Good evening everyone, my name is Paul Karnstedt. I am a science teacher at Libertyville High School and am serving as the Secretary of the D128 Federation of Teachers. I’m honored to be in this position of speaking on the behalf of our Union tonight, and I thank you for the opportunity to address you.
The purpose of us speaking at these meetings is to be an informative teammate with the Board as well as our Administration by sharing our members’ voices. We hope that this is used as a tool to reflect and refine our decisions and practices. Now that we are over two months into the school year, we are in the swing of things, and there is plenty to talk about.
First, we wanted to welcome the newest member to the Board, Mithilesh Kotwal. We are looking forward to working with you, and we are excited to hear your voice at the table as we work together to serve the students of this District.
Secondly, we wanted to acknowledge something the Union and District Administration accomplished together. As you may know, a law was passed at the start of August that changed the pathway for acquiring tenure in the State of Illinois. This new law passed just before the time we usually recognize teachers who have received tenure, on Opening Day, and as a result, the District was not ready to recognize twelve teachers in our District who met the requirements for tenure as a result of this new law. This was an unfortunate situation for all involved because the most significant holdup under the previous system was that these twelve teachers were not evaluated during the 2020-21 school year of eLearning. Thankfully, through the grievance process between District Administration and Union, we achieved a resolution and those 12 teachers were recognized as tenured on the October 9th Institute Day. This may seem like a small thing, but I can tell you personally, as one of those 12 teachers, how important this was to our members. I want to especially thank Briant Kelly for his work on the issue.
The third, and biggest item that I’ve come to speak to you about, is our District’s movement towards heterogeneous classes. The move from a traditionally tracked system where students are grouped according to ability level (homogenous) to one where students of varying ability levels are in the same class, is a massive undertaking. Encouraging our “striving learners” to strive harder by being with students of higher academic achievement is a noble idea. But this is a massive shift in educational policy that has our members deeply concerned about how to successfully implement this change. It has been discussed here how concerned our membership is about the speed at which changes are being adopted in our District, and the October 9th Institute Day caused a lot of these concerns to surface among our membership. Our members all have different roles and therefore have varying opinions, so I will try to boil down all of the concerns that were shared with us into two key categories.
First, many of our members feel that the partnership with Equal Opportunity Schools resembles another “AP Push.” The first presentation of the Institute Day was given by Equal Opportunity schools, and our membership felt that the majority of the presentation focused on increasing AP enrollment. We then took a 45-minute survey that was centered around our attitudes about AP classes and concluded with us recommending students to enroll in AP classes. Given the way that we were told about the reporting of this data, many teachers said they felt pressured to recommend students into AP classes. The message of the EOS presentation was further confused by the next keynote consultant, Tony Frontier, who gave a nice presentation that was generally received positively, but ended with a very explicit message to teachers to “slow down” in their classrooms to accommodate the needs of students with varying ability levels. While his presentation was high-spirited and positive, ending with an encouraging staff sing-a-long, no update was provided in terms of the work that he has been doing with teams of D128 teachers. Upon reflection, it would have been an ideal time to get the entire staff on board with the upcoming changes and the work that is currently underway.
Many of our members are torn because we feel that pushing kids into AP courses runs counter to our Social and Emotional Learning initiatives. Later that day on October 9th, there was a presentation made at the Board Committee Meeting about the results from our student SEL survey data from earlier this year. One of the final slides was a word cloud with the prompt “thinking about everything in your life, what feels the hardest for you right now?” The biggest word, and therefore most common reply? “School Work”, followed by “college apps”, and “homework stress”, “tests”. To be clear, we believe in challenging our kids, but the messaging around the EOS presentation was we are not pushing them enough while they are simultaneously reporting that school work load is their biggest stressor.
There is also some confusion as to what exactly EOS is doing to help us move to heterogeneous classes. The majority of District messaging about WHY the shift to more heterogeneous classes is important (outside of the new Accelerated Placement Act) is that our minority, Special Services, and English Language Learner students are over represented in our “striving learners” classes. In fact, hours after our institute day, at the October 9th committee meeting, the Board viewed a presentation where this data – not AP data – was used to support the movement to heterogeneous classes. Therefore, why are we bringing in a consultant whose stated purpose is to increase enrollment in AP classes? Why isn’t the conversation revolving more around diagonal movement – co-taught to regular, or even regular to honors? Why is our focus all of a sudden so centered around increasing enrollment in AP classes, specifically?
Secondly, our teachers are concerned about what resources and supports will be available to our students and teachers as we make these big changes. What sort of extra help will we have for struggling students? Will students have the ability to move down if they feel the challenge is too much without compromising optimums, which are designed for effective instruction? What sort of professional development is going to be available, and how will we balance that on a large scale with our current teaching duties? There are lots of smaller trainings going on with targeted groups of teachers, but it is unclear how this will be scaled up to all teachers.
We have a passionate staff in a lot of different places about the issue of the District shifting to heterogeneous classes. This has been addressed already by Dr. Herrmann at the previous May 8th Committee meeting, and she is right, that this isn’t going to change quickly. However, it is clear that our members are yearning for more meaningful professional development to prepare for this shift. They are anxious to learn about what support will be in place for our students, both in the academic domain, and the SEL domain. They want some clarity that our district’s approach to the shift to heterogeneous classes is done intentionally and in a way that will benefit our students and not just as a way to increase AP enrollment or to simply be compliant.