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Maine Schools Getting Creative ; From Houlton to Portland, High Schools Are Trying New Ways to Engage Students - and Succeeding.

Posted on: Sunday, 28 August 2005, 18:00 CDT

Joel Daley of Portland is about to take part in a bold new experiment.

The 14-year-old former King Middle School student is one of 86 students in the founding class of a new high school that teaches students through experience, called expeditionary learning.

"There are going to be tests, obviously, but we actually get to share our opinions," Joel said, explaining why he decided to attend the new school rather than follow the bulk of his classmates to one of the city's two traditional high schools this fall.

Joel will be joining the front ranks of a quiet revolution taking place in Maine high schools. In growing numbers, schools are shelving long-standing practices, such as grouping students by ability and ranking student work with letter grades.

Instead, freshman are being funneled into small groups to work with the same adviser for all four years. Other schools are requiring every student to take college entrance exams and apply to college whether they plan to attend or not.

Maine is on the cutting edge of a movement to radically change the nation's secondary schools, according to some experts. Earlier this year, 45 governors and top education and industry leaders gave failing grades to American public high schools, where only 68 of 100 ninth-graders manage to graduate on time and only 18 percent of those finish college in four years.

In Maine, the failure of high schools to turn out students prepared to compete in a global economy has been the focus of reforms since the mid-1990s. While Maine's graduation rate compares well with other states, the number of students enrolling in college does not.

In 2004, Maine's high school graduation rate was about 78 percent, the 13th highest nationwide, according to data complied by the Morgan Quitno Press, a publisher of annual and monthly state and city rankings. But Maine ranked only 37th in the number of 18 to 24- year-olds enrolled in higher education in 2002. It ranked 39th in the percentage of the population holding bachelor's degrees in 2004.

The effort gained traction three years ago when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the state $10 million to ramp up its high school reform efforts. The Gates foundation is also behind the funding of the new Portland high school.

This year Maine was one of 10 states to receive a $2 million grant from the National Governor's Association to raise high school graduation rates and improve college readiness.

And this summer, state Education Commissioner Susan Gendron announced plans to replace high school assessment tests with the SAT and PSAT to encourage students to think about college. This fall, teams from Gendron's office will visit every public high school in the state to try to generate more excitement for the plan.

While educators say Maine high schools are ahead of national efforts, assessment test scores among high school students remain flat statewide. But educators report encouraging results at the roughly 25 percent of the state's 140 public high schools that are aggressively pursuing change.

POLAND SCHOOL IS A MODEL

Much of the change taking place in Maine high schools is modeled after Poland Regional High School. When it opened six years ago, letter grades were tossed out in favor of student assessments, and students worked with their advisers every day.

Initially, not all parents were pleased with the approach. The school launched a campaign to win back their support. Today there are few complaints, said former principal Derek Pierce, who is now head of the new Portland high school.

The Poland school saw dramatic changes. Only 35 to 45 percent of the students in the area went on to college before the school opened. Today, more than 80 percent attend college, and every student is required to apply. Last year, every student got into a college, with 50 percent being accepted everywhere they applied.

PARENT INVOLVEMENT SOARS

Other schools have gotten results by involving parents. Machias High School was bogged down with mediocre assessment scores and high teacher turnover in the late 1990s.

But in the past five years, the 150-student school has seen the number of graduates going on to college jump from about 50 percent to nearly 80 percent. Eleventh-grade assessment scores have gone up. The school now ranks in the top third of Maine high schools instead of the bottom third, said Principal Tim Reynolds.

He said reaching out to parents has helped. Three years ago, only 10 to 12 percent of the parents would show up for parent-teacher conferences, even when conferences were scheduled after working hours.

So the school ditched the conferences in favor of meetings between students, their parents and the student's adviser. The students, rather than the teachers, formally present their work to their parents.

"The first year we had 98 percent turnout. Last year we had 100 percent," said Reynolds.

Two years ago, only a handful of high-achieving students at Machias High took advantage of the free courses offered at the University of Maine's Machias campus. Now 20 juniors and seniors take courses each semester, riding a shuttle bus that runs between the high school and the university campus. Some seniors graduate from high school with a full year of college already completed.

Houlton High School, where students spend four years in groups with the same advisers, saw 11th-grade assessment scores jump in the past year by encouraging students to take the tests seriously, said Principal Martin Bouchard. Students took the grueling four-day test in their adviser groups rather than in a large classroom with a teacher they might not know. Students who showed effort were rewarded with special privileges.

A COORDINATED ENDEAVOR

The high school reform movement in Maine is being headed by the Department of Education's Center for Inquiry on Secondary Education, the Southern Maine Partnership at the University of Southern Maine and the Great Maine Schools Project, which is distributing the $10 million Gates grant.

Great Maine Schools Project director Pam Fisher said about half of the grant has been spent at roughly 32 high schools around the state. More than 80 percent of the high schools in Maine have taken part in programs offered by the project.

She said Maine's small high school population, which numbers about 65,000, makes change easier than in other states where a single district can outnumber the roughly 202,000 students enrolled in Maine public schools.

"We have the advantage of knowing each other fairly well," she said.

Still, the pace of reform is slow and frustrating to some educators. They say they blame both parents and themselves for resisting change, clinging to the liberal arts-based school curriculum that does not work well for all students.

"I haven't seen much action yet," said Don Cannan, director of the Lewiston Regional Technology Center, where 1,100 students from six high schools take career and technical education classes.

Cannan said high schools must take brave and bold steps to make the changes that will result in students prepared to compete in a global economy. He said there is a terrible mismatch between the course offerings in public high schools and the skills students need to be thinkers, inventors and innovators.

In today's work world, he said, high school students must speak and communicate effectively, not be able dissect the plot and characters of a great novel.

The Mid-Coast School of Technology in Rockland turned to innovative new teaching methods to improve reading and writing skills. Every reading assignment is custom-designed to be just slightly above each student's reading ability. The students are asked to identify the main point of every reading assignment and figure out its relevance to the work they are doing.

"It gives reading a purpose," said director Tim Hathorne. He said there have been dramatic results, with some students raising their reading skills by three grade levels in just one year.

The hands-on approach to learning is what attracted many parents and students to the new Portland high school, where students will spend the first half of the year in an intensive study of the Portland working waterfront. Some parents said they are not risking their children's academic success by sending them to an untested high school.

"To me there is a greater risk in maintaining the status quo," said Joel Daley's father, Michael. He said he was drawn to the new high school because it acknowledges that students have different learning styles.

Marley Bergeron, 14, a former Lyman Moore Middle School student, said she is also excited about attending the new high school. The study of the Portland waterfront will work out perfectly, she said.

"That sounds really cool because I worked on Peaks Island this summer," she said.

Staff Writer Beth Quimby can be contacted at 791-6363 or at:

bquimby@pressherald.com

HOW MAINE STACKS UP

Number of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in higher education

in 2002:

STATE RATIO RANK

per 1,000

Maine: 543 37

Connecticut: 620 16

Massachusetts: 737 2

New Hampshire: 603 21

Rhode Island: 697 4

Vermont: 589 24

National average: 601 Source: Morgan Quitno Press, Lawrence, Kan.

2004 HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION RATES:

STATE PERCENTAGE NATIONAL RANK

Maine: 78.2 percent 13

Connecticut: 75.5 percent 20

Massachusetts: 74.2 percent 22

New Hampshire: 76.3 percent 19

Rhode Island: 68.5 percent 33

Vermont: 83.9 percent 5

National average: 68.8 percent

Source: Portland Press Herald

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