Sitting around the table in the superintendent’s office last Friday at Oak Park and River Forest High School, Karin Sullivan, the communications person, was the veteran. She’s been at the school since the days of Supt. Steven Isoye and is starting her eighth year.
At the head of the table was Supt. Joylynn Pruitt-Adams. She is just beginning her fourth year as superintendent. And she has hired everyone else who was gathered last week to explain the school’s bold decision to end the academic tracking of incoming freshman starting in the fall of 2021.
There was Greg Johnson, associate superintendent, who oversees curriculum but has also taken on some of the duties previously assigned to the principal’s post. OPRF eliminated that position this year. Laurie Fiorenza is now director of student learning. And also brand new is LeVar Ammons filling the newly created post as director of equity and student success.
That’s a lot of new. And it is a lot of focus on, at long last, taking substantive steps to smash through the baked-in institutional racism that has guaranteed there would be an academic gap, a discipline gap, a connectedness gap for students and families of color at this high school.
Pruitt-Adams on Friday repeatedly came back to her preferred language to describe the divide as an access and opportunity gap.
OK. It’s an access and opportunity gap.
The conversation Friday was direct in acknowledging that the “restructuring” of freshman year — there’s a little hesitance in calling it detracking “though it borrows from the detracking research” — is a full-frontal attack on the school’s historic failings. But then there is also a little defiant pride in pointing to current efforts on equity, in talking up headway teachers are already making in individualizing instruction, in what the jargon calls “culturally responsive teaching.”
And it is true that while detracking is the single, most direct and foundational assault on the access and opportunity gap, this school has been consciously laying bricks on a hard path to this consequential moment.
That we now directly and openly speak about the intrinsic racism that afflicts this school — and, yes, every other school and institution in this country — that the entire focus is on change, no longer if change is necessary but how fast we can go, is a testament to the new leadership of this school, the leadership of the school board(s) in setting this situation up over what is now multiple terms, the voters of Oak Park and River Forest who have, fully consciously or not, elected leaders pretty much singularly focused on equity with, finally, a responsible approach to fiscal concerns.
The enormity of the change that detracking freshman represents is made plain by the two year ramp-up the school is building in. There is more work to be done in professional development for teachers to make sure the combined college prep and honors curriculum for current seventh-graders as they arrive at OPRF in 2021 is, in fact, rigorous enough. There is work to do with those seventh-graders and their families to explain the opportunities and the expectations that “earning honors” represents.
Teachers and the school can change notably — supports can be structured for kids on the cusp and for top learners, too. Ultimately, though, we need to build a culture of aspiration and possibility where students previously pre-judged by test scores and other evaluation methods walk through those doors on Scoville and feel that they will determine their future and not be held back by a system built to squash their future.
