Noe Middle School works to balance gifted & regular programs

(Vol. 2, No. 2 - Summer/Fall 1998)

"We Don't Put Kids in Boxes Here"

Noe Middle School enjoys a reputation as a school that works to identify and nurture every student's special talents. As demand grows for slots in its gifted-and-talented magnet, Noe's educators face extra challenges.

by Holly Holland

The Jefferson County Board of Education's decision to place a gifted and talented magnet at Noe Middle School four years ago could have caused a fundamental shift in the school's longstanding philosophy of teaching.

When Noe opened in 1974, it was the first in Louisville to embrace the fledgling national middle school movement. Noe's classrooms were built without walls to complement the school's unstructured approach to learning and to encourage collaboration among teachers and professors from nearby University of Louisville.

So, if Noe had followed the lead of most schools and separated academically advanced students from their peers for most of the day, it would have meant abandoning a belief that all adolescents have special talents and can learn from each other.

True to form, however, Noe forged its own path. The school created special accelerated classes in math, science, and English to accommodate the gifted students, but opened the courses to anyone who demonstrated either high ability or strong interest in a subject. Noe also expanded its offerings in the visual and performing arts to give students different pathways to success in school. The result is that nearly every class at Noe includes students with a range of skills.

"We don't put kids in boxes here," says Noe's principal Ron Crutcher.

In a school district with an entrenched system of tracking students primarily by their standardized test scores, Noe continues to prove an exception. Although not perfect, its practice of providing diverse learning experiences could be a model for schools seeking to break down the barriers that tend to segregate students by race and family income.

"I think this district has made it almost impossible not to track kids," laments Chrissy Jones, a state Distinguished Educator and former principal from Shelby County who worked with Noe to boost its declining state test scores. "But I think they've done more than most schools have. For the most part, their hearts are in the right place."

Students are encouraged to move in and out of programs at Noe. For example, when English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher Mike Mullins discovered that one of his Bosnian students had a flair for drawing, he made sure the boy took an art course despite overcrowded classes and his limited language skills. The student proved to be a sophisticated sculptor with the ability to create remarkable art forms from cardboard.

Gary Brown, Noe's full-time ESL coordinator, acts as a liaison between the ESL staff and the regular teaching teams. He said he tries to move immigrant students out of the self-contained ESL classes and into regular courses as soon as they understand enough English. Math is the easiest course for ESL students to navigate because language proficiency is not as essential as it is in other subjects and many students already have learned advanced math concepts in their native countries.

"My whole purpose is to get them involved in the rest of the school," Brown said.

Noe's trademark is diversity

Noe's diversity is one of the reasons the school has been so successful in collapsing the barriers created by program admissions and labels. The school offers every major academic program available locally, including gifted and talented, Advance, comprehensive, and special education. In addition, Noe has one of the largest ESL programs in the state with about 120 students speaking 11 different native languages. The school enrolls more than 1,250 students, about 57 percent of them from poor families, a figure slightly higher than the district average. Noe's student population is 32 percent black -- again, just above the district average. The school's attendance zone includes the Algonquin, Churchill Downs, Edgewood, and University of Louisville neighborhoods.

But where Noe deviates most from the district average is in the percentage of African-American students enrolled in accelerated classes -- 18 percent versus 10 percent for the school system as a whole. Only Newburg Middle School was able to match that figure last school year. Stuart Middle School is at the other end of the spectrum; just three percent of the Advance Program students enrolled there are black.

Part of the reason Noe exceeded the district average is that it operated the Advance Program center for students who normally would go to Bruce, Meyzeek, Farnsley, Southern, and Western middle schools. This school year, however, Noe will draw Advance Program students only from Meyzeek, Southern, and Western.

In Jefferson County, students qualify for the Advance Program based on a formula that gives credit to grade-point averages, teacher recommendations, documentation of "exceptional characteristics," and scores on a national norm-referenced test. In general, students must score in the 78th percentile or higher on the Cognitive Abilities Test (an abbreviated IQ measurement) to gain admission to the Advance Program and score in the 97th percentile or higher to be accepted into the gifted program. Although many local schools have Advance Program classes, only Noe and King Elementary School have designated gifted programs.

