May/June 2003

Teacher Research

By Joan Kernan Cone, English teacher, El Cerrito (Calif.) High School

The Harvard Education Letter's teacher research column profiles classroom or school-based research performed by practitioners to improve educational practice.

The Context

El Cerrito High School draws its population of about 1,450 students from a wide and economically diverse geographic area. Feeder schools include elementary schools with the highest achievement test scores in the district and schools with very low scores. The student body is racially diverse: 40 percent African American, 25 percent White, 18 percent Asian American, 13 percent Latino, 1 percent Pacific Islander, and 1 percent multi-ethnic.

The school is the site of a teacher-initiated detracking reform effort that began more than a decade ago. This initiative originally consisted of detracking all 9th-grade college prep English classes, opening up AP English classes to all seniors who were willing to do summer reading and writing, and allowing 10th, 11th, and 12th graders to choose their own classes. As our detracking reform has evolved, we have reexamined it and made adjustments. Once we saw, for example, that, after 9th grade, students retracked themselves into the tracks they had been accustomed to in middle school, we eliminated the self-selection option for 10th graders and moved to detracked, carefully balanced sophomore English classes. We also discussed the possibility of eliminating the honors English 3 class, but given parental opposition and the realities of competitive college admissions, we opted instead to recruit a wider diversity of students (especially African Americans and Latinos) for the class. Most recently, we voted to eliminate the generic college prep English 4 class and to offer in its place three electives: contemporary American literature, essay writing, and journalism.

The focus of this study is the heterogeneous English 4/essay writing class I taught in the 2001-02 school year. Of the 29 students in the class, 16 were female and 13 male, including 11 African Americans, nine Whites, six Latinos, two Persians, and one Southeast Asian. The highest (weighted) GPA in the class was 3.9; the lowest was 1.2.

As excited as I was the first week of school about my students and the class, by the fourth week I saw the class as "difficult." Many students seemed determined to do the least amount of work for the highest possible grade (even when that grade was a D). They resisted unfamiliar tasks, did little or no homework, ignored due dates and deadlines, and cut class. I also was confronted daily with an achievement gap: some of the students (all white and middle class) clearly had arrived with a strong set of reading and writing skills, while others had not.

Research Questions

1. Given the English department's longstanding commitment to detracked classes, why were some 12th-grade students still so ill prepared for serious reading and writing tasks? Why did they have such poorly developed identities as school learners?

2. What school-based factors went into the construction of students' low achievement, and what role did teachers, the school as an institution, and students themselves play in that construction?

Methods

I collected a variety of student writing, including essays, personal narratives, and reflections on their schoolwork and daily lives. I also collected transcripts, attendance records, and class-rank listings. I conducted taped interviews with three students and used my lesson plans as a quasi-journal, in which I wrote comments to myself about the day-to-day workings of the class. For purposes of comparison, I also collected data (grades, attendance records, and written work) on students from three AP English classes.

I chose to limit this study to factors that are part of students' school lives. I do not discount the importance of factors outside of school and the ways my students' lives are affected by poverty, violence, isolation, and inadequate access to mental and physical health care. But I was especially interested in what happens within school walls that affects academic success or failure.

Findings

1. Through qualitatively different curricula, instruction, and behavioral and academic expectations (starting most significantly in 9th-grade science and math classes), the school and individual teachers had contributed to the construction of students' school identities-some as high achievers and some as low achievers. Admittedly, the construction of low achievement did not begin when the students entered 9th grade; many of them had come to high school with low-achiever identities that were already well developed. Once students were at our school, however, most programming and curricular decisions that they made or that were made for them were based on that negative identity, and almost everything worked to reinforce it.

As 9th graders, for example, my students had been programmed into their first math class based on courses they had taken in middle school, their success in those courses, and the decisions of their high school counselors. Students who had successfully completed algebra as 8th graders were programmed into geometry; those who had done well in pre-algebra were programmed into Algebra 1; those who had not done well in pre-algebra or who had taken a general math class in 8th grade were programmed into Algebra A. In their reflections on their initial math classes, students painted starkly different portraits. Students who had been in Algebra A talked of teachers who had little control of their classes and who did not explain math concepts well, of numerous students who had to repeat the class, and of themselves as poor or failing students who hated math. Students who had taken geometry classes as 9th graders talked of doing nightly homework and having that homework checked, of being expected to come for help at lunch or after school if they did not understand concepts, and of "aceing" tests. Placement in initial math classes also set in motion choices of subsequent courses through the rest of high school.

