Course Correction  |  Continued

urty Jean-Denis is the only black face in her advanced placement chemistry class. Last year, she was one of three African-Americans in her AP history class, and one of two in AP English. Step into any advanced placement class at Rindge, and it's hard to believe you're still standing in a school that's overwhelmingly minority.

Jean-Denis is also one of a handful of students in upper-level classes to live in subsidized housing, even though about 40 percent of Rindge students live in public housing. She refuses to be the minority who is lagging in her mostly white advanced classes. "I always have felt sensitive to where I grew up," she says. "It makes me try harder. I feel like if I don't represent myself correctly, then I'll represent a stereotype."

If Jean-Denis represents any stereotype, it's that of an overachiever. She's an honors student, senior class president, and active member of the national Minority Student Achievement Network. She also holds down a part-time job at a local Blockbuster Video store. This fall, she will study pre-med at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"I got a good education here because I chose to," says Jean-Denis. She says her parents implanted that drive, urging her to create opportunities far beyond theirs: Her father works as a steward at a downtown hotel, and her mother was laid off from her job.

Jean-Denis has thrived in heterogeneous and advanced placement classes, and she thinks other minorities can, too. She also appreciates the extra attention that the small schools focus on each student. "The cracks are smaller, so kids can't slip through," she says. She's hopeful that if she returns to Rindge in a few years, she'll see more minorities in the AP classes she's slogging through alone. "We've got to make it a priority for students of color to get into AP," she says, believing heterogeneous classes are a part of that.

"Ambition does rub off," she says, and that's important for poorer students whose families haven't raised them with a lifelong sense of entitlement to the Ivy League. "You don't pick where you're born or what your financial situation is," Jean-Denis says. "It's something that students don't have any control over, and to ignore it would be a big problem. It's not the job of a teacher to leave students behind."

Jarmal Hollins is the sort of African-American student who was typically left behind in the old Rindge. Three years ago, he was failing classes and on the fast track to dropping out. But for Hollins, switching from House A to School 2 meant more than a change in homerooms. He went from being essentially invisible to administrators to meeting regularly with Debra Socia, School 2's dean of curriculum, and Rasheed Meadows, the school's dean of students. "I wasn't on the right track," says Hollins. "But Mr. Meadows told me black people can be successful. Most of my uncles are in jail, and I don't want to end up like that."

Shored up by summer school classes and determination, Hollins is willing himself to pass. Far from jail, the 18-year-old is now in AP classes and choosing which of several local colleges he will enter this fall to study graphic design. Though he struggled in the first quarter in AP history, earning only a D, he managed to pull his grade up to C+ in the second and third quarters. "If it weren't for this change," he says, "I probably wouldn't be serious about graduating."

Walk into AP classes in most suburban high schools, and you'd be hard-pressed to find students whose graduation is in question. More likely, you'd see a striving throng of white kids, polishing their transcripts and hoping for admission to the Ivy League. But the new ethos at Rindge embraces the idea that the whole spectrum of students should have access to the most rigorous of classes -- even if that invites the question of what "advanced placement" really means.

"I teach heterogeneous AP," Carol Siriani announces proudly. She's taught at Rindge for 34 years and is one of its most outspoken proponents of heterogeneous classrooms -- a firm believer that a diverse high school should challenge all of its students. "Before, we had parents saying, `I send my kids to a diverse high school, but I don't want them sitting next to kids who are not like them.' " At Rindge, any student can take an AP class with teacher approval.

"A lot of parents just don't understand it," says Emma Lang, a white senior who has been accepted at UMass-Amherst. But to her, heterogeneity has been the most educational part of her high school experience. "I came here after attending the Shady Hill School," the 18-year-old says, "and I wanted to go to a school where people were different than me." The A student has taken four advanced placement courses during the last two years.