At Noe, teachers try to build on children's individual strengths, regardless of their program qualifications, Crutcher says. Teachers routinely encourage students with average test scores but good work habits to reach higher. And they recognize that while every student has certain talents, even the brightest adolescents do not excel in every subject. Most students in the gifted program, for example, choose to enroll in only one or two of the special accelerated classes, which operate like workshops to allow time for extensive independent study.

Seventh-grade language arts teacher Kim Wermuth said she knew of only two students on her team last year who took the maximum number of workshop classes offered.

"It's not the real world that you spend all day with gifted people," she explained, adding that teachers tend to forget who's enrolled in each program after the first weeks of school. "None of us keeps track of it. That's just not important to us."

Wermuth said she uses the workshop method with all classes. Some students move at a faster pace than others, she said, but they all cover the same material. Students also can choose different ways to demonstrate their knowledge. For example, during a unit on the Elizabethan period last spring, Wermuth told her students that each would have to explain passages, quotations, and plots from selected Shakespearean plays; rewrite a play in the vernacular of another time period; create a vocabulary list from their readings; and evaluate a Web site about the English playwright. But in addition, they could choose to complete one or more projects, including building a miniature Elizabethan museum, cooking a feast of foods served during the period, and creating a multimedia presentation about significant cultural events.

"I tried to hit all the different learning styles," Wermuth explained to her students. "You tell me, did I leave something out?"

Middle school should be a time to help adolescents find their special talents, not exaggerate achievement gaps, said art teacher Doug DeWeese. "When I see a kid who can't draw well, I say, 'Well, maybe he's a sculptor.' If he can't sculpt, I'll say, 'Well, maybe he's a painter.' It's all very exploratory. I think that way every single day." (DeWeese left Noe for Ballard High School this fall, but assistant principal Kathy Sayre says "we've found another good one.")

Picky parents chose Noe

Each of Noe's 10 teaching teams sets its own class schedule and maintains a different personality and focus. Some parents and teachers prefer more structured instruction, for example, so Noe has teams that provide it. But for the most part, the school emphasizes creative learning.

That was one of the things that appealed to Kay and James Grubola when they were searching for a middle school for their daughter, Morgan, three years ago. Armed with a detailed questionnaire they prepared with a group of friends, the Grubolas visited many public and private schools. Noe was one of the only public schools where the administrators freely answered all the survey questions and allowed the Grubolas to spend a day observing classes. The Grubolas' daughter finished Noe in the spring, and a younger son is now enrolled. The Grubolas say they continue to be impressed with the staff's ability to discover and respond to students' different academic strengths.

"My daughter is a very visual learner," Kay Grubola said. "Within the first half year, they had really zeroed in on that. So in math class, for example, they charted and graphed everything and it really made sense to her...There's a lot of consistency between what they say they're going to do at this school and what they actually do."

Kay Grubola said she also likes the school's racial, ethnic, and economic diversity and the way the staff downplays academic labels.

"Noe feels like the real world," she said. "I think that kind of diversity is so enriching. That phenomenon is so much more important than a kid's score on a test."

Yet such differences might be harder to accommodate in the future. Because of Noe's apparent success providing challenging classes for gifted and talented students, an increasing number of qualified students are applying to the school.

Last school year, Noe had about 40 identified gifted students and about 80 Advance Program students at each grade level. This year, the number of gifted students in the sixth grade has nearly doubled -- a trend which could limit the staff's ability to maintain heterogenous classes in the future.

In addition, the percentage of black students enrolled in the Advance Program classes fell to 18.3 percent last school year, down from 20.2 percent the year before. This year's figure is 18.5 percent. Although the decline represents fewer than 10 students, any reduction in the number of AP minority students is a cause for concern. Noe officials aren't sure why the numbers are dropping -- it may simply be a decline in the total population of AP-qualified students in Noe's attendance zone. "Up to this point," assistant principal Sayre says, "we have accepted all students regardless of race who have met selection criteria and applied by the deadline."

In earlier years, Noe did not rely totally on the AP program to draw academically promising minority students to the school. In the past, says Sayre, "a kid who was a B-C student who showed promise we could usually accept" through the school's optional program. We can't do that anymore," she says.

