Open Response Question
TeachBoston

A shy boy like Jesse measures his approach to life. Friends, for example, are made with care, but once earned, are cherished in the fiercely offhanded manner of boys everywhere. So, when it comes time to cross over from childhood into the adult-making years of high school, a boy like Jesse will want to go where his friends go. And this is how Jesse happened to enroll at Rex Putnam High School.

To look at, Putnam is unremarkable. It's much like any big, suburban high school. Its territory, a dozen miles from Portland, ranges from forested neighborhoods and small farms, to the thoroughfare at the bottom of the hill overgrown with franchises and a local strip joint. What's different about Putnam lies inside, at the heart of the school. Jesse's parents didn't know this when they opted to send their son to Putnam to be with his friends, rather than to the high school prescribed for their neighborhood. But their choice turned out to be a wonderful choice.

"We dodged a bullet," says Shannon Evans, Jesse’s mother. Not because the other school was a bad school, but because Putnam happened to be beginning a process of restructuring that would transform and personalize the way it teaches its 1,300 students. And Jesse Evans was a kid who needed that kind of attention. He got distracted easily, and learning was often a struggle. Naturally quiet, he shrank from competing for the attention of his teachers or from buddying up with classmates he didn't know well. As he approached ninth grade, Jesse seemed poised to sink out of sight in the swell of big-school crowds and competition.

But before classes started that fall in 1997, Shannon got a letter from Deno Edwards, Putnam's principal, inviting parents to consider placing their youngsters in something called the GATE House (meaning, Gaining Access to Excellence). This "house" would consist of three teachers-one each from social studies, language arts, and science—who would stay with a group of 90 freshmen and sophomore students for two years.

Because they would share the same students, this trio of teachers could collaborate. They could create extended projects integrating all three subjects so that learning in one class would reinforce learning in the other classes. Coordinated schedules would enable teachers to share class preparation time when they could plan curriculum or discuss how a particular student was coming along. In this arrangement, teachers and students would get to know each other very well. The GATE House was Putnam's first big change in the way the school was organized and the first part of what was to become a realignment of the large school into smaller learning communities.

"Small schools are more likely to create and sustain conditions that improe student outcomes" such as better test scores, college-level course- taking, attendance, and self-esteem, researcher’s have concluded. After reading the letter from Principal Edwards that fall, Shannon Evans wrote back: Put my son in GATE.

"If the school hadn't had this house, I don't think my son would have made it," she says today. "He might have dropped out."

Instead, Jesse is now a senior eager to graduate with his best friends, all pals he first met in GATE.

Source: Northwest Regional Education Lab http://www.nwrel.org/nwedu/winter_00/index.html

RUBRIC

Scoring is based on DEVELOPMENT of content (use and explanation of evidence from the reading) as the real “right answer.” Having the right idea but not supporting the assertions will mean that the score can be no more than fifty percent of the possible ‘topic development’ portion of the score.

Standard English conventions, based on a 1-4 score point scale
NOTE: This means that 40% of the score for any open response question is based on mechanics of language regardless of the ‘correctness’ of the answer.