Lang's biggest complaint is the one that's echoed around every school -- the unevenness of the teachers. Some of the older teachers came to heterogeneity having taught either the honors track or lower level students, and now they're struggling to teach both at once. "The worst are the ones who try to teach to the middle," says Lang. "Because there's no one there."

here's no such thing as a typical day in Larry Aaronson's classroom. One day, his lesson plan centers on an episode of The Sopranos. Another day, it's his own stand-up comedy act, leading students through world history with an entire comedy troupe's supply of voices, dialects, and jokes. His off-the-cuff, irreverent style looks impromptu, but it's the fruit of 12-hour days and creative planning aimed at getting students from the top to the bottom of the academic spectrum to think like historians.

Aaronson at once represents the school's old guard and new guard. He was the glue that held Pilot House together -- overseeing its annual house plays, known for being every bit as cheeky and incisive as Hasty Pudding theatricals. As much as he loved Pilot, however, Aaronson embraced the reorganization at Rindge, aspiring to create five Pilot Houses where there had just been one.

During a recent unit, Aaronson led students through history's changing perception of Christopher Columbus, using multiple textbooks, films, and lectures. The students' final assignment was to write their own chapter of a history book, explaining how the view of Columbus has shifted.

Aaronson's Columbus assignment -- an open-ended one with plenty of room for students to weave together facts and critical thinking -- is ideal in a heterogeneous classroom, says former principal Paula Evans, who now directs the New Teachers Collaborative, a training program supported by the Gates Foundation that's based in Ayer. "Prior to heterogeneous classrooms, a lot of kids were deprived of that kind of rigorous work," she says. "The expectation was that lower-level kids couldn't do it."

Aaronson was a ready convert to heterogeneity, but plenty of teachers still are not. As a group, the math department puts up the most resistance. The teachers argue that math must be tracked, because they can't teach an advanced concept until students have mastered the basic concept that underlies it. Says teacher Leslie Mili: "The problem is that the basic skills have not been developed in the elementary grades. They graduate kids who don't know their times tables, and then it snowballs from there."

The uneven preparation of the students entering the high school dogs all of the teachers and accentuates innate differences among students who enter Rindge from any of Cambridge's 14 grade schools. "I can tell you what elementary school kids attended after they open their mouths," says freshman physics teacher Emma Stellman. "Some kids come in here without ever having had any homework."

Faced with these roadblocks, some teachers are finding they would rather quit than fight. Chemistry teacher Maureen Murphy will call it quits this month after 34 years at the school, tired of what she calls a "steady spiraling down of academics." She says, "The range of ability in an inner-city school like ours is just too great, and it's just unworkable."

Money is not the problem. Cambridge spends more than $17,000 per year on each student, more money per pupil than any other public school system in the state.

"In Cambridge, it's not just the money," says Pedro Noguera, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education who has been studying changes at Cambridge Rindge and whose daughter is a senior there. "It's about effective support for students before they start to fall behind. Cambridge tries to solve this through remedial programs, but they have to look at the core program."

During each of the last three years, Rindge teachers and administrators have been tinkering with the most effective way to teach those core classes so both remedial and gifted students can learn in the same classroom. This year, 10th-grade chemistry classes have had two teachers, allowing them often to split the class, creating a kind of tracking within a heterogeneous setting. Teachers in the physics department meet weekly to assist one another in creating lesson plans that allow lower-achieving students to grasp basic concepts while higher-achieving students feel challenged. And the school is experimenting with "honors options" -- a kind of extra credit plan that lets more talented and ambitious kids do more work so they can put the coveted "H" for honors next to as many classes as possible on their high school transcripts.

ybil Knight's hopelessly cluttered office is an outward sign of the mess she has to clean up. Her desk, windowsills -- even the floor -- are littered with paperwork. Covering the walls are posters from various committees, scrawled with questions such as "How do we retain the middle class?"

The third principal at Rindge in three years, Knight is trying to iron out the kinks in a system that is still irking parents and teachers. She began her first year with a low-key approach to leadership, holding an endless series of meetings -- 225 by her count -- with teachers, parents, students, and administrators. "I'm just a conduit," says Knight, who formerly served as principal of Cambridge's Baldwin Elementary School. "I realized very early in this game that no one person can take responsibility for what goes on here."

