NEWPORT, Maine — Algebra was not Kylee Elderkin’s favorite subject at the beginning of the school year.
“I was a little behind,” said Kylee, 14. “I wouldn’t understand.”
The Nokomis Regional High School ninth grader said she used to routinely miss key skills and do poorly on tests. Struggling students like Kylee might not have made it through honors algebra in the past, said teacher Ellen Payne, who has taught high school math for 11 years. Payne said she used to “lose” four or five students a year from honors algebra; they’d have to drop down a level. In lower level classes, some would have to repeat the whole course.
This year Payne doesn’t expect to lose Kylee or anyone else.
That’s due to a new teaching approach here called “proficiency-based education” that was inspired by a 2012 state law.
The law requires that by 2021, students graduating from Maine high schools must show they have mastered specific skills to earn a high school diploma. Maine is the first state to pass such a law, though the idea of valuing skills over credits is increasingly popular around the country. “Maine is the pioneer,” said Chris Sturgis, co-founder of CompetencyWorks, a national organization that advocates for the approach in K-12 schools.
“I definitely would have struggled [in algebra] if I didn’t have to go through the process of re-taking.”
This year’s nearly 13,500 eighth graders will be the first students required to meet the changed requirements, which are being phased in gradually. By 2021, schools must offer diplomas based students reaching proficiency in the four core academic subject areas: English, math, science and social studies. By 2025, four additional subject areas will be included: a second language, the arts, health and physical education.
When such a system works, it’s meant to offer students clarity about what they have to learn and how they are expected to demonstrate they’ve learned it. Students have more flexibility to learn at their own pace and teachers get time to provide extra help for students who need it. Ideally, every diploma in Maine would signify that students had mastered the state’s learning standards.
Part Two: Why Maine’s new high school graduation rules could hurt more than help
But the law grants local districts lots of leeway in determining what students must do to prove their proficiency, which means the value of the new diplomas will still be largely determined by where students live. Logistical hurdles, resistance from teachers fed up with top-down reforms, confusion about exactly what the law requires, and missing information about how districts will be judged on their compliance are among the challenges that come with overhauling the state’s high schools.
Five of the state’s 124 high schools are on target to hand out the new diplomas next spring, according to a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Education, while others have barely started to make the transition.
Erika Stump, a research associate at the Center for Education Policy, Applied Research and Evaluation at the University of Southern Maine, has written seven reports on proficiency-based education in the state. Asked how it’s going so far, Stump replied: “It depends on how you define ‘it’ and how you define ‘going.’”
Since the mid-1990s several New England states have looked to proficiency-based education in an attempt to ensure a more equal education for all students. In fact, several Maine districts, including Gray-New Gloucester, were already working toward a proficiency-based model at the time the diploma law was passed.
Starting in 2011, several key groups and people in Maine worked to put the state ahead of the pack in terms of legal requirements for proficiency. Educate Maine, a local nonprofit with several business and technology leaders on its board of directors, spoke out early in favor of the diploma law. Former state education commissioner Stephen Bowen was a cheerleader for the idea during his tenure at the Maine Department of Education from 2011 to 2013.
“Maine has really had a struggle making the transition from a natural resource-based economy to whatever this new economy is,” said Bowen, who now directs innovation initiatives for the Council of Chief State School Officers, a national association for state superintendents. “There was a sense that we needed to swing for the fences to make the economic transition the state needs to make.”
“In terms of the proficiency-based diploma, Maine is the pioneer.”
Bowen said that test scores had been flat and educators told him they felt they had squeezed all the success there was to squeeze out of the current system. “It wasn’t for lack of trying,” Bowen said. “It was a systems design problem.”
Initially, there was little pushback, said Lois Kilby-Chesley, president of the Maine Education Association, the state’s teachers’ union. “The way it was presented was that it was going to meet the needs of every student, and that sounds like what all of us want,” Kilby-Chesley said.
As the rollout of the new system has proved challenging and confusing for many school districts, though, the union’s position has grown more cautious. Kilby-Chesley now worries that low-performing and special education students could be hurt.
The proficiency-based idea has also created headaches at some schools for teachers trying to monitor students’ individual progress. Many teachers are skeptical of yet another in what seems like a series of endless “reforms” from the state government. Teachers report that some parents worry that switching to a new grading system with numbers instead of letters, which is an option for schools but not a requirement of the law, could affect college admissions. And the consequences for not meeting the terms of the law, including the way districts will be judged, have not yet been published by the Maine Department of Education.
