Educator Finds Traditional High Schools Are Failing Students

MACHIAS — In middle and elementary schools throughout New England and across the United States, education reforms are rolling along. In classrooms from Maine to California, noisy groups of students work together at clusters of desks or seated on the floor. In schools that have adopted block scheduling, students study related subjects for up to two hours. Textbooks often are shunned in favor of “hands-on” learning.

In high school, the reform movement comes to a screeching halt. Students sit in orderly rows dutifully completing worksheets or listening to teachers lecture. Every 45 minutes they move on to a new classroom. Hands-on experiences, even in science and art classes, are rare.

The newest education professor at the University of Maine at Machias decided to examine this troubling trend from the perspective of students who must make the transition from an innovative middle school to a traditional high school.

Cyrene Wells went back to school to gather research for her doctoral dissertation at the University of New Hampshire. The former middle school teacher spent the 1991-92 school year in eighth grade at a rural New Hampshire middle school that she dubbed the Meadowbrook Community School.

Like many Maine communities, the New Hampshire town with the middle school did not have its own high school. The students chose from one of five nearby high schools. Wells went on to ninth grade in 1992-93 with five Meadowbrook students who chose to attend Whitmore High School, also a pseudonym.

With shocks of gray hair framing her face, Wells, now 43, knew she could not pass herself off as a teen-age student. Instead she told students that, for purposes of her research, she needed to know what it was like to be an eighth- and ninth-grader. She worked to earn the students’ respect and trust by doing what they did and sometimes turning a blind eye to minor misdeeds. She went to classes, ate lunch, cheered at sporting events and went on class trips with the Meadowbrook students.

Her experiences and findings are detailed in “Literacies Lost: When Students Move from a Progessive Middle School to a Traditional High School,” her recently published book.

What Wells found during her two years of study was that a group of active, engaged eighth-grade learners was transformed into a group of uninterested, bored ninth-graders.

“We are turning active learners into passive recipients,” Wells said during a recent interview at her UMM office.

At Meadowbrook, students felt they were an important part of a larger community. They felt that their teachers cared about them.

At Whitmore High School, the same students felt that their teachers simply didn’t care whether students learned or not. Two weeks into ninth grade, one student was puzzled because her math teacher didn’t know her name.

Teachers are not the only ones to blame, Wells emphasized. Textbook publishers, testing companies, parents and others share the blame, she said.

To secure their hold on the market, textbook companies persuade teachers to focus their curricula around their manuscripts and supplementary material. Teachers, feeling ever short of time, find it easy to use prepared worksheets and questions that accompany many textbooks.

Tests such as the Maine Educational Assessment also play a role in forcing conformity, Wells said. Teachers feel they must cover material and teach skills that are likely to appear on the test.

Parents sometimes stifle reforms as well, Wells said, because they assume high school must be the same as it was when they were students.

“Our society values a factory mentality for high school,” she said. “You do your stuff, collect your grades and graduate.”

Order was of paramount importance at Whitmore High School, a school of about 850 students. A 68-page handbook detailed what students could and could not do. If students followed the rules and earned the necessary number of credits, they would graduate. Students who broke the rules often fell by the wayside and were ignored by teachers.

“It’s almost as if the kids were set up,” Wells said. “You get by by following the rules; you don’t get by by being innovative.”

Wells, whose specialty is reading and writing instruction, was particularly interested in the students’ reading and writing habits. She found that students who were rabid readers and writers in eighth grade found themselves stifled in the high school environment.

“The bottom line is that the kids’ literacy just stopped,” she said. “Children who had been interested learners in eighth grade did almost no reading and writing.”

As an example, she cites Monica, a prolific and good writer. While she wrote freely and easily in eighth grade, she struggled with a high school English assignment that required her to go through a set of seven steps in writing an essay.

“They go to high school and they’re done,” Wells said. “They just tread water for four years.”

While her study is the first of its kind, it does not offer any solutions, Wells said somewhat apologetically.

Rather than providing answers, Wells hopes her book will serve as a “call to action” to spur parents, students and others to work for changes in their high schools.

“It will make you mad,” she said of the stories told in “Literacies Lost.” She hopes that anger will be translated into a concerted push for changes in high school structure and philosophy in Maine and every other state with a school like Whitmore High.