Newton Public Schools (NPS) Superintendent Anna Nolin presented a memo regarding the discrepancies within district-wide regulation at the NPS committee meeting on Monday.
Nolin began by addressing multi-level classes at the high school level, which were introduced in 2021 and have received significant backlash.
A multi-level class combines students of different learning levels into the same classroom with the goal of creating a more equitable learning environment.
Both Newton North and South high schools offer college preparatory courses, advanced college preparatory courses, honors courses, and advanced placement courses.
Nolin is currently working with Gina Flanagan, assistant superintendent for teaching and learning, and Gene Roundtree, assistant superintendent of secondary education, to develop the organization of these classes.
“We have actually worked extensively with the high school curriculum council,” Nolin said. “Our first move is to work with those educators to define what rigor levels actually mean.”
In addition to organizing listening sessions at both Newton North and South, Nolin and her colleagues are running a K-12 math curriculum review for the first time in 25 years.
“The purpose of this is mapping the actual standards by grade level and by level of courses,” Nolin said. “So what distinguishes what is covered in an honors class versus an advanced class versus a college prep class, which there is not agreement about what that means.”
Presently, students are placed into class levels based on their grades and teachers’ recommendations. As a result, different departments have their own expectations for student placement, explained Nolin.
“Given the lack of district-wide training, consistent central office leadership, vision related to curriculum assessment, and lack of curricular resources available to the average Newton teacher, they are running themselves ragged simply trying to meet the needs of all students, whether they are in single-level classes or multi-level ones,” Nolin said.
According to Nolin, there is a lack of standardization beyond the organization of students in multi-level classrooms, and a large concern has been the regulation of NPS’ new Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS).
According to Nolin, NPS adopted MTSS to offer specialized support to struggling students through tiered learning and data-driven decision-making.
“Tiered instruction is a way of organizing school supports, but also guides how we communicate as grade-level teams, utilize student data, and center student belonging and connectedness alongside our academic data points,” reads the NPS website.
Nolin explained that the system works to meet students where they are and promote their advancement through the offered support levels.
“The idea is to push the supports in, not lower the rigor of the courses,” Nolin said. “We need defined levels and common assessments to ensure that we do not do that, that we have not called a course advanced that is no longer advanced.”
Ryan Normandin, a math and physics teacher at Newton South, expressed his disappointment in Nolin’s memo.
“The memo claims nobody has agreement on what levels mean, and nobody has common standards with which to make recommendations,” Normandin said. “In fact, we’ve recommended students successfully for decades, whether those placements were made in the tracked model or the multi-level model.”
Nolin plans to visit the neighboring Lexington Public School District to observe a different approach to higher-level courses.
“Our focus here is to build a strong, reliable future system where students receive the challenge level they want—and are ready for—in a systematic way so they can build their own goals and learning agency,” Nolin said.
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