As Michael Horn, recently wrote, "Fundamentally
the question comes down to this: Do we want our education system to be a
sorting system or a learning system?"
How well-intentioned education and business leaders, backed
by wealthy foundations and a success story from faraway Alaska, sold state
lawmakers on a largely untested theory of change
by KELLY FIELD April 19, 2019
Ragan Toppan, a junior at Deering High School, took part in
a walkout last fall to protest a change in the school’s grading policy. Kelly
Field, for The Hechinger Report
This past fall, Ragan Toppan, 16, walked out of her Algebra
II class at Deering High School to protest her school’s recent switch to
standards-based grading.
Toppan, a junior at the high school, was angry that the
administration hadn’t sought student input about the change, and worried that a
switch to a 1-4 grading system, with a 3 the highest possible grade on some
assignments, would hurt her chances of getting into a good college. On her
transcript, those 3s, which signify proficiency in a standard, would appear as
85s, or B’s.
“I shoot for A’s on all my work, but a lot of teachers don’t
give you an option to go ‘above and beyond’ ”
Her mother, a longtime English teacher at Deering, sees
things a little differently. Kathryn Toppan switched to a 1-4 scale even before
the administration required it, finding it “less arbitrary” than the
traditional 1-100. “It’s easier to communicate to students where they’re at and
what they need to do to improve,” she said.
She sympathizes with students, like her daughter, who have
seen their high school careers disrupted by change. But she believes there is
no other way. “Sometimes it doesn’t seem fair, but there’s sort of a greater
good,” she said.
Seven years after the state passed a law that required
Maine’s high schools to award diplomas on the basis of demonstrated
“proficiency” in eight key areas, and nine months after the legislature
repealed that mandate, the debate over proficiency-based diplomas continues to
divide districts, teachers and families here, even as the concept spreads to
other schools and states.
In a recent survey of the state’s superintendents conducted
by the University of Southern Maine, roughly a quarter of respondents said they
planned to stick with a proficiency-based diploma, even though the law no
longer requires it. Thirty-eight percent said they would likely return to
awarding diplomas based on the accumulation of credit hours. Another quarter
preferred “hybrid” approaches, and 11 percent said it was too soon to
speculate.
“No other state has embraced this model for all their school
systems. We’re not ready for this.”
Earle McCormick, a former teacher and state senator
The only thing most everyone agrees on is this: The rollout
of the 2012 law, LD 1422, was a disaster, plagued by insufficient funding and
inadequate guidance from the top. While the state’s Department of Education
cycled through commissioners (six in six years) superintendents struggled to
figure out the law, largely on their own.
The result today is a patchwork of local policies, with
pockets of proficiency-based grading surrounded by schools that have stuck with
traditional methods of evaluating students — or reverted to them recently.
Districts have spent thousands of dollars on consultants and software upgrades,
and the racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps that the law was supposed to
help eliminate remain largely unchanged.
Related: Documenting Maine’s failure to implement
proficiency-based education
Now, as a new governor and legislature grapple with these
gaps, many parents and educators are left asking: How did Maine get into this
mess?
To answer that question, The Hechinger Report combed through
grant databases, legislative records and lobbying disclosures, looking for the
forces and funding behind LD 1422. We spoke with more than two dozen lawmakers,
foundation heads, business leaders and educators about the bill.
The story that emerged is a complicated one, spanning more
than two decades and reaching across the country to a remote district in Alaska
that became a model for Maine.
At its heart, though, it’s a familiar tale in American
school reform — the story of how a small band of well-intentioned education and
business leaders, backed by wealthy foundations and armed with optimism and a
few early success stories, sold state lawmakers on a largely untested theory of
change.
Imported from Alaska
Proficiency-based education is a wonky term, but in essence
it means that students master certain skills before they move up a grade or
graduate. The amount of time they’ve spent in the classroom (“seat time”)
doesn’t matter, nor does the number of credits they’ve accumulated.
proficiency based learning
Deering High School, one of the largest in the state of
Maine, is in the midst of a controversial transition to proficiency-based
diplomas. Kelly Field, for The Hechinger Report
In theory, proficiency-based models let students learn at
their own pace, speeding up if they grasp a concept quickly, and getting extra
help if they struggle. In practice, though, it can take many different forms,
including independent study, learning communities and online programs. It
doesn’t always include changes to grading — and indeed, Maine’s law didn’t
require any.
