SOM-GOAL Speaks

Editor's Note: John Davenport presented these thoughts to the Board of Education on August 16. Slighted edited for clarity, Davenport has shared his thoughts as a editorial.

This July, in response to the School Board's vote to delevel 7th grade core subjects and developments since then, a group of local parents and residents formed the South Orange - Maplewood Group for Objective Academic Leveling (SOM-GOAL) and started a webpage (www.som-goal.com). We are extremely concerned about the all-out attack on honors classes and grouping by ability or achievement-level in our schools. We object to the new push to delevel 8th grade and the high school before the 7th grade deleveling has even started or its results have been proven.  We are concerned for our kids, our property values, and the integrity of the unique community that we have all worked hard to create and maintain in our two towns. We support efforts to increase the overall rigor of the South Orange/Maplewood curriculum. Most immediately, we will work to ensure that the combination of Level 3 and 4 courses starting this fall in 7th grade does not reduce the rigor of the curriculum or grading expectations in the combined courses. We are calling for the same tests for level 4 standards to be applied to previously combined 6th grade courses as well. 
 
GOAL has grown quickly since its founding, with more than 60 members registered since the website was launched two weeks ago. We represent a wide range of opinion that diverges from the new trajectory of our school district toward the ending of all levels and the elimination of honors classes.  While we support the administration's desire to hold students to higher standards in an effort to raise performance, in fact, even existing Level 4 course standards are too low and many students need further challenge.  We believe that in some cases, grouping by ability or achievement levels will need to be part of any solution that really works for all students; so-called "differentiated instruction" cannot solve all problems with combined classes. Many of us know from first-hand experience that children who can move faster in a particular core subject are often not sufficiently challenged in currently deleveled core courses.  In an era focused (understandably enough) on pulling up the test scores of students who are failing to achieve proficiency, the needs of faster-moving students seem largely forgotten.

  
We do not stand for the status quo.  We recognize that some lower-level classes may have held students back and we support changes to help them to reach higher, including efforts to make level 3 classes stronger and step-up summer classes. But initiatives to pull up test scores must be done in a way that keeps all students challenged. We are interested in exploring a range of creative alternatives, including contracting-up in levels and smaller honors classes that would also meet the district's statutory obligations to provide "gifted and talented" programs.

We are just as concerned as our opponents about the racial achievement gap in our district (which mirrors that of comparable NJ districts). But unfortunately we doubt that this gap can be significantly closed by deleveling alone. The achievement gap may be more of a cause than an effect of racial stratification in our leveled classes. For the gap opens up in elementary grades before there are any leveled classes in our district, and later level placements are thus a consequence rather than a cause of these differences in performance. But we reject our opponents' claim that level assignments are destiny. Parents across our district testify that their children have benefited from smaller, less advanced classes in the past.  There is also a significant rate of movement between existing levels, which belies the argument that movement is impossible. We also believe that more minority students can make it on the merits into honors classes, as evinced by Level 5 math classes in which almost a quarter of the students are African-American.

We agree with a college preparatory education for all students in our district.  However, our opponents descend into ideological naivete when they say that eliminating honors and AP classes will make more of our students better prepared for success in college. Let's work on improving the quality of instruction in our district at all levels, so that every student has the opportunity to succeed throughout the years in our school system and in college.