Charles
Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British
Columbia
[permission
granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]
A high
school in Columbia, Maryland implemented an innovative way to encourage low
income students and students of colour to enrol in advanced classes. The initiative
is worth a closer look.
According to
an article in the Washington
Post, Hammond High School’s advanced course enrollments looked the same
year after year, despite a changing demographic that saw a larger number of
students of colour and students from low-income families enrolled at the school.
Based on other instances where the opposite happened, I wondered what made this
possible.
First, the
school responded to its changing student population by eliminating low-level
classes and requiring all students to enrol in a minimum of one advanced class
each school year. Then, the school established a suite of supports to assist
the students who struggled with the more demanding coursework, including a
summer workshop to prepare them for the more advanced classes: a homework club,
common planning time for teachers in the same subjects, and professional
development to assist teachers to learn new ways of supporting all learners.
The Hammond
experience has been that minority enrollments in advanced courses have
increased and so, too, have graduation rates. The graduation rate for
African-American students increased from 80% to 92% from 2010 to 2016. The increase
for Hispanic students went from 81% to 95% and, for students with special needs,
the graduation rate increased from 56% to 80%.
The pattern
at Hammond is for students to work in groups and to collaborate with one
another. Group work engenders responsibility to the group which prompts
students to work harder and to help one another. The approach was questioned in
one of the comments accompanying the online article: “Group work at my kids'
schools is too often used to turn the high performing into the classroom
teachers and to get students who couldn't do the work through the course or to
lessen the grading load.” This reader wanted to know the impact of the approach
on high performing students: Is this approach something that the high
performers prefer or endure? Does the approach adversely affect their
scholarship?
The evidence
from studies of well-planned collaborative learning shows favourable outcomes
for all learners. Studies of
peer-tutoring typically show that both the tutor and tutee benefit, with the
greater benefits accruing to the tutor.
Notwithstanding these bodies of evidence, the concerns raised in the
comment are very legitimate.
I had
several points in mind in writing about the Hammond innovation. One was that
performance of students regarded at risk appeared to improve when the demands
and expectations increased. Another was to encourage careful examination of
promising innovations to ensure that the successes are genuine and are
sustained over time, addressing the issues raised by those responding to the
article. A third is to suggest that the return on the investment of such
innovations should be calculated to determine the cost of the incremental gains
achieved and to answer the question: Can this innovation be brought to scale on
a system-wide basis?
We should encourage schools and school boards to take a more experimental approach to
education. But our support for a more experimental approach should be
contingent upon close study, the calculation of the return on investment, and
the determination that, if successful, the approach can be brought to scale.