Terrence Bosell sat in his 8th period freshman study hall with his head down on his bony arms, looking like another day at Evanston Township High School had totally taken the life out of him.
But suddenly he popped up in his chair, eyes intense, transformed into a cocky world-beater, rising to a question about a workload made heavier by the honors classes he takes.
“This may seem strange, but I do better in honors classes,” he said. “The work is constantly coming at you and it gives you something to work with. If it’s always coming at me I’m more centered and focused.”
Such positive responses to challenge are the specialty of a program at the school designed to get students who wouldn’t ordinarily be qualified, based on their test scores, into and successfully through the school’s tough, high-expectation honors courses.
The program, called Steps Toward Academic Excellence, or STAE, is a key element of the school’s attempts to deal with academic and social challenges of a kind experienced by only a few other schools in the U.S.
The North Shore public school is daintily called diverse by many Evanstonians; some might call it polarized.
This year the school sent two of its 586 graduates to Harvard, two to Princeton, two to Dartmouth and a host to other top colleges around the country. One student was named a presidential scholar, and the school was a national winner in the SuperQuest High School Supercomputing Competition for the fifth straight year.
But the school also had a stabbing incident in a hallway, helped bail students out of jail and bombarded students with information on staying away from drugs and gangs, which are harsh realities in both the school and the city.
In an honors English course, students assigned to relate a vivid incident in their lives may talk of a trip to Paris or a safari in Africa; students in a regular English course in the same grade with the same teacher may write of an encounter with police, a graffiti-spraying expedition or a violent fight at home.
“The school is unique in its wide variation of social-class background,” said James Rosenbaum, Northwestern University professor of education. “You have kids of professors and top-level executives and of parents on welfare. And you have substantial numbers of each. That’s what’s unusual.”
The North Shore public school also has an almost even split along white and black racial lines. In a student body of just above 2,700, 45.4 percent are white and 44.3 percent are black.
These kinds of divisions can be fertile breeding grounds for conflict, with every contentious issue in danger of becoming a racial issue.
For instance, perceptions of declining standards of behavior and achievement coupled with an increasing black school population have been ripping apart Proviso West High School in Hillside, with some white parents campaigning for their Westchester area to secede from the district.
And three years ago in Evanston, an incident involving a racial remark by a high school teacher sparked a series of town meetings in which sharp fissures emerged in the perceptions by many blacks and whites of the school’s mission and performance. Some charged the institution was really two schools: an accelerated version for whites and an inferior one for blacks.
But even while those accusations were being made-not for the first time-the STAE program was already changing the racial composition of the accelerated program.
At the same time, the program appeared to be offering promise that high standards; consistent, hands-on support; careful monitoring; incentives; and an insistence on parent involvement can raise the achievement level of students regardless of background.
The most dramatic result of the program, which began with about two dozen students in 1986 and now involves some 300, has been to more than double the rate of minorities entering and staying in honors courses.
In 1985, only 13 percent of students taking at least one honors course were minorities; this year the rate is more than 30 percent.
But STAE isn’t only for minoriites. Whites and blacks participate in about equal numbers, which administrators say is a key factor in the program’s success.
“Each year I’ve had (minority) parents who say, `If this is just for minorities, my kid won’t participate,’ ” said Associate Principal Jeff Taggart. “They perceived a danger for the child, that somehow the standards would be different, that it might be just a shell game.”
The issue of minority-help programs is a touchy one, given a belief in Evanston’s black community that black students have traditionally been given short shrift. The suspicion lurks that anything targeted solely at blacks might be inferior-intentionally or not.
Those dynamics have undermined similiar efforts elsewhere, according to Rosenbaum. “A number of schools and colleges have set up special programs to improve black achievement,” he said. “Sometimes there’s a tendency for such a program to become stigmatized.”
Blacks and whites helped
For that reason the STAE program was designed to be racially balanced even though it was developed primarily out of a need to improve minority performance.
Detailed data on STAE student achievement by race is not available, but overall the strategy appears to have been successful, with black and white students benefiting.
In the last four years, less than 20 percent of entering freshmen involved have dropped out of the program-a figure that includes students who have transferred to other schools. And in the different grade levels over the past six years, from 38 to 59 percent of STAE students have made the honor roll (requiring a 2.7 grade-point average).
There have been some problems, however. In the 1992-93 school year, when the entering STAE group was greatly expanded from the previous year, almost half the freshmen in the program were getting at least one “D” at mid-year. Administrators decided they had outstripped their resources, cut back the numbers for the next year and tightened monitoring of students to prevent a recurrence.
Justin Shapiro, a white sophomore, said he’s glad his parents pushed him into the program. In honors classes, “you’ve got a lot of work to do, but it’s more fun and more in-depth.”
And he added that Jill Korshak, the STAE program coordinator, keeps on top of him to keep up with the work. “If I start to screw up, she’s just like my mom, so I don’t screw up as often as I did without it.”
Bosell, who is black, spoke in similar terms. “Korshak and the tutors care about us. My parents aren’t here at school, so it’s important to have a watchful eye to tell me to do better.”
Finding likely candidates
The program targets incoming freshmen whom administrators feel have a chance of doing honors work with the proper support, based on recommendations by middle-school teachers and rankings of at least 60 percent in the Stanford Achievement Test. Honors students usually are required to score at least 80 percent.
