Educational reform is not an easy feat to undertake; it is a task which is twice plagued by the unmistakable boulder-sized problems present in American public schools and the often fruitless act of continually pushing those boulders up a steep cliff, just for inevitable shortcomings to yank them back down, crushing anything in its path. And yet we try again, not because we believe the next push will be the last but because the last push marks defeat. In this way, certain mistakes are unavoidable and cannot earnestly be met with a degree of contempt that overshadows the hardships of the task itself, but this is a matter of substance. An honest pursuit of growth is not at the heart of this particular critique, rather an obfuscation of appearance, an overvaluing of aesthetics to the detriment of material.
Following the passing of LD 1422, An Act to Prepare Maine People for the Future Economy, in May of 2012, Maine public high schools were required to graduate their students with a diploma which exemplified proficiency on guiding principles and standards in eight content areas. According to the New England Secondary School Consortium, the goal of this initiative was simple: redefine the high school diploma to be an emblem of competency and preparation rather than a sign of completion. A key part of this change was a unified push towards standards-based curriculums. Established standards would lay the groundwork for consistent, clear, and meaningful expectations for each student’s education. Inherent to this plan is a shift where high schools assign structure, placing consistency on the value a diploma has, no matter the student, while leaving behind past expectations surrounding the circumstances in which any individual student may come to receive such a diploma. Although former Governor Paul LePage signed a bill repealing LD 1422 in July of 2018, Nokomis Regional High decided to maintain its proficiency-based curriculum, though one would be forgiven for not noticing upon first glance.
What defines a school as proficiency-based is its ability to certify that each graduating student is prepared for life beyond high school and that they are willing to accommodate the various needs of individual students to achieve this goal. Lori Merrow, Curriculum Director for RSU 19, said “We [Nokomis] are proficiency-based. The transition to proficiency-based grading included our work with Great Schools Partnership over the course of several years to develop our curriculum based on standards, performance indicators and using scoring criteria to assess student progress and mastery.” Though Nokomis continues to push forward with this grading system, one must stop to ask whether current performance indicators are actually reflective of true mastery, a question state-collected data seems to side against. Nokomis currently holds (as of 2018-19) an impressive 92% graduation rate, but the percentage of students proficient in reading is only 37% while proficiency in mathematics is 22%, both of which fall under the Maine state average. During the 2009-2010 school year, before implementing the state-mandated proficiency-based system, Nokomis had a 75.62% graduation rate with a combined average proficiency of 28.44%. While the shift in curriculum did not significantly change proficiency rates, it did substantially boost successful student completion of high school. This discrepancy can be explained not by examining the changes made during this supposed transition to a proficiency-based system but rather by looking at the policies which remained the same, policies established well before the passing of LD 1422.
On September 21, 2010, the RSU 19 Board of Directors approved of a uniform grading system for Nokomis Regional High, assigning numerical percent grades to their equivalent letter grade. The fact that this scale has not changed, despite of Nokomis’ shift towards proficiency-based learning, is not on its own evident of a discrepancy between vision and execution; however, the absence of any integration among this system and the newer standards-based system does present a flaw in the overall defined educational goals of the school. Kasie Giallombardo, Nokomis’ in-house Instructional Coach, explained that grading based on established standards works as follows: “All of our curriculum is developed based on standards, we use scoring criteria to assess student mastery and we grade on proficiency (1-4 rubric scale)... teachers reference performance indicators (those smaller skills that make up a standard) and scoring criteria (the rubric to gauge proficiency of a performance indicator).” She further explained that these proficiency rubrics would be presented to students with four possible distinctions based on their performance: Does Not Meet, Partially Meets, Meets, and Exceeds. However, unlike other schools who have used this 1-4 grading system by directly converting these values into an equivalent letter grade, students’ transcripts at Nokomis continue to consist primarily of letter grades derived from a percentage-based grading system. After talking with Kasie Giallombardo it became clear that this practice is not an intended part of the curriculum, saying, “One extra thing we do is also post a letter grade that’s equivalent to that level of proficiency. By using a dual-grading system, I think it gives two access points for parents/colleges to access how the student is doing.” The problem then is that this practice is not consistently implemented across the entire faculty at Nokomis. Instead, arbitrary point-based systems continue to be used which is under the discretion of each individual teacher, a practice which makes it hard to report consistent evaluations of students’ knowledge and skills across same-grade classrooms in the same content areas, a process encouraged by the RSU 19 Board of Directors.
The other glaring continuity with the Nokomis curriculum is the method in which students are expected to approach sufficient completion, in terms of proficiency and graduation. In a document published by the RSU 19 Board of Directors titled “Educational Philosophy/Mission”, the Board claims that they, “will always consider the welfare of students as the single most important factor in making decisions relative to educational policy.” Rigorous consideration of students’ futures should be the goal of any successful school system, yet the requirements placed upon students at Nokomis reflect less of a consideration towards welfare and more so towards a consistent, streamlined movement achieving as little resistance as possible. Progress towards graduation continues to be determined based on “experience completion”, an adherence to a strict set of required courses in each content area offered by the school. Core curriculums such as this are not inherently negative in terms of student growth; however, the pairing of this policy with the consistent trend of students graduating in four years indicates performance and ability is less of a metric for graduation as the accumulation of completed credits. Proficiency-based diplomas are intended to provide a more variable and flexible timetable for students to fully prepare themselves for life beyond high school, but Nokomis continues to push a four-year standard, defining any variations as rare exceptions or unfortunate stumbling blocks. Part of the difficulty in tackling these inconsistencies is caused by the chain of command established by the RSU 19 Board of Directors, who list themselves and other district faculty members as the primary source of curriculum assessment, assigning teachers to one of the least significant portions of this decision-making process, and leaving out students altogether. It is not the intention of the Board to leave students out of the conversation, even explicitly stating so in their adopted policy on “Curriculum Development and Adoption” stipulating that, “It is expected that curriculum development and revision be achieved with appropriate involvement of administration, instructional and support staff, students, community and the Board…” The Nokomis curriculum is not a conversation of bad intentions but rather a symptom of an old way of approaching educational reform, a procedure that must be updated.
To alleviate and correct some of the confusion caused by Nokomis’ proficiency-based curriculum, a strong line of communication must be established among staff and students. A major contributing factor to the repeal of LD 1422 was backlash by educators who were left in the dark by state policymakers after being demanded to change their instructional systems. We again are experiencing this problem, but instead, the disconnect is occurring between those who are implementing these changes and those who are directly affected by them. During senior year, students are expected to showcase how they met the standards of graduation along with outlining their individual graduation plan, but these requirements come too late into a student’s educational path to be effective, reducing the process to a surface-level technique of showcasing a dedication to a proficiency-based system while missing out on the core benefits of the program. Nokomis’ Senior Experience Teacher, Sherry Dubay, notes that a narrative essay titled “My Story” continues to have a positive effect on her students, “This essay, to me, feels like a place where senior students sincerely express how they have grown into young adults. I feel that it is in this essay that students appreciate their journey.” A good education system leaves students with an understanding of how they have been adequately prepared for the future, an achievement undoubtedly accomplished through this task, but a great one ensures that students see meaning even in classes that play no role in their post-secondary plans. Reflection can be a powerful tool but falls short when one must scramble to find meaning in something they had long deemed meaningless. Instead, students should be constantly updating and reflecting on their learner profiles throughout their years at Nokomis, creating portfolios that will not only reflect their proficiency in all content areas but also showcase individual student achievements. A system like this would place individual student strengths and experiences over grades, grades which would now serve to complement a student's time at Nokomis, not define it.