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Four years ago many Berkeleyans were involved in a passionate debate over a proposal to divide Berkeley High entirely into small schools. The School Board eventually resolved that controversy by adopting a compromise plan which called for a Berkeley High School with half its students in small schools and half its students in a large, comprehensive school. 

This fall a proposal is working its way quickly and quietly through BHS which, if approved by the School Board, would effectively render that compromise null and void. While the label “comprehensive high school” would remain, every student considered a comprehensive high school student (by virtue of not being enrolled in a “small school”) would be enrolled in one of two “small learning community” programs—Academic Choice or a new International High School (IHS) program. IHS would start next year as a program for 9th and 10th grade and add a grade each year until it becomes a four-year program, offering International Baccalaureate (IB) as an option in the 11th and 12th grades. Since this proposal was instituted by BHS’s powerful and popular principal, Jim Slemp, there is a widespread assumption at the high school that it will be approved. 

Under the proposed new configuration for the high school, students will be assigned to one of the small schools, Academic Choice or International High School using the same lottery system as was used to assign students for the current year. IHS will simply replace “large school” as one of the choices. Students enrolled in International High School would take three classes within the program each semester, plus they will be required to take a world language of their choice all four years. This compares to Academic Choice where students take two classes within the program each semester and small schools where students take four to six classes within their school.  

This year, programs and schools were required, via the lottery, to match the diversity of the school as a whole in 9th and 10th grade, but 11th and 12th grade students were allowed to continue wherever they were. After two more years, however, the administration has said it intends to maintain matching diversity in all schools and programs at all grade levels. This implies that a student won’t be able to transfer out of a school or program unless there is an opening for students of their diversity category in the school or program they want to join. I fear that students’ ability to change programs could be very limited. 

Imagine a college where every freshman is required to declare a major from among only half a dozen choices, with little possibility of changing it if it doesn’t suit. Then imagine that those students are only 13 years old and, to top it off, that they may have to accept a major that is their second or third choice. Would anyone apply to such a school? BHS could become that school. The variety of choices which were once the hallmark of BHS and which were a large part of what people valued in the comprehensive school would be gone. What a shame. 

There is no question that International Baccalaureate is a high quality, rigorous academic program. Although lately it seems to have become something of an educational flavor-of-the-month (much as small school reform was four years ago) it has a long established, internationally recognized reputation. However, Berkeley High already has a vigorous Advanced Placement program (open not just to Academic Choice students, but to everyone except some students whose small school won’t let them passport out). The needs of students who are ready to do college level work while still in high school are being met (at least in 11th and 12th grade). It is the needs of the many students who are failing at Berkeley High that should be our primary focus. The IHS proposal does nothing to specify how its 9th and 10th grade program would better help those students to succeed. Taking IB tests would be optional for IHS juniors and seniors, which would very possibly produce a two tier International High school with the same achievement gap that our entire educational system currently suffers from.  

The IHS proposal seems to be geared to overcome the disappointment of students who requested Academic Choice or a small school but were placed by lottery selection in the general comprehensive school. Although the lottery has accomplished its very desirable goal of making all programs and schools equally diverse, it has forced our academic programs to compete with each other and turned school choice into a popularity contest. There will always be losers in such a contest. Next year the outcry may come from Academic Choice parents who wanted their kids in IHS, or perhaps the small schools—once the darlings of Berkeley High—will become the place where the “leftovers” are placed. The small schools are already struggling against the misperception in some minds that they aren’t college prep programs. Creating a “comprehensive” school where everyone is in a program that can (but doesn’t necessarily) lead either to IB or AP won’t help small schools.  

For every action to change things at BHS there is a reaction. When will we learn to anticipate the fallout from the endless, countless changes made at BHS? We have a multi-year action plan to raise academic achievement while eliminating the achievement gap. When Berkeley High’s accreditation was reviewed last spring, that plan earned our school WASC’s highest level of approval. Nowhere does that plan propose converting the remainder of the comprehensive high school into another small learning community or to an International High School. Can’t we stay the course even one year and follow through with our laboriously laid plans? Must we always be pulling in some new thing that will suck away attention and resources from solving the basic, long term problems at BHS? 

Whereas the small school RFAs (request for authorization) and the Academic Choice program proposal previously approved by the School Board were lengthy, detailed documents written by large committees of teachers, parents and students over a period of time, the International High School (IHS) proposal is a four page document written by Jim Slemp. An IHS design committee with members from the various stakeholder groups has now been appointed, but Principal Slemp says he does not anticipate that the proposal will change much before being presented to the school board in January. The devil is in the details as they say. I implore the community and the Board of Education to take a long, hard look before leaping off in yet another direction at Berkeley High. 

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