To supporters like former state senator Brian Langley, a
longtime culinary arts instructor and the sponsor of the now-repealed LD 1422,
proficiency-based diplomas are a way to ensure that all kids graduate with the
skills they’ll need to succeed in a changing economy.
“It’s about equity,” he said. The law “was bringing a voice
to the kids who don’t have helicopter parents, so when they left high school,
their diplomas would mean something.”
Maine’s march toward a proficiency-law began in 1997, with
the adoption of the Maine Learning Results, which set statewide standards in
eight content areas. It accelerated a couple of years later, when the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation began pouring millions of dollars into high
school reform and the creation of small schools. (The Gates Foundation is among
the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)
In 2000, Tom Vander Ark, the first executive director of
Gates’ education program, heard about Chugach, a district in Alaska that had
seen dramatic gains in test scores after switching to a proficiency-based
model, and he decided to visit.
There, in tiny schools reachable only by plane, Vander Ark
spoke with students who “could tell you exactly what they were learning, why it
was important, and what they had to do to move to the next level in each
subject,” he said in an interview. Each student had a little bar chart on their
desk that tracked their progress toward mastery in each standard.
“I was fascinated by it,” he said. “I had never seen kids so
in charge of their learning.”
Related: What if personalized learning was less about me and
more about us?
When he returned to Seattle, Vander Ark gave the Alaska
Council of School Administrators $5 million to bring the Chugach district’s
model to six other Alaska districts.
The next year, Chugach, with its 214 students spread across
22,000 square miles of glaciers, mountains, islands and wilderness, won the
prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality award. The federal award brought
national attention to the district, which created a nonprofit, the Re-Inventing
Schools Coalition, to take its approach nationwide. The group’s acronym, RISC,
was deliberate, according to a book by its creators, “Delivering on the
Promise.” Schools and districts that adopted the model “would take risks in
transitioning to a system fundamentally distinct from the one that was deeply
ingrained in U.S. culture.”
In 2003, the Gates Foundation gave RISC $5.8 million to train
additional Alaska school districts and to create a research and development
program.
“The mission was to hit the tipping point to transform the
education system,” said Richard DeLorenzo, the former superintendent who
created RISC. “That was my vision.”
$13 million in outside philanthropic funding supported two
Maine districts’ efforts to implement proficiency-based education
The first converts were Adams County School District 50, in
the Denver suburbs, and the Lindsay Unified School District, in California, he
recalls. Like the Chugach district, they had high percentages of low-income
students, though they were much larger districts than Chugach, with more than
10,000 and 4,000 students, respectively.
Meanwhile, in Maine, a handful of districts were
experimenting with similar methods. Among them were RSU 2, a far-flung district
in central Maine which includes the towns of Hallowell and Monmouth; MSAD 15, a
district midway between Portland and Lewiston; and RSU 20, which includes the
small coastal community of Searsport. Searsport had started transitioning to a
standards-based diploma in 2002, after receiving a share of a $10-million
school reform grant that Gates had made to the Sen. George J. Mitchell
Scholarship Research Institute, an organization that gives out scholarships to
Maine students.
In 2007, Maine’s then-commissioner, Susan Gendron, invited
DeLorenzo to speak at a summer conference for superintendents in Bar Harbor. At
the end of the conference, she took a survey: 80 percent of attendees said they
supported the RISC philosophy, but only a quarter said they were ready to make
the leap, she said in an interview.
To encourage them along, the state offered schools $50,000
grants to subsidize RISC training, Gendron recalled. DeLorenzo screened the
candidates, assessing their capacity for change, and six districts were
approved, among them the three districts mentioned above that had already begun
experimenting with the model.
When the state withdrew its financial support for the
training a year and a half in, citing budget shortfalls, the districts formed a
consortium to pool their resources: The Maine Cohort for Customized Learning.
One of the first things the new nonprofit did was hire Beatrice McGarvey, from
Marzano Research, a consulting organization that offers professional
development to schools across the country, to craft a common curriculum, said
Linda Laughlin, now the Maine group’s executive director.
At least one of the early pioneers, RSU 18, which includes
the small town of Oakland, has since backed away from a standards-based
diploma. But one district has been steadfast in its commitment, staying the course
through three superintendents: RSU 2.
A local success story
In a math classroom inside Monmouth Academy in the RSU 2
district, 20 students, ranging from freshmen to seniors, sat in clusters of
four, working independently on small dry erase boards. Some were still studying
geometry, others had advanced to Algebra II. One group was just starting on
probability.
proficiency based learning
Elizabeth Ross, a math teacher at Monmouth Academy, explains
a chart that shows which standards students have met. Kelly Field, for The
Hechinger Report
Elizabeth Ross, a ninth-year teacher in the district, buzzed
between them, stopping to show two juniors, Violette Beaulieu and Hannah
Levesque, how a parabola can dip from positive to negative.
