Cypress School Honored for Academic Integration, Higher Test Scores

By taking an idea that was out of fashion for 10 years and combining it with today’s techniques, a seventh-grade English program at Lexington Junior High School has been honored as a model for the future.

The program recently received a Golden Bell Award from the California School Boards Foundation as one of the state’s 21 most innovative courses.

School officials said the 3-year-old program has raised the school’s scores on the statewide English test from average to among the top 25% statewide.

The old idea that is being used is to keep the best and brightest students in the same English classes with their less-gifted counterparts, teacher Joan Edwards said.

But rather than make the brighter students wallow through lessons designed for less-gifted students, which was generally the case 10 and 20 years ago, the average and below-average students are being given assignments that normally would only be given to classes with only gifted students.

For example, the students in Edwards’ classes are rewriting a fairy tale such as “The Three Little Pigs.” They can rewrite the story from a different angle such as the Big Bad Wolf’s point-of-view. Students can modernize it or set it in a different culture.

In a class designed for average and below-average students, such an assignment would be more structured, and the students would be told what to write about and what angle they should take.

“What we’re finding is that the gifted students are still doing the same beautiful work they always do, but the less-gifted students are stretching themselves intellectually,” Edwards said. “Maybe their work isn’t as creative or in-depth as the gifted students’, but they are being successful at their own level.”

The program has also helped classroom discipline, Edwards said. Gifted students can lead their peers by example, she said, but when they are segregated, the average and below-average students have no one to emulate.

“When someone starts goofing around, the gifted students are often the ones who give that student a look that says ‘What are you doing?’ ” Edwards said. “It’s peer pressure and it works. But if the gifted students are not in the class, it’s often the kids who act up who become the class leaders.”

Student Celina Balangue, who would be in a gifted English program at other schools, said she prefers being in an academically mixed English class. Her social studies and math classes are for gifted students only.

“I like this English class because when it is just the (gifted) students, we all think alike and we always come up with the same ideas,” the 12-year-old said. “In this class, we get people from all different groups, and we learn from each other.”