If talented, experienced teachers in some DeKalb County high schools outside Atlanta want a prime parking space or super-clean classroom, they need only say yes to one thing: volunteer to teach ninth grade. North Lawndale College Prep charter school in Chicago expects Advanced Placement teachers to teach freshmen. And at POLYTECH High School in Delaware, a schoolwide emphasis on cultivating ninth graders means teachers are “fighting” for open positions in the freshman academy, according to the principal there.
Ninth grade has long been identified as a critical year. Social networks established in earlier grade levels are disrupted when new ninth graders arrive at large, often impersonal high school campuses. Academic expectations rise, and many students are ill prepared to meet them. Over the past three decades, researchers say, ninth-grade enrollment has swelled with students who are not promoted to the tenth grade. The concern is most acute in urban districts, where studies have linked ninth-grade course failures to the odds of students’ dropping out.
At the same time, researchers have begun documenting a related phenomenon: For a variety of reasons, teachers with fewer credentials and less experience tend to teach the youngest high school students.
Mel Riddile, associate director for high school services at the National Association of Secondary School Principals, summarizes the problem by drawing an analogy to House, the popular television medical drama. “The premise is that the best doctor treats the most critically ill patients,” Riddile says. “We do the exactly the opposite of that in most high schools.”
The High School “Teaching Gap”
Johns Hopkins University researcher Ruth Curran Neild has studied the Philadelphia public school system to uncover the scope of the problem. Neild and her colleagues have documented not only a strong correlation between the proportion of courses failed in the ninth grade and the likelihood of dropping out of school, but also evidence of a gap in teacher quality between ninth-grade teachers and those who teach the upper grades.
One study of Philadelphia public schools during the 1999–2000 academic year found that each year, about 35 percent of first-time freshmen were not promoted to the tenth grade. In subsequent research, Neild and her associates showed that the percentage of courses failed in the ninth grade is a significant dropout predictor. Failing the equivalent of one extra class in a five-course load increases the odds of dropping out by more than one-third. Neild also found that most students who dropped out—even those 16 or 17 years old—were technically still in ninth grade, having failed to accumulate the credits needed for promotion. (See M. Sadowski,
“Getting to Tenth,” Harvard Education Letter, November/December 2004.)
In the Philadelphia study, ninth graders were also likely to encounter teachers with the lowest status. Neild began following a group of freshmen at two Philadelphia schools in 2001 and observed some of their teachers. An uncertain first-year instructor was teaching ninth-grade math. A freshman science instructor with two years’ experience had most recently been a bartender. A social studies teacher felt the principal was punishing him by assigning him to teach ninth grade. A ninth-grade teacher is often “the lowest person on the totem pole,” Neild says.
Neild and co-researcher Elizabeth Farley-Ripple went on to document significant gaps in teacher quality among Philadelphia high school teachers. Using teaching experience and certification as indicators of status, they found that 35 percent of students in ninth-grade math had a teacher who was either uncertified or new to the campus. In grade 12, just 25 percent of teachers had similar status. The gap persisted across subjects, peaking in the foreign languages. The researchers found the smallest variations in social studies and the sciences.
In Texas, The Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit advocacy organization, is analyzing teaching quality in the largest school districts to find similar patterns. Evidence shows that differences in teacher quality between the senior and freshman levels not only are common, but are most pronounced at schools with the highest percentages of poor students.
In schools serving mostly African-American students, for example, 42 percent of teachers in Algebra I, a typical ninth-grade class, were not fully credentialed, compared to 18 percent in schools with the smallest black populations. The disparity was even greater in English I. “Students who are in the highest poverty schools are doubly disadvantaged,” says Heather Peske, until recently the director of teacher quality at The Education Trust. “We know from the data that they’re not getting access to the teachers that they need.” (See table "The Teacher Credential Gap in Texas.")
The Teacher Credential Gap in Texas
Percentage of teachers not fully certified in math (2007):
School Poverty Level
|
9th Grade |
10th Grade |
11th Grade |
12th Grade |
| 0%-25% |
10.1% |
5.1% |
5.2% |
3.8% |
| 25.1%-50% |
11.2% |
8.6% |
7.0% |
4.6% |
| 50.1%-75% |
14.6% |
10.9% |
10.5% |
6.1% |
| 75.1%-100% |
23.3% |
15.1% |
12.8% |
5.8% |
Source: Ed Fuller, special research associate at the University of Texas and a consultant to The Education Trust.
At the Bottom of the Totem Pole
Experts say this teaching gap is due to a complex mix of cultural and logistical factors. Culture, not collective bargaining agreements or formal policies, appears to drive the hierarchy within high schools, observes Susan Moore Johnson, an expert on teacher policy and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Teaching assignments also mirror the pecking order among students, with ninth-grade or remedial students at the bottom, says Neild. “Being assigned to teach older students who are perceived to be more academically advanced … it’s kind of a reflected status,” Neild explains. “You are good enough to teach these more advanced students, while so-and-so here is only good enough to teach these remedial students.”