When they understood the concept, Ross moved on, giving
another group a lesson in operations with square roots. Then she moved on
again.
After an hour of shuttling between students, Ross was sweaty
and flushed, the carton of yogurt on her desk only half eaten. It’s hard work differentiating
curriculum for so many students, but Ross believes it’s worth it.
“I feel like they learn more,” she said. “When I give them a
test, they have to know all of it” to earn a 3 and be deemed proficient. “Not
just 70 percent.”
On the wall, there was a chart with stickers showing which
standards students had met. Shading in the boxes indicated a higher level of
competence — half-shaded was a 3.5 and fully shaded was a 4. The students had
requested the shading, to show more nuance in the scores, Ross said.
Levesque, who wants to go to either St. Joseph’s or Thomas
College and become a realtor, strives for all 4s, often requesting extra work
to get to that level. But Beaulieu, who hopes to attend the University of Maine
Farmington and become a preschool teacher, said she’s content with a “solid 3.”
Both said they like the individualized instruction that they
get from teachers like Ross, and appreciate the opportunity to retake exams if
they have a bad day. They worry, though, how they’ll fare in college, where
professors are less forgiving, and there’s thousands of dollars in tuition at
stake.
“Here, if I get something wrong, I’ll be able to go back and
fix it. In college, you can’t,” said Beaulieu. “That kind of freaks me out.”
RSU 2 is often held up as a standards-based success story.
Nearly a decade in, the culture of competence is deeply ingrained in the
district; most of today’s high schoolers have never experienced anything
different.
Getting to this point wasn’t easy, though. When Hallowell
tried to extend proficiency-based education to its high school in 2008, parents
put up a fight, saying the change would make it harder for their children to
compete for scholarships and admission to selective schools, according to a
case study published by the state Department of Education.
The state ramps up
Meanwhile, the momentum — and the spending — for reform was
continuing to build. In 2009, Gates gave half a million to the Nellie Mae
Education Foundation, which describes itself as New England’s largest
education-focused philanthropy, to lead a four-state effort to remake the
region’s schools. (Nellie Mae is among the many funders of The Hechinger
Report.) Nellie Mae passed on the money to the Portland-based Great Schools
Partnership, which used it to coordinate The New England Secondary School
Consortium, a coalition advocating for proficiency-based diplomas, among other
things.
The following year, Gates gave Nellie Mae an additional
$1.75 million to identify and fund “proficiency-based pathways.” Some of that
money trickled down to MSAD 15 and the Casco Bay High School for Expeditionary
Learning, in Portland, which had been created five years earlier using a grant
from The Gates Foundation. At Casco Bay, the money would be used to create a
“roadmap” for other districts and Portland’s two other high schools to follow,
according to a 2012 report on the initiative.
Nellie Mae, which had $430 million in assets at the end of
2009, began investing its own money in Maine, too. In 2010, it gave $200,000
each to Portland and two other districts to develop plans for “district level
system change” focused on “student-centered approaches,” including
proficiency-based education.
At the end of the following year, it awarded organizations
in Portland and Sanford nearly $9 million to implement their plans. To build
public support for the changes, the foundation also gave smaller grants to
youth and immigrant advocacy groups in the districts.
The foundation ultimately gave a combined $13 million to the
two districts, with roughly two-thirds of it going to Portland, according to a
Nellie Mae spokesperson.
In its application for its 2011 grant, Portland pledged to
move the entire district to a proficiency-based diploma. When the grants were
announced, Nicholas Donohue, the foundation’s president, said the districts
were chosen because they were already “most aligned with our theory of change.”
But some Portland parents were wary of the award. Anna Collins,
a Portland mother and attorney, said she saw the grants as an attempt to build
support for LD 1422, which had just been approved by the state legislature’s
education committee and would soon be debated by the whole legislature.
“They can say ‘We’ve got some of the biggest districts in
the state on board, you have to pass this,’” she told the Bangor Daily News at
the time.
Nellie Mae was supporting the proposed law. A few months
before it made the grants to Portland and Sanford, the foundation gave the
first of three grants to the Maine Department of Education to create an online
Center for Best Practice, with case studies of districts that had embraced
proficiency-based learning.