As the year progressed, however, Knight made her own mark. In January, she severed the school's relationship with the New England Small Schools Network. And last month, she decided not to extend the contracts of the deans of the five small schools.

In her first address to the teachers in January, Knight announced that she was creating 13 teacher committees to draft policies on everything from the school's mission to MCAS to heterogeneous groupings. Over the past three years, tinkering at the school has been called "reorganization," "retooling," "reforming." Knight's is probably best labeled "refinement." Most recently, Knight has turned her attention to the school's accreditation, after Rindge received a poor report card from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges in April.

Knight has already signaled that she wants to expand the honors option across the curriculum to ensure rigorous work for high achievers. And she wants to make more room for 10th-graders to skip some core classes so they can pursue more vocational training in the Rindge School of Technical Arts, located within the high school. "Our students are never all going to be college prep," says Knight. "We have to also provide strong opportunities for vocational education."

With Knight at the helm of the school, early returns are revealing that the heterogeneous experiment is producing some results. The achievement gap by race is beginning to close, although only slightly. Even as the percentage of low-income pupils and students of color is increasing, the dropout and course-failure rates are falling and the number of students planning to attend college is rising. More students are taking AP courses -- including more African-Americans -- and despite the greater enrollment numbers, more students are passing those courses.

Knight says she is committed to heterogeneous classes. And reformers -- surprised that the reorganization has shown improvements in student achievement in just two years -- predict that given five or 10 more years, the results of heterogeneous classrooms will be striking. "The most important ingredient here is time," says Harvard's Sizer. "You have to stay the course with any good idea long enough to allow the people to figure out how to put that idea into practice."'

As important as time is consistent leadership. The revolving door among Cambridge's educational leaders both in the high school and in the Cambridge School Department creates a shaky foundation on which to build bold reforms. Sybil Knight is the third principal in as many years, and her biggest champion is former superintendent Bobbie D'Alessandro. The School Committee decided not to renew D'Alessandro's contract last fall, and she submitted her resignation on Valentine's Day.

Then there's the ever-changing School Committee, which is reelected every two years. With each new school board member comes new politics, new agendas, and new demands for immediate results. Michael Sullivan, the mayor since last year and head of the School Committee, defends the urge for the quick fix. "Someone always says to wait five to 10 years to see what happens," he says. "But no one can go back and look into the faces of the parents and children and tell them to keep waiting."

Education reformers urge Cambridge to be patient. And across the country, all eyes are on the school to see if the city can sort through the thorny issues of race and class to create an urban system that works for all students. As academics pore over the data, no one is watching more closely than Cambridge parents, whose children are the raw material for the grand experiment.

"I like the idea, but I don't trust it," says Denise Simmons, a City Council member who was a member of the school committee that originally approved the heterogeneous plan. "I have to see it work before I put my child there."

Simmons, an African-American, sent four children to Rindge before the reorganization and is now raising three elementary-school-age grandchildren. She's hoping that she'll feel more confident by the time the fifth-grader is ready for high school. "First, I'll look at the statistics to see how they are teaching children of color," says Simmons. If she's not satisfied, she'll consider parochial or other private school.

And even though Carolyn Watson opted to send her daughter to private school, she's preparing to send her seventh-grade son to Rindge. "We're willing to give it another try," says Watson. "We just need to see that they're meeting the needs of the kids who are ready and prepared to do higher-level work. If it's hard for those kids to stay, then we're going to lose the capacity to have a really good school."

Michelle Bates Deakin is a freelance writer who lives in Arlington.

This story ran in the Boston Globe Magazine on 6/8/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

Search the Globe  Search for:   Today Yesterday Past month Past year   Advanced Search © Copyright 2003 New York Times Company | Advertise | Contact us | Privacy policy |