High Expectations With High Support: A Case Study of the Level-Up Initiative

Abstract

The Cambridge Public School District serves approximately 7,000 students within Cambridge, Massachusetts’ 6.6 square miles. City and school district leaders refer to Cambridge as a resource-rich city that spends one of the highest dollar amounts per student in the state of Massachusetts. Despite the monetary advantage that Cambridge has over other school systems, its achievement levels for Black and Latino students lag behind. This difference in achievement is exacerbated by the course-taking patterns of students at the district’s one high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin. The lower track of courses, called “college prep,” leads to a 24% gap between white and Black students taking Advanced Placement, the most advanced courses. Students of color at CRLS experience vastly different college and career preparation than their white counterparts. School and district leaders agree that this tracking contributes to inequitable outcomes, yet the system has persisted for many years. I explore what happens when a district attempts to ensure that Demography is Not Destiny by supporting the leadership of an initiative called Level-Up. This initiative funded a pilot course that enabled all ninth-grade students to take an honors-level English Language Arts class in 2017-2018. I draw from research about what happens when students are heterogeneously grouped together for learning (de-tracked), and I reflect on my implementation of a continuous improvement model. My strategic objective was to lead the Level-Up initiative, which aimed to provide equity and access to the most rigorous English course offered to students who traditionally enrolled in lower-tier options. I will argue that expansion of this pilot program would support the further de-tracking of the high school and create the best possible impact on future course-taking plans by students, thus increasing the number of students of color selecting honors and Advanced Placement classes. In this capstone, I describe my efforts to (1) lead the district team responsible for the Level-Up initiative to follow a continuous improvement model that relies on failing fast and adjusting quickly to improve the systems that support the new heterogeneous classes; and (2) explore how a school system committed to equity and access wrestles with the tension of how to provide it to all students.