be done to mitigate the inequities.

My students’ parents, I’ve come to learn, were mostly not college-educated themselves, so in my classroom, any expectation of higher education was absorbed, with some notable exceptions, not at home, but through BHRSD culture and through the  guidance department. This is not to say that the bulk of my students wanted to go to college, only that they were made to believe it was the only option available.

College seemed to represent for them a vague and unpleasant obligation, the last in a long line of similarly unpleasant obligations laid out by the government’s mandatory schooling laws. As several of my students put it to me years after the fact, the message they got from school was: “It’s college, or nothing.”

Three out of four of them, in the end, chose “nothing.”

Yet all but two of my students raised their hands when I asked who wanted to go to college. They did not — with, again, several notable exceptions — connect the work of our English class with that goal. The only time I could be sure my students did any reading or writing was when I could observe them doing it live during class. But even then, I learned, there was a fair bit of performance going on. (I was under the impression, for example, that we’d all successfully completed Steinbeck’s 107-page novella “Of Mice and Men,” but several students were betrayed by their shocked reactions to Lennie’s death at the end of the film version.)

On the other hand, in the inspired space of Honors Fact and Fiction, the sons and daughters of college-educated professionals were held to prep school levels of expectation, completing long hours of homework in preparation for vigorous, intellectually stimulating class discussions. On the day I visited, I sat speechless as every single student — well over 20 of them — contributed to a conversation about “free indirect discourse” vis a vis Elizabeth Strout’s novel “Olive Kitteridge.”

Ten of the 39 have completed a four-year college degree, and I imagine a few of them would have had opportunity there to participate in lofty conversations of a free indirect discourse nature. Another handful of my kids — I’d estimate five — could have ably contributed to such a discussion in high school if, starting in middle school, they’d been given a lot of one-to-one mentoring and support.

Three had attended middle school together at Farmington River, and were selected for the Gifted and Talented group there, called the Dragon’s Den. With six other verbally advanced students, they read books above grade level and participated in an afterschool program that helped them identify and pursue independent projects. One studied architecture.

But well before they’d reached high school, they’d fallen off that track and gotten onto the College Prep track, where they would remain all four years. One had been my most reliable, most fluent reader, and the other had been an excellent persuasive writer, as I learned when he handed in to me an unassigned four-page essay defending the Second Amendment. Though I disagreed with his conclusions, I was deeply impressed by his writing and the clarity of this thinking.

“Why didn’t you sign up to take Honors English?” I asked him.

He scoffed and said, “I don’t wanna be in class with the rich kids.”

What sort of interventions might have eaten away at this ugly barrier, and pushed this kid to set a goal of reaching his potential as a reader and writer? What supports would it have taken to keep all three of those boys on the Honors track, and to have sustained them on it throughout high school, so they could gain admission to selective colleges, and be set off on a better economic footing than the one they are now mostly on?

On the other hand, at least one of the four-year college graduates from my College Prep cohort is now in a far worse financial position because of it. As a childcare worker, she earns the same hourly wage with a BA as her colleague who has only a high school diploma, but, of course, none of her $50,000 debt. I asked this student what her goals were in high school. She said, “I didn’t wanna go to community college. I just refused … All I knew is just I wanted to go to college and get out of Great Barrington.”

She now lives with her mom in Great Barrington.

If I were to rank my College Prep students in terms of where they are now success-wise, as far as I’m concerned the valedictorian and salutatorian are two of the boys who most strongly resisted my efforts to prepare them for higher education. They’re the two self-directed smarty pants who did not raise their hands when I asked, “Who wants to go college?” One is a truck driver. One is a firefighter/EMT. They’re both financially stable. They have no school debt. They’re married. They live in their own homes.

College, in the American Dream version, means an entrée to opportunity. To many of my students it was not this. College meant something rich kids got to do, or the illusory chance to “get out of town,” or simply another way to fall short and feel like a failure. To others it meant a waste of time and money, and in their cases, they were right.

Today the success of Equity, Access, and High Expectations for All depends on our speaking a common language, or at least agreeing on certain fundamental definitions. What, for instance, does “equity” mean to you? We think of it differently.

For much of the country, and for one parent I spoke with, the word “equity” is intrinsically connected to “racial justice.”

For other parents, “equity” in the context of de-tracking means something akin to: “Choosing mediocrity and lower standards over academic rigor.”

For Monument Principal Kristi Farina, equity means: “Helping every student achieve their potential.”

It’s only November. The first marking period just ended. We could go in any number of different directions, but what seems clear even now is that to approach the better world that “Equity, Access, and High Expectations for All” envisions will demand new ways of thinking about what makes a “good school.”

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