The Free Press
NEWTON, Massachusetts — In autumn 2021, against the already-challenging backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic and remote learning, the Newton Public Schools decided to carry out a complex initiative at its two high schools known as “multilevel classrooms.” Previously, most classes at Newton’s high schools were given a label: honors, advanced college prep, or college prep, with honors offering the most challenging content.
This system of “tracked classes” had its problems. Students who began their freshman year in a particular level could find it challenging to change levels, possibly making it harder for them to eventually take more advanced courses such as AP Calculus. To make matters worse, black, Latino, and low-income students were disproportionately represented in lower-level classes.
The multilevel model sought to rectify this problem by mixing the levels together into a single classroom taught by a single teacher. The district’s administrators claimed this would allow easier transitions among levels for students, increase exposure to more advanced content for lower-level students, and provide beneficial interactions among students who might otherwise never meet. This was a model that had seen some success at Newton South in the English and history departments and in specialized, opt-in programs that were well-funded and well-supported.
I was curious how this model would work in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) classes, which require students to build upon previous content, and world languages, where teachers of more advanced classes typically speak entirely in the language being taught. What would teachers do when some students fully grasped the material and others did not because of their varying abilities or past learning experiences? How would teachers scaffold instruction to meet the needs of students with wildly different foundations in math or foreign languages?
Three years later, some answers are becoming clear, and they are troubling. Newton South’s Faculty Council, an elected group that advocates on behalf of staff and of which I am chair, has been listening to complaints from teachers about how poorly these classes are going.
Students—at all levels of performance, but especially our students who need the most support and for whom this model was intended to help most—aren’t having their needs met. In one of my multilevel classes, I received feedback that the lower-level students didn’t want to ask questions because they didn’t want to “look dumb,” and the higher-level students didn’t want to ask questions because they didn’t want their classmates to “feel dumb.” The result was a classroom that was far less dynamic than what I was typically able to cultivate.
Teachers—especially new hires—say they feel unheard and unsupported. During one meeting, an educator recounted their experience of finding a colleague crying in a closet because they felt like such a failure teaching multilevel. Despite promises of professional development, educators have received minimal structured support on teaching multilevel over the past three years.
One world language teacher compared the challenge of meeting the varied needs of students to teaching a class where half the students are learning colors for the first time and the other half are analyzing a Salvador Dali painting. There’s nothing wrong with learning either—but in one room, it’s impossible to teach both simultaneously.
Without adequate training or support, many teachers are forced to teach to the middle (let’s list all the colors in the Dali painting), leaving the highest-needs students lost and struggling and the highest-performing students bored and disengaged. Further, collaboration among teachers in a multilevel model is nearly impossible—splitting teachers among advanced college prep/college prep, honors/advanced college prep, standalone advanced college prep, and every other combination, each of which has different pacing. That means that there are far fewer colleagues with whom to plan and that prep time must expand to accommodate the combinations of teams.
The Faculty Council met with department heads all the way up to the superintendent, and what we found was shocking—Newton implemented this monumental change to instruction with no metric for success and no plans to collect data. In not a single conversation over three years could anyone present to us data showing that these classes had a positive impact on students.
So the council collected its own data. Our surveys of the staff showed that 61 percent of the 31 respondents in STEM classes believed that multilevel classes were “not at all beneficial” for students (the lowest rating) and only one respondent answered on the “beneficial” end of the rating scale. Teachers ranked multilevel classes as an urgent problem to be solved. They cited these classes as a major source of stress and low morale among educators while providing no clear benefits to students.
Multiple teachers collected data from their classes indicating that college prep students enrolled in single-level classes outperformed college prep students enrolled in multilevel classes, despite having the same teacher and learning the same content. In one stark example, the single-level college prep students outperformed their multilevel counterparts on every single-unit assessment in addition to the final exam.
This led the Faculty Council to draft a petition imploring the superintendent, Anna Nolin, to roll back multilevel classes in STEM and world languages beginning in the 2025–26 school year. The petition also called on the district to identify the problems multilevel classes were meant to solve, create appropriate solutions, and deploy opt-in pilot programs during the upcoming school year.
This petition received universal support—every full- and part-time teacher with professional status in STEM and world languages signed on, except for one. We presented this petition to the Newton School Committee during its November 4 meeting. During the following meeting on November 18, another petition echoing our requests, signed by over 400 residents, was presented to the committee.
The central administration has indicated that it will study leveling and issue findings and recommendations in May. By that time, however, it will be challenging to roll back multilevel classes for the 2025–26 school year due to our scheduling timeline. While I appreciate the desire for thoroughness, the house is on fire now.
We acknowledge that tracked classes have problems, but as far as we can tell, multilevel classes are worse. Classes may appear more diverse with all students mixed in one room, but no data have been presented to suggest these classes are actually helping black, Latino, or low-income students. Instead, we have seen firsthand that the students who need the most support are those least served by multilevel.
The concept of anti-racism often cited by administration officials should not involve blindly insisting that these classes are working simply because they make administrators feel good. Effective anti-racism should entail having the courage to admit they’re not working and finding something better. There is no shame in failure. There is shame in failing over and over again and calling it success.
Newton Public Schools’ motto is “Equity and Excellence”; these classes are not equitable, and they are not excellent.
This article originally appeared in The Boston Globe.
Ryan Normandin is a math and physics teacher at Newton South High School in Newton, Massachusetts. For more on education, read Frannie Block’s piece, “School Choice Is Usually a Conservative Issue. Not in Kentucky.”
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