Part Three: The future of proficiency-based education
At this point, Kilby-Chesley said that the union would support legislation to repeal the current proficiency-based diploma law.
“We do want all kids to be proficient, obviously,” she said. “But when you say, ‘Here’s the bar, and you’re never going to be able to jump over it,’ why would [students] bother to keep trying?”
But at schools that have embraced the new system, teachers say they are finding that struggling students are seeing the biggest gains because teachers are given more time to re-teach skills and students better understand the parameters for earning a diploma.
“I think it’s going to raise our graduation rate,” said Nokomis Principal Mary Nadeau. “It’s going to free us from backtracking. We can just cut to the chase and say, ‘Can you do this?’”
If a student can write a great essay by the end of 10th grade, she pointed out, why should it matter that he or she struggled to write essays for most of freshman year? Once the student can show proficiency in essay writing, his or her grade on that skill in a previous course can cease to be a concern.
“Part of this change has been about equity,” Nadeau said. Deciding to believe that all students are capable of learning all of the standards, she said, “was scary.”
In the classrooms at Nokomis, tests are now broken down into specific sets of skills so teachers can identify how well students understand each task. When students get less than a proficient score, they must go back and study the skill they missed. They are then given a chance to retake the relevant portions of the test until they earn a satisfactory score.
Kylee said that process is why she now loves algebra and is on track with the rest of her class. “I definitely would have struggled if I didn’t have to go through the process of retaking,” Kylee said. “It ties to what we’re doing now, so if I didn’t know it, I wouldn’t be getting the grades I get.”
It has always been true that algebra students need to master variables in order to move on to factoring, for example, but ninth graders weren’t always so adept at understanding that, Kylee’s teachers said.
A similar realization has motivated students who don’t master all the skills in a given course by the end of the school year, Payne said. In part, that’s because they now get to keep the credit for the skills they have learned.
“While we will still have students having to repeat Algebra I—or any other class—they will at least not have wasted their year,” Payne said. “They will have fewer [skills] that they have to meet the next year which takes a little pressure off them.”
“If your intent is to raise student achievement, a large-scale, vaguely defined proficiency-based diploma law is not going to do that.”
If one of Payne’s algebra students gets through just half of the skills one year, he will be signed up for the course again the following year. The difference now is that he will be able to start where he left off. He might work independently from the rest of the class, with Payne providing guidance, until he masters all the necessary skills.
The shift in thinking about how students learn best has inspired other changes at Nokomis too. A new algebra class for students who struggle the most with that subject meets daily instead of every other day to provide the needed extra time. English students can prove their understanding of concepts in more than one way, such as illustrating a poem to demonstrate a grasp of figurative language. Multiple-choice questions have virtually disappeared. Homework is checked, but not graded.
“We really thought if we didn’t grade it, they wouldn’t do it,” Payne said of the homework she and her colleagues assign. She said that fear proved unfounded.
Teachers and administrators here said they prioritized their students and families over fitting any preconceived idea of what proficiency-based education should look like. For example, they use the 1-to-4 grading scale in class to help students better understand how close they are to hitting their proficiency targets. For report cards, they convert those scores into letter grades to make it simple for parents, colleges and other post-secondary institutions to understand.
But despite its popularity with both teachers and students at Nokomis, this potential revolution in Maine’s high school experience is far from a successful finish.
On the plus side, even critics have been mostly unconcerned about costs beyond what it will take to pay educators for their extra training and planning time during the transition. To cover those costs, districts are receiving 1/9 of 1 percent of their annual state education allocation on top of their regular amount during the years of the phase-in. That could range from a few thousand dollars for smaller districts to more than $10,000 for larger districts, Stump said.
Private funding causes some to worry about outside influence. In New England, the primary private funder has been the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, which has donated to multiple projects, including Educate Maine and Great Schools Partnership, seeking to evaluate proficiency-based education and make it a reality in schools. (Nellie Mae is also one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report, the nonprofit education news publication that produced this report.)
And the practical questions for schools can seem endless: How do coaches determine athletic eligibility if every student learns different things at different times? When are teachers supposed to find time to let students re-take tests? And what about students who, due to their special education status, will never reach a universal standard for “proficient”?
With districts across Maine answering those questions in different ways, the new law might not result in academic improvement across the board, Stump said. “If your intent is to raise student achievement, a large-scale, vaguely defined proficiency-based diploma law is not going to do that,” she said.
Some schools are making unpopular changes that aren’t required by the law, she said. Other schools are changing the language they use to describe what they are doing without changing their practice. And still other schools have made changes only to have them reversed when leadership or other circumstances change. None of these processes have endeared teachers or students to the new rules.