They are invited to join the program, and if they agree are required to take a summer school class to prepare them for a math or humanities honors course.
The STAE staff evaluates summer school performance and recommends placement in honors or not. In this year’s summer school group, only 5 out of 85 were not recommended for honors, and a few others were let in on probation.
To stay in the program, the students have to take at least one honors course in English or math in each school year and keep their grade-point average in all courses above a “C” level.
In 9th and 10th grades, students attend special daily study halls that are smaller than regular study halls and staffed with tutors in English and math. In those grades, coordinators check with teachers at least four times a semester and with parents at least twice a semester to monitor student progress.
Special events are held for positive reinforcement and team-building, such as pizza parties and overnight field trips to colleges and universities.
Parents are pulled in through conferences during the summer before 9th grade and with the continued contact from coordinators, and there is a STAE parent advisory council. Parents get college couseling starting freshman year.
“There’s a higher parent involvement than average for the school, but not with all parents,” said Korshak. “We have single parents for whom school is not a priority, and we take those kids under our wing.”
For most of the students, the push to succeed from home is a powerful motivator when the work gets tough. “My mom keeps having to remind me I can do it,” said 9th-grader Beth Gayle, who is black. “She knows I can do it because they wouldn’t have put me in if I couldn’t.”
No coasting
Even with the careful selection process and the support, the volume of work is a shock to most participants.
“At first I wanted to get out because the (English) teacher loaded on so much work,” said freshman Andre Stinnette, who is also black. “But then I started getting good grades and decided to stay. It’s more of a challenge.”
Stinnette’s experience isn’t unusual, said associate principal Taggart. “You always have freshmen during first semester, breaking down the doors, saying, `I need out, it’s too hard, I can’t do it.’
“But we tell them they can’t give up yet. The most exciting thing is when they struggle all freshman year, resisting all the way, and then when they’re sophomores they’re more mature and ready to study and succeed.”
That a program can succeed with students whose test scores show them to be borderline high achievers through firm goal-setting accompanied by strong school and parent support may seem unsurprising to some.
But STAE, which will cost less than $50,000 this year out of the high school’s total budget of $42.6 million, is particularly significant because it goes against a strong movement in public education to do away with honors programs because they are supposedly elitist and unfair to students who don’t get in.
That approach, called detracking because of its aim to do away with different academic levels, or tracks, that separate students, was in fact advocated strongly by some people in meetings that followed the 1992 racial incident at Evanston High.
Professor Rosenbaum, author of a book on tracking called “Making Inequality,” said the problem with detracking is that it glides over wide gaps in achievement, which can stretch to seven or eight grade levels in reading among same-grade high-school students. Teaching across such a wide gap in one class doesn’t work, he said.
But Rosenbaum said the STAE program shows that flexible tracking can deal with clear achievement differences between students while allowing movement from one track to another.
“Doubling the minority numbers is really quite impressive,” he said. “They’ve gone below what they thought were necessary standards (for honors admission), and the kids have thrived.”
There are doubters
Not everyone at the school is won over by the STAE approach. “This is still a private and a public school,” said Eddie Stevens, dean of students for juniors, who leans toward detracking. “The private school is honors and advanced placement. The public is regular and lower levels.”
Stevens, who is black, agreed that the program’s placement of more African-Americans into honors classes is progress, but he expressed some cynicism about STAE’s overall significance.
“Everything’s OK if you can select who you want,” he said. “You can be successful and make the school look good.”
The fact remains that regular and lower-level classes are still mostly black, he said. “What you’re creating inherently, whether intended or not, is a situation in which they perceive themselves in certain ways.”
He said all students have the potential to live up to the higher expectations imposed in honors classes. “It would be nice if all we had was honors,” he added.
But Taggart said the success of minority students in the STAE program has encouraged other minority students to enroll in honors classes. “More kids are succeeding, and they are acting as models for others,” he said.
Taggart noted that in the past, minority students have been uncomfortable going into accelerated classes because they would be alone or with only one or two other minorities-and sometimes that still happens. Getting more minorities into the top-level advanced-placement classes is a priority for next year, he added.
“It’s an issue for the kids, even very capable kids,” he said. “A lot goes on in (their) choice to be in a class besides just ability. There’s the context of . . . being comfortable in that setting.”
Most black students in STAE don’t appear to be concerned about the comfort level. In a 1993 school survey, 77 percent of the black students said they were in STAE because they wanted to be there, rather than as a result of, say, pressure from home or teachers; for white students the number was 67 percent.
And among more than a dozen black students interviewed, none seemed to experience much alienation from peers in regular courses because they were in honors courses. “Some people think you’re a nerd if you do well, but people here (at the school) understand (doing well) is a good thing,” said Nicole Fitzgerald, a black sophomore.
The goal: Push all kids
Allan Alson, who is superintendent of the high school, stresses that STAE only addresses the upper end of the achievement gap. “These are not the ones with histories of academic failure,” he said.
The school’s overall goal is to push all kids, particularly those who haven’t done well, he said.
“There are pockets in any school where we need to improve expectations in terms of a greater quantity and quality of work, more likely at lower levels than at honors,” he said.
For more than two years the school has been going through a full-scale review of its academic program, seeking ways to motivate students and integrate learning with career objectives. Alson said he will begin to roll out specific proposals to the school board this spring.
“We want a system where there is no escape, that wherever (students) go, teachers are pushing very hard.”
