Chips observes the differences between Blair's honors and on-level classes
It's fifteen minutes into sixth period, and one head is already down. Senior Shane Senior rests his head on the wooden desk of his on-level English class as his teacher, Maureen Diodati, struggles to keep the class focused.
His eyes follow Diodati as she weaves her way around the room, gently hushing students. Some have broken out into loud side conversations, while others wait patiently for the class to resume its discussion on the article she has presented.
Two minutes pass. Two more heads hit the desk.
Regardless, the teacher perseveres, calling on senior Jonathan Brown to finish reading aloud before telling the students to pull out their journals for a one-page reflection. Senior lifts his head from his desk long enough to complain. "I don't know that many curse words," he quips.
Diodati's efforts to engage the class mean little to the students, who talk when they want to, not bothering to raise their hands. The class continues, with almost all instruction drowned out by complaints and disruptions.
The level of focus in the classroom is the most apparent difference between on-level and honors classes. Though educators and analysts debate the role tracking has played in the racial achievement gap, at Blair, separating the two levels from one another has more to do with attitude and motivation than any form of institutionalized segregation.
Setting the pace
The Global Screening Process, a test administered to second-graders in Montgomery County, places a student into one of two tracks. The roughly 35 percent of students who are designated "gifted and talented" (GT) by the test are put into an advanced track, while the other students are designated as "on-level." Students usually follow this track through high school, and the designations are difficult to change. Almost a decade later, most GT students are enrolled in honors classes, while the majority of students designated on-level take mostly on-level courses.
The curriculum for English classes is the same for both tracks — one set of guidelines that all classes must meet. Teachers then modify the curriculum according to the level of their class.
According to Evie Frankl, co-chair of the Montgomery County Education Forum, an organization that seeks to end tracking in MCPS, one of the problems of tracking is that it limits students by giving them lower expectations and a watered-down curriculum. "Tracking limits their options," she says. "It's basically saying that somebody is unable to do something."
But according to English teacher Michelle Edwards, teachers adjust the curriculum mostly by giving more time to on-level classes. "There's more reading, more writing assignments, more independent text [in honors classes]," she says. "On-level takes longer to get started than higher-level classes do."
For students put in the wrong class, this can be very frustrating. Because he enrolled in Blair over a month into the school year, senior Wilber Zabala missed his chance to take Honors English and, as a result, sits quietly in the back of Diodati's sixth period class, trying to absorb what he can from what he feels is too easy of a class. "I'm pretty frustrated," he says. "Here, I feel like I'm losing time and getting nothing from it."
He knows there's a disparity between honors and on-level courses. He remembers reading Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in ninth grade Honors English and finishing the book in three weeks, whereas a friend taking on-level English finished the book in two months. "I was a little surprised," he says. "I thought to myself, if we're reading the same thing, why did it take you so long?"
Color lines
Though tracking's opponents maintain that level designations widen the achievement gap between white and Asian students and their black and Latino counterparts, Lee says that though there may be a few more white and Asian students in her honors classes, the number of minorities and the majority are representative of Blair as a whole.
But Zabala argues that the classes he's taken in the past show a clear demographic difference between honors and on-level. For the past three years in his Honors English class, he's counted the number of Latino, black, white and Asian students, and every year, he's disappointed. "In honors, there are less than two Latinos," he says. "Usually about four to five black, five to six Asian. The rest are white."
He believes that the reason for this disparity is because of the perception that taking honors classes is a 'white' thing to do. Last year in his English class, a student asked him why he "pretended to be a white kid," simply for using big words. Zabala says that many of his friends have avoided taking honors because they are afraid they won't fit in or belong.
But in Edwards's honors ninth grade English class, the class is primarily black and Latino with a few Asian and white students. Here, the classroom environment isn't perfect. One student comes in late without a pass and one head rests on a desk. But as these students watch an HBO special based on their book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, they quietly take notes on the scenes illuminated before them without the need for an extra push by their teacher.
Turning it in
Edwards says that much of the work assigned to on-level courses deals with skill building and technique, which requires repetition and reinforcement in the classroom. Therefore, much of the reading and writing takes place in class, meaning less homework for on-level classes.
Edwards says that honors students also tend to turn in their homework more often than on-level students. "[On-level students] don't do the work you want them to do," she says. "It's not that they're not as bright, it's that they don't prioritize the work."
Brown feels that for many students taking on-level courses, excelling in their class is not their goal — it's more important to just pass. "They're going to do enough to get by," says Brown. "They don't push themselves to be the best."
Child left behind
Social studies teacher Stephanie Lee believes that on-level students are generally less motivated because they feel as though less is expected from them. "Regular students have kind of been left behind," she says. "They assume that they're in a lower position."
She recalls hearing her students tell a kid that he should be placed in honors when he answered a question correctly. This attitude makes it harder on Lee and other teachers, who put extra effort in motivating their students. As a last resort, she tells her students that if they don't pass her class the first time, they'll have to pay to take it again. "Sadly, money is a big motivation," she says.
A for attitude
English and drama teacher Kelly O'Connor also believes there is a critical difference in attitude between the two levels. For her honors classes, she finds that students are more willing to share their opinions in class discussion and are able to handle a larger workload. "Attitudes are often more positive in an honors class. Students show more intellectual curiosity," she says. She says that this doesn't mean that on-level students aren't curious or eager to learn, but that honors students are more likely to openly show an interest in learning.
Brown attributes the attitude towards on-level classes to the mentality that they don't require much work to pass. "Students don't take regular classes seriously because it's supposed to be easy," he says. "Regular is just regular, so I'm going to do regular."
Lee agrees — she says some students in her on-level social studies class were shocked when she told them they were required to complete certain long-term projects. "I've heard comments like 'I can't believe were doing this, it's supposed to be regular,'" she says.
But even when put in a less than challenging class, Zabala maintains that he will strive to excel. "My motivation is to do better than anyone," says Zabala. "And for more honors kids than on-level kids, they want to be the best too. But in my English class now, I'm thinking, what the hell am I doing here?"