Brookline to hold off on changes to 9th grade English

Brookline Public Schools won’t eliminate the district’s honors ninth-grade English class next school year after all.

The district administration recently sought to eliminate the distinct honors and standard classes and replace them with a class currently being piloted, in part because of racial disparities in honors-level enrollment. But after pushback from families, the School Committee has decided to keep the honors course.

The committee on Thursday night voted 7-2 to keep the existing standard and honors level classes as well as a pilot class. Committee members said they wanted to see more evidence that the pilot class is raising academic achievement or, at the very least, not lowering it.

“We need more time in order to see what those different achievement levels look like,” said committee chair David Pearlman. “While certainly having more representative demographics in our classes is important to me, so is academic excellence and improvement.”

Member Natalia Linos, one of two members who voted to support the district initiative, said that given the negative socioemotional impact of segregation, she just wanted clear evidence that the pilot class is not harming students academically.

“As long as it’s equal or not worse, that’s good enough for me,” she said.

About one-fifth of Brookline High ninth-graders are taking the pilot class voluntarily this year.

The district already axed ninth-grade honors social studies in 2019, and the phasing out of honors English was expected to presage changes to math and science courses. Districts across the region and country also are weighing whether such advanced courses put students of color at a disadvantage; there are often stark racial disparities in who takes advanced classes.

Brookline district leaders said they hope universal ninthgrade courses will help more students of color feel equipped to take on advanced classes in later grades, rather than signing up for standard classes when they enter high school and sticking with the basic classes for all four years.

Gabriel McCormick, the district’s secondary school teaching director, said in advance of Thursday’s vote that if the policy did not change, any rising ninth-grader earning at least a B will be recommended for honors courses, including math and science classes. Had that policy been in place for the current school year, dozens of additional students, including more children of color, would have been recommended for honors classes, the district found.

At the meeting Thursday, McCormick presented data showing the existing sharp disparities by race and disability status in Brookline classes as well as academic research indicating that eliminating honors classes can have positive impacts on the achievement of weaker students without hurting stronger students.

But public commenters speaking at the meeting, including students and parents, were overwhelmingly against the change. Critics said there was insufficient evidence in favor of the change and worried that it would water down the rigor available to ninth-graders without successfully increasing enrollment of Black and Latino students in later advanced classes. Others worried that the change would only exacerbate disparities, by driving higher-income families to private schools or enrichment programs that less-wealthy residents cannot afford.

But the committee also heard favorable testimony, including from Gary Shiffman, the district’s social studies curriculum coordinator until last summer. Shiffman argued that before eliminating honors social studies, the district saw “social sorting” in ninth grade, that many students taking the honors class were not prepared for it, and that the new class has fewer behavioral issues than the prior standard-levels social studies class.

The pushback in Brookline follows some recent shifts in how other districts, near and far, handle math; both Cambridge Public Schools and San Francisco have said in the last year that they will return to offering Algebra 1 to middle schoolers, after previously eliminating the advanced class as an option and facing backlash from parents. (Cambridge plans to have all students take the class, rather than offering it as an accelerated option.)