That same month, it awarded $50,000 to the Maine Coalition
for Excellence in Education, a business group now part of Educate Maine, to
support its “political/legislative work.” The coalition, which had drafted an
omnibus education reform bill that was ultimately whittled down to LD 1422,
used the funds to host a retreat for members of the education committee shortly
before the legislature voted on the bill. The lawmakers visited a
proficiency-based school in Oakland and attended a policy forum in Freeport.
Just before the vote on LD 1422 in early April 2012, Educate
Maine and Great Schools Partnership circulated a letter to committee members
with the signatures of nearly 50 principals and superintendents who supported
the bill.
Ed Cervone, the executive director of Educate Maine, said LD
1422 was an attempt to bring accountability to the Maine Learning Results,
which the state had passed 15 years earlier, but never adequately enforced.
“This wasn’t some radical new pathway,” he said. “We were
looking at finishing the pathway put off by governors prior.”
Guinea Pigs
When the legislature debated the bill, lawmakers who
represented communities in RSU 2 spoke against it, citing complaints they’d
received from parents and students in their district. They urged lawmakers to
slow down and let districts decide whether to implement proficiency-based
diplomas on their own.
“No other state has embraced this model for all their school
systems,” warned Sen. Earle McCormick, a former teacher who represented part of
RSU 2. “We’re not ready for this.”
The heavy involvement of unelected, out-of-state foundations
in advancing proficiency-based diplomas stoked suspicion and resentment among
some Maine parents and teachers. They created a Facebook Group called “Mainers
Concerned About Proficiency Based Learning,” where they shared lobbying
reports, grant details and consulting contracts, and swapped horror stories and
conspiracy theories. The group remains active today, with 1,500 members.
“Have you found a grassroots movement pushing for this?”
Ericka Lee-Winship, a teacher at Portland High School
“We are guinea pigs for a new, experimental method of
teaching and learning that has been designed to benefit content providers
rather than students,” wrote Emily Talmage, a fourth-grade teacher in Lewiston
in a 2015 post detailing spending by Nellie Mae.
That view is shared by policymakers like Rep. Heidi Sampson,
who led the push to overturn the law. In an interview, she said the law was
created to “pad the wallets” of consultants like Great Schools Partnership,
which offers coaching to districts.
Great Schools Partnership, which charges schools and
districts between $24,000 and $84,000 for its services (depending on the number
of coaching days), did see an uptick in contracts after the mandate passed,
from 18 to 25, and a decline back to 18 after the law was repealed, according
to data provide by Ian Bassingthwaighte, a spokesman. It also won a $200,000
contract from the state to create free standards-based tools for schools. But
the law was hardly a bonanza for the nonprofit, and Bassingthwaighte said it’s
not in it for the money.
“We are former teachers, principals and superintendents who
are dedicated to our mission of ensuring high quality learning for each
student,” he said.
(Great Schools has received continued support from Nellie
Mae; the foundation gave it several million dollars to administer the New
England Secondary School Consortium and to run a program aimed at building
“public understanding and demand” for reform across the region, including in
three Maine communities.)
Charlie Toulmin, Nellie Mae’s policy director, insists his
foundation wasn’t the driving force behind the law.
“They were already walking down this path, and they and us
sort of found a match in our interests,” he said.
Staying the course in Portland
Portland’s district leadership has said it plans “to stay
the course with its transition to a proficiency-based diploma,” regardless of
changes in the law.
proficiency based learning
The entrance to Portland’s Deering High School, the most
diverse high school north of Boston. Nearly half the enrollees are students of
color. Kelly Field, for The Hechinger Report
In the city’s two traditional high schools — Deering and
Portland High School — classes look, and sound, much as they did prior to
2012.. The only signs that things have changed are posters that hang in some
classrooms, enumerating the standards and proficiency levels.
Most of the ongoing change is happening behind the scenes,
in departmental meetings where teachers hash out graduation requirements, and
in online gradebooks, where teachers spend hours assigning standards to
assignments, and rating students on levels of proficiency. It’s a ton of data
entry, but none of it has appeared on students’ report cards, which still
include traditional numerical grades.
That frustrates teachers like Ericka Lee-Winship, who would
“much rather spend time planning exciting lessons than sitting at my computer
clicking buttons.”
Lee-Winship, who has taught social studies at Portland High
School for 21 years, thinks the Great Schools Partnership coaches her school
has hired are smart and mean well, but are out of touch with the realities of
the profession.