2. By habitually cutting classes, acting inappropriately, and/or doing little or no classwork and homework, low achievers, together with their schools and teachers, worked to construct a negative identity for themselves that became ever more consistent. They lost their ability to view themselves as achievers. The classes they were taking as seniors reflected both their success and failure as students and, to some degree, the perceptions they had of themselves as learners. Some were finishing their high school years taking AP Chemistry, AP Biology, and calculus; others were struggling to meet minimal graduation requirements. Some were in elective classes that required little or no homework or were earning credits as teacher aides. The most extreme example of this was Allie, for whom three of her six "classes" were periods she spent working as an aide for a PE teacher.

3. A particularly insidious aspect of students' participation in the co-construction of themselves as low achievers is the effect that the process has on some teachers: It sets up a recursive dynamic in which the student and the teacher constantly reinforce each other's negative behaviors in the classroom. During the first term, I saw this dynamic play out frequently in my relationship with students, as evidenced in my daily journal. When students consistently came late to class, I stopped expecting them to come on time. When they didn't bring in books or drafts of their papers, I wasn't surprised or, after a while, even disappointed. They were doing what I had come to expect.

4. Students who were able to shed the negative school label assigned to them as 9th graders and enroll in honors and AP classes did so because of their regular contact with higher-achieving students. Julio, a student in the AP English class I had taught in the fall, illustrates this point. As a 9th grader, Julio was programmed into Algebra A, a class he remembers as chaotic, undemanding, and "filled with minorities-African Americans and Mexicans." But Julio was also in symphonic and jazz band with students taking geometry and honors biology. "That's what started me focusing on trying to get into higher classes because people around me were taking those classes," he recalls. In 10th and 11th grade, he doubled up on math classes and took calculus as a senior.

How the research has affected practice

In my second year teaching English 4/essay writing, I was determined not to bring into class the assumptions that had affected the previous year's class. I worked hard to create lessons that engaged and challenged all students but did not overwhelm them. Instead of focusing almost exclusively on expository and persuasive writing in the first term, I incorporated several autobiographical essays and short pieces into my writing curriculum. In addition to distributing style sheets after each major writing assignment, I taught short, lively lessons on grammar and mechanics. I also allowed students to choose half of the books they read, which they discussed in small literature circles. And when students did little or no homework, cut class, or came late, I was clear with them and with myself that I was not constructing the failure that resulted from their actions-they were-and that I still expected them to do rigorous academic work.

Also, during the spring session of the current school year, I turned my end-of-the-day conference hour into a tutorial for 9th graders with Ds or Fs in my class. To inspire other teachers to implement this kind of tutorial, I have met with the principal to urge him to create a master program next year that does not include any 9th-grade classes during the last block of the day.

Implications for educators

First, this study suggests that in offering students a choice of classes, high school academic departments may in fact only be offering students a choice of track. All departments and schools need to ask whether they have one set of classes for students they see as college bound and another for those they view differently. As the strongest advocates of detracking at El Cerrito High have discovered, choice as a method of detracking has not resulted in the kind of movement we had hoped for: Honors and AP classes still do not reflect the racial and socio economic diversity found in the school.

Second, as important as it is for teachers and administrators to look at specific institutional policies and practices that play a role in constructing low achievement, it is equally important to look at our beliefs about students. Teachers and administrators need to examine how beliefs about intelligence inform institutional decisions that set up success for some students and failure for others. This examination might also expose some of the issues of power that exist in schools and are reflected in programming decisions, as well as the salience of race and class in those decisions.

How does a school begin to confront the construction of low achievement? A line from Toni Morrison's Jazz offers a suggestion: "This city is good at this . . . disguising coded messages as public signs." I suggest that schools read the coded messages in their public lists. What messages are hidden in the rosters posted on school and classroom bulletin boards, published in school and local newspapers, or tacked on the teachers' workroom door? If teachers and administrators-with our insiders' knowledge-read critically, we will come to see that school lists reveal a good deal about school culture: about who has power and who does not, who is valued and who is not, who is perceived as a learner and who is not. If we read the lists thoroughly and thoughtfully, we also will see-if we allow ourselves to-how complicit we are in assigning names to the lists. What we do with this knowledge is inextricably bound to the construction of success and failure for our students.