Researchers also see teaching assignments as a form of lateral mobility in a profession that generally does not provide differentiated career paths or monetary compensation for difficult assignments. Teachers consider working with the more mature and academically engaged students as a form of advancement. “If you stick around and you work hard and everything, instead of paying you more money, we let you teach the higher-level course,” explains Ed Fuller, a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin, who consults with The Education Trust’s Texas project. “They tend to be easier to teach and the kids tend to be a little more motivated.”
The complexities of scheduling high school teaching assignments can also influence the placement of less experienced teachers. Principals need instructors with specific skills and preparation to teach advanced classes, which makes it hard to wait to assign teachers until hiring is completed, often in the late summer. The safe bet is to leave the entry-level course for the new teacher who’s hired later.
Challenging the status quo to strengthen the ranks of ninth-grade teachers, however, is not easy. Imagine the potential controversy if a principal abruptly decides to reassign a successful AP teacher to the remedial class. “You’re going to start getting phone calls,” says high school consultant Billie Donegan, predicting protests not just from the teacher but also from the parents of the students affected. “The fact of the matter is the parents [of underperforming ninth-grade students] aren’t going to run to the school board and make a fuss,” adds Donegan.
Donegan, a retired high school teacher, describes herself as a “reformed elitist” when it comes to the ninth grade. After 20 years at South Grand Prairie High School in Dallas County, Texas, her schedule was full of honors classes. She discovered a passion for freshmen only after her principal “cajoled, conned, drugged, coaxed” her into teaching the ninth grade. Now she advises high schools on how to make that plea on a large scale, working with organizations like the Center for Secondary School Redesign, which assists schools in developing personalized education opportunities for students.
Challenging Tradition
The DeKalb County school system is expecting teacher volunteers to help lead a ninth-grade redesign that launched in fall 2008 at 11 high schools, mostly those with the highest number of dropout problems. Graduation rates in the district had climbed 12.5 percent in three years. Yet one-fourth of the district’s high schoolers were still not graduating. District administrators invited principals from the high schools with dropout problems to a day-long meeting in February 2008 to review the data and discuss the need to pique high school students’ interest early. Ninth-grade planning committees made up of principals and teachers at each campus were to identify solutions.
DeKalb is working in partnership with the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), which stresses the importance of administrators collaborating with teachers. “Smart principals are able to get some of those best teachers to come to the ninth grade and actually be leaders of teams of teachers,” says Gene Bottoms, who heads high school and middle school reform efforts for SREB. “But if you try to take that on through administrative fiat, the first thing you’re going to find out is that your school board has gotten a number of calls about what you’re doing.”
In DeKalb County, many teachers immediately responded to the call for help. A summer training session, where teachers work with SREB to develop the curriculum in reading and math recovery and career technology, attracts those interested in professional development. Other incentives are more unusual. One school offers special parking privileges to ninth-grade teachers. At another, a teacher has assurances that a modular classroom will be cleaned daily. “[There are] just things you wouldn’t expect to entice teachers,” says Gloria Talley, the deputy superintendent of curriculum and instruction. In one school she is working with, the principal asked for volunteers. To encourage others to follow, the principal held the volunteers up as models and asked them to lead presentations on the ninth-grade initiative for the rest of the faculty. The principal intends to use the ninth-grade redesign to develop some of these teachers as future leaders.
In Chicago, the North Lawndale College Preparatory Charter High School, a high-poverty school with 96 percent African-American students and 4 percent Latino, is mixing up teacher assignments to give ninth graders a blend of experiences. Principal and chief academic officer Rob Karpinski believes “scaffolding” teachers across course levels makes educators stronger, while also enriching the ninth grade. “He knows what these freshmen will take when they’re juniors,” Karpinski says. “He knows where these kids have to get.”
The benefits of this arrangement extend beyond the ninth grade. In his first year as principal, Karpinski says he focused on getting seniors into college. Meanwhile, freshmen were floundering. His problems carried over to the next year. Now he has honest conversations with teachers about the significance of the freshman year. “If you build a strong freshman class, then you have that strength for the next three years,” he says. “If you start from a weak foundation, then you’re constantly patching the foundation for the next three years.”
POLYTECH High School in Delaware is an example of what can happen once a teaching culture that emphasizes ninth grade takes root. Principal Bruce Curry says he rarely has vacancies in the ninth grade’s Educational Foundations Academy. When slots do open, he says, teachers compete to fill them. They see students excelling in the ninth grade and want to be involved.
Sharon Crossen is part of a ninth-grade team that includes both new teachers and veterans. A former state teacher of the year with 37 years’ experience, she taught eighth grade before coming to POLYTECH to help start the drama program. She enjoys teaching ninth grade because she can develop students and then keep them in her drama program for three years. As a ninth-grade teacher, she describes herself as a nurturer, showing students how to succeed at the school. Her rewards include feedback from tenth-grade teachers, who pass along praise when they see a student writing well or demonstrating impressive mastery of similes and metaphors. There also is the simple gratification of turning a ninth grader on to high school.
“I want to be the teacher who introduces and shares my love of Shakespeare and literature with the freshmen,” Crossen says. “The ninth graders are like sponges. They just soak up and absorb everything, and you really get to see the fruits of your labor.”
Letitia Stein writes about education as a staff writer for the St. Petersburg Times.