Moreover, in Maine, it’s up to each district to decide what “proficient” means. So while everyone agrees that high school graduates should be able to read, Stump said, that’s not a sufficient answer to what constitutes proficient reading.
“I think it’s going to raise our graduation rate. It’s going to free us from backtracking. We can just cut to the chase and say, ‘Can you do this?’”
“How much should you be able to read?” Stump asked. “Should you be able to read Shakespeare or should you be literate?”
Some teachers worry that requiring all students to be proficient at everything is both unrealistic and unfair. Not every academic skill is essential to every person, argued Linda Morehouse, a longtime English teacher at Gray-New Gloucester High School. “They can still be contributing members of society even if they’re not that great at grammar,” Morehouse said. “That shouldn’t hold them back from a ticket to a successful career, which is our diploma.”
Ideally, the additional time and support students are supposed to receive would address concerns like Morehouse’s, said Diana Doiron of the Maine Department of Education, who visits schools across the state to help put the new system in place.
“We inherited a structure for schooling that was based on time and on philosophical beliefs that learning would be distributed across a bell curve,” Doiron said. To dispense with that structure and allow all students the time they need to complete their work, she said, “is really getting at the heart of what education is supposed to be.”
Related: Has New Hampshire found the secret to online education that works?
Such a shift would move schools away from what educators sometimes refer to as the “industrial model” of education that held sway in the 19th and 20th centuries to a model geared towards the more flexible work environments of the 21st century, proponents argue.
It’s also potentially more motivating to students, said David Ruff, a former Maine teacher and the executive director of Great Schools Partnership, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on bringing proficiency-based learning strategies into New England schools. It’s the difference, he said, between telling a kid, “‘You’ve got to spend the morning with me raking leaves,’ or ‘You’ve got to rake the backyard and when it’s done you can run,’” he said. In the second case, “the backyard gets done pretty quick.”
Back at Nokomis, where roughly half of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a few students dressed in colonial garb hurried back to class for a presentation on the Revolutionary War. Camouflage flannel shirts and hoodies were the fashion statement of choice for most of the rest of the 613 students in this rural high school.
Spurred both by the new law and by concerns that academics at Nokomis lacked “cohesion,” Principal Nadeau tapped her subject-area department heads to “get crystal clear about what we want students to know and be able to do and then how to measure it.”
Related: Blue-collar town leads Rhode Island’s tech assisted learning revolution
Some teachers were initially resistant, Nadeau said, but all of the academic departments met both on their own and with administrators to develop their lists of what students in their subject area needed to know. Teachers also received additional transition help from Ruff’s Great Schools Partnership thanks to a federal grant Nadeau won for the school. Now, most say they approve of the changes.
8 — subject areas all Maine high school graduates must be “proficient” in to earn a diploma beginning in 2021.
Nokomis High School’s graduation rate is on par with the state average, but it’s located in an economically depressed, rural area of the state with lower teacher salaries, so proponents see their success as a particularly encouraging sign.
“If Nokomis can do it, anybody can do it,” said Ruff, of the Great Schools Partnership.
Nokomis does boast the advantage of having a strong and trusted leader in Nadeau, a factor Stump called critical to successfully encouraging teachers to question their current practice and embrace massive changes.
English department head Elizabeth Vigue was quick to point to the biggest change her team had to make: giving up nearly every novel on their syllabus.
“Having to acknowledge you didn’t know what skills that novel was good for was painful,” Vigue said. But she’s decided that giving up classics like Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations has been worth it to watch her students better grasp concepts she knows will allow them to tackle any novel they want in the future.
“I think this takes courage,” Vigue said of making such big changes. “One thing you need to believe to work here is that every child can learn.”
The next story in this short series exploring Maine’s new graduation requirements will look at a school that has struggled to comply with the new law. The final story will examine a school that’s found a different proficiency solution, one that may offer a clue to the system’s future.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about high school reform.
