A Massachusetts School District Rolled Back Advanced Classes. Teachers Are Starting To Revolt.

In 2021, a school district in Newton, Massachusetts, got rid of advanced classes in a bid to increase racial equity. But instead of reducing achievement gaps between racial groups, teachers are now sounding the alarm that the strategy is resulting in classrooms that serve neither struggling students nor high achievers. 

According to a Boston Globe article by reporter Carey Goldberg, several parents brought up similar concerns with the new policy—but say they were smeared as “racists” and “right-wingers.”

Goldberg writes that, in 2022, a group of three moms—all Democrats—started a petition to create a parental advisory panel for the school district. The move was motivated by what one parent described as “ideology superseding student needs,” following the school district’s decision to place students in “multilevel classes.” In these new classes, rather than sorting students by ability, students would learn together in the same classroom. The school also decided to stop allowing advanced math students to skip a year to access higher-level classes. The parents also shared concerns that the school’s approach to race and identity issues “emphasized differences rather than commonalities.”

The women say they were branded as far-right conservatives motivated by racial animus rather than a genuine concern for academic opportunities. According to Goldberg, Parent Teacher Organization newsletters urged parents to speak out against the petition at a public meeting. An email from local activist group Families Organizing for Racial Justice said that the petition was “tied to the apparent belief that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts that take race into account compromise academic excellence” and claimed that some petitioners “challenge the need for any activities related to micro-aggressions, inclusion, respect or belonging.”

“The mothers and their allies found themselves portrayed online and in public as dog-whistling bigots doing the bidding of right-wing national groups. Social media comments painted their side as ‘racism cloaked as academic excellence’ and ‘right-wing activism cloaked as parental concern,’” Goldberg wrote. At one meeting, a speaker compared those who supported the petition to “white women who helped perpetuate segregation and white supremacy.”

But years later, the Newton mothers are being vindicated. Teachers themselves are now openly criticizing multilevel classes, arguing that it isn’t serving students’ needs.

“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,” Newton teacher Ryan Normandin wrote in a Boston Globe opinion article in December. “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.”

“I’ve heard about multilevel classes from many, many parents over the last three years, and the feedback has been consistently negative,” School Committee member Rajeev Parlikar said in November  “I actually have not heard from a single parent who thought their child benefited from being in a multilevel class.”

According to Goldberg, the district is now working on reinstating leveled classes.

“We were really, truly three innocent moms just trying to get conversations going,” one of the moms originally involved in the petition told Goldberg. The three used to joke that if they had indeed been funded by right-wing groups, “maybe we would have done a better job.”

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