“They want teachers to think big picture, but every day I’m
expected to manage the details,” she said. “When I go home, I have a huge bag
of homework to grade. I’m not sitting around pondering the big picture
questions.”
She believes the state’s shift to proficiency-based diplomas
was driven “100 percent” by foundations and interest groups.
“Have you found a grassroots movement pushing for this?” she
asked.
Beth Arsenault, who has taught in Portland High School since
1996, has practiced many of the habits of proficiency-based learning for years
— letting students retake tests and keeping her grade book open, for example.
In her alternative education classes for at-risk students, the mantra is
“you’re not passing yet.”
So she’s not philosophically opposed to proficiency-based
education; she just doesn’t like it being imposed on teachers by outsiders.
And, like Lee-Winship, she finds the data entry meaningless.
“Trust me, professionally, that I’m teaching to the
standard,” she said.
With neighboring districts backing away from
proficiency-based diplomas — including those centered in Scarborough and South
Portland — many teachers here hope theirs will be the next to fall.
Ragan Toppan, now 17, is among the students who do, too. She
was pleased in January when Deering took a small step backward, giving teachers
the option of grading using either a 1-4 or 60-100 scale. But the compromise
has the potential to complicate transcripts, and thus the college application
process, for students like her: “We can’t forget that kids are planning for
their futures. This may be a test run for the administration, but these are
real lives, real students.”
“I shoot for A’s on all my work, but a lot of teachers don’t
give you an option to go ‘above and beyond.’ An 85 is not going to cut it for
college.”
Ragan Toppan, a junior at Deering High School
Her mom, Kathryn, remains committed to the 1-4 grading
system. But even she says it would be “premature” to switch to a
proficiency-based diploma before ironing out the kinks around remediation and
grading.
In the meantime, Deering’s teachers have agreed to award up
to a 4 on all assignments that use the 1-4 scale, according to Principal Gregg
Palmer. He said he didn’t think many teachers limited students to 3s before,
but “I can’t say it never happened.”
And what about the Alaska-based group that brought its model
to Maine? DeLorenzo, who created RISC, lost his passion for the business, and
was running a fly-fishing business when he got a call from a Russian friend who
asked him to come create schools there. They’re up to five now. He believes the
“hierarchal, compliance-driven culture” of Russia is more conducive to system
change than the U.S.’s locally controlled one. “I never had the leverage to
flip American schools, to get CEOs behind me. That’s why I’m in Russia,” he
said.
RISC, meantime, was acquired by Marzano Research and is no
longer offering trainings. Marzano, which helped Maine’s pioneers in
proficiency develop their curriculum, is creating a series of proficiency-based
student “academies” with help from RSU 2 superintendent Bill Zima, who is
leaving at the end of the school year to join the company. So far, none of the
academies are in Maine.
Chugach has stuck with its proficiency-based diploma, but
test scores have dropped, from the top quartile of the state to roughly the
middle, according to current superintendent Mike Hanley. Nearly all of the
schools in Alaska that copied its model have since abandoned it. Bob Crumley,
the superintendent who put it in place, thinks they got complacent.
“Over time, it didn’t seem as urgent,” he said. “The initial
adrenalin and drive kind of waned.”
Nellie Mae, meanwhile, is re-thinking its grant-making
strategy, acknowledging that some of its investments in “student-centered
learning” haven’t had as big an impact on low-income students and communities
of color as the foundation had hoped. Going forward, the foundation will “put
much more attention on racial equity” and be more open to grant proposals that
don’t involve student-centered practices, Nellie Mae’s Toulmin said.
In RSU 2, there’s less pushback to proficiency than their
used to be. But some parents and teachers still worry about the lack of
consequences for slacking. Deadlines here are flexible, and students know they
can retake tests if they don’t feel like studying one night.
“There’s no motivation because there’s no deadlines,” said
Jennifer Heidrich, the mother of a Monmouth middle schooler who teaches in
another district. “His attitude is he shouldn’t have to do work outside school.
Coming from a teacher’s kid — you can imagine the fights we get into.”
School leaders acknowledge this challenge, and have begun
requiring students to rate their “habits of work,” each Friday. Teachers review
the scores and can change them if they disagree. If a student’s “habits of
work” are poor, they can lose junior or senior privileges. But there are still
no consequences for underclassmen, and the score doesn’t affect a student’s
grade.
“It doesn’t have teeth,” said Christine Arsenault, a
longtime English teacher and supporter of proficiency-based learning. “That’s
the biggest downfall.”