I expect that many people reading this article will be pleased to see that the state of Maine has decided to tackle the ever increasing failure rate of students attending public schools. On the face it appears as though skills attainment will become the new benchmark for moving students ahead in the system and ultimately graduating them. Unfortunately though, Maine has missed the point and that is that rehashing and renaming what has always been done in the past, is not likely to amount to any substantive changes. That Maine decided that students need to attain skills in math, science, social studies and English should be an indication that nothing has really changed. What the authors of this directive have failed to understand is that today’s students and more importantly today’s workplace have needs and standards of their own. If educators are truly invested in 21st century learning objectives than they should also be cognizant of 21st century essential skills and the training required to meet them. Thirty years ago there was a need for graduates with good math, English, science and social studies skills. Very few careers require those strengths today. Understand that those areas of study are still needed but ask yourself when was the last time you wrote a research paper, calculated a cube root, mapped a genome or interpreted the 14th amendment? In truth, very few of us use or need knowledge or skill in those areas past what should be attained by about the 5th grade and yet we continue to hold those subjects as “core” requirements all throughout the public educational experience because public schools are also indentured servants of the four year colleges and the college accreditation system that funnels federal and state funds into schools that meet the requirements. In reality, most high schools place around 30% of their graduates in a four year college. Unfortunately, there is no definitive tracking of students after they enroll but some estimates are that about half of those 1st year students drop out after the first semester. In essence, that leaves public high schools with about 70% of their graduates either going to a two year community college or right into the workplace, and yet schools cater heavily and build their instruction and assessments around the 30%
A valid argument can be made that schools are dealing with children who are too young and inexperienced to know or understand what is and is not important for their education and therefore schools should offer a great variety of subjects that ostensibly give the student a rounded education. I can see that point. However, those subjects have not materially changed in over a century. The content and in some cases the course name may have, but essentially science is still science and math is still math no matter what you call it or what new scheme you come up with to teach it. Wouldn’t our students be better served if they spent the first years, kindergarten through fifth grade, learning how to learn? By that I mean learning how to research, organize, prioritize, and self-motivate so that regardless of their interests later in life, they have the background skills to achieve their goals.
I believe that those core classes should be eliminated from the high school curriculum and instead, be moved down to the middle school where students should be required to have a solid foundation in them before moving on to high school. At the high school level, all courses should become electives with major emphasis on workplace skills attainment. High schools should still offer standard level, AP and honors classes but they should not be a requirement for graduation. Students should be encouraged to take responsibility for their high school education and decide for themselves which courses are best suited to their strengths and future goals. I will even go so far as to say that I believe students should be able to decide when they want to graduate and that the credits for graduation is archaic and in most cases a highly flawed determination of the students true abilities. The value of a diploma lies squarely on the student that achieved it, not the institution that delivered it. For most students, their diploma will end up in a book shelf or a box stuffed in the back of a closet. The only time it has any value at all is if an employer wants to take a look at it which increasingly, they do not. In fact, the only place that a high school diploma has any real useful value is if the student is applying to a four year college and even then, their SAT scores and GPA along with their financial ability to pay also factor in.
Today’s students do not study or learn the way we did. In fact, they don’t study and learn the way they did a decade ago and that’s because of technology. While my generation is still enamored with the bells and whistles, we also have an inherent distrust for its reliability. We are convinced that the internet could go down, be hacked, succumb to an EMP blast and a host of other gremlins that we are convinced exist out there in the ether. Students on the other hand don’t give those things a moment’s thought. If the internet goes down, they know it will come back shortly. They navigate the digital world with ease because they were brought up in it. While we struggle with technology, they just go right ahead and use it. Within their lifetime, technology will only continue to insinuate itself into their daily lives. They will come to rely on it in the same way that our generation relies on the automobile and television. Automation and robotics are taking over the workplace. Millions of jobs have been displaced by automation, not outsourcing. Volkswagen is laying off some 35,000 workers. Not because the company is failing, because robots work faster, longer and for a whole lot less money. All of the major fast food restaurants are moving toward automated service. Hundreds of retail outlets are closing due to internet sales and automated warehouses. Self-driving cars will displace millions or factory and administrative workers and likely close down such institutions as the department of motor vehicles and insurance companies. There is virtually no area of the workplace or marketplace that is not moving more and more toward total automation and workers will need to find another way to make a living or become a burden on society. The future is in designing, programming, installing and servicing robots and automation. Are we really preparing our students for the future or are we selling the same old goods with a shiny new package?
I fear that the institution has become myopic. We seem more concerned with retaining our jobs and continuing to do what we know how to do than we are with helping todays learners to shape their futures. We pretend to embrace change but when it’s time to actually implement it, we fall back on the same tired old paradigms and methods and increasingly our students are not buying into any of it. The referenced article is a good example of the narrow minded approach to education. They are still talking about essentially teaching the same subjects they have always taught with the only substantive change being that they now give students more time and endless opportunities to assess and reassess until they meet the standard. The problem is that the standard is likely twenty years old and probably no longer relevant in today’s workplace.