As the popularity of Noe's gifted program grows -- and enrollments in the program increase -- openings for students outside the attendance zone who show academic potential but don't meet the district's guidelines for AP/gifted programs are vanishing. But Sayre says Noe is trying to anticipate the impact of "a greater influx of gifted students" by making plans to develop another sixth grade team "who will embrace the workshop concept and also blend students."

Slower students and large class sizes

In an interview near the end of last school year, Noe's Distinguished Educator Chrissy Jones said she was concerned that slower students were beginning to get overlooked at Noe. With large class sizes, teachers didn't always have the time or the skills to adapt their lessons for each child, she said.

"I don't know if the kids at the bottom are really getting what they need," Jones said. "You need smaller classes. It's very hard to differentiate instruction with 31 kids in a class. In fact, it's almost not humanly possible."

Sayre notes that 7th and 8th grade classes are funded at a 31-student average and says Noe doesn't have the funds to hire more teachers to lower class size significantly. But she says the school has selected "differentiation of instruction" for special attention in this year's staff development plan.

Noe's administrators acknowledge that some teachers are much better than others at meeting the varied needs of their students, which might explain the school's inconsistent test scores. Noe earned rewards for exceeding its goal in the first biennium of Kentucky's new assessments, but moved into the decline category during the next two-year cycle when it fell short of its goal.

Sayre and academic coordinator Jan McDowell have spent the past few years helping teachers align their curricula with national, state, and local content and performance standards. McDowell said they discovered that one of the major weaknesses was math instruction. Teachers were repeating the same arithmetic lessons from year to year because the textbooks presented material that way. So administrators urged them to reduce their dependency on textbooks and use supplementary materials that introduce advanced skills earlier and build on them through a spiraling curriculum.

But the hardest task of all may be helping teachers understand that they must raise the bar for all students in all subjects. Gretchen Williams, a sixth-grade science teacher, acknowledges that she has higher expectations for the students in her accelerated workshop class. She said she can compress the curriculum because the gifted students grasp concepts so quickly.

"I expect them to be able to ask questions and carry out experiments with minimal help from me," she said. "I provide more guided instruction for the regular kids, but we use the same books and resources."

Yet, it's clear from the way Williams conducts her classes that she believes all students can perform at high levels. For example, during a lesson about reflection last spring, she prodded students in a non-workshop class to explain their experiments and demonstrate their understanding of key concepts by using mirrors, flashlights, aluminum foil, and imaginary periscopes. Although some of the students' responses were simplistic, Williams helped them rephrase their points in more scientific terms.

"You may not know why that happened, but here's the scientific principle," she said. "At whichever angle the light hits the mirror, it will reflect at that angle. So how can you make a light beam change directions? I want to see a lot of hands. You all did the experiment. Now let's talk about the meaning."

She asked students to explain their experiments out loud, then urged the class to evaluate the procedures. Next Williams sent several students to the blackboard to illustrate the way a periscope "sees" around corners. She continually moved students deeper into deductive reasoning, unwilling to let them become satisfied with easy answers.

"We teach to the high end and push those other students up," Williams said later. "Sometimes the more we expect of kids, the more they do."

Proof that average kids can meet high standards

Sixth grade math teacher Steve Weber said he switched last year to a team that includes no identified gifted students because he wanted to prove that he could maintain the same high standards with more average students. He said his subsequent experience showed him that many average students lack only the confidence and the label of gifted students.

Weber said he has had to adapt to a "little bit wider span" in mixed-ability classes, working from very basic understanding to more abstract thinking. But he said he is often surprised by the sophisticated insights shared by students considered less capable on conventional academic measurements.

"From gifted kids, you have this idea that they'll always go to the highest level," Weber said. "But a lot are still at the concrete stage. They can do formulas and procedures, but they don't always know why."

To find time for more individualized instruction, Weber encourages students to move at their own pace so they don't become either frustrated or bored. Students whose test scores on a particular unit indicate a high level of understanding can pursue independent study projects -- such as an analysis of the stock market -- while Weber works more intensely with students still struggling to learn basic concepts.

Ultimately, he said, it's up to the faculty to ensure that all students succeed. He concedes that it's easier to sort students based on test scores, but he says it's harder to search for buried treasures that way.

"We in this building designed a curriculum for everyone," Weber said. "We expect all kids to reach this outcome, and it's up to us to be able to find a way for kids to get there."

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