Most Maine high schools say they need more time to begin awarding diplomas based on proficiency and not seat time or credit hours. Last week, the state gave high schools the option to complete this work by 2020, instead of 2018. A handful, though, don't need any extension.
The story of how Searsport District High School became a leader in proficiency-based learning began, as many education reform experiments do, after the school kind of hit bottom. In 1997, Searsport lost its accreditation as a high school. Six years later, the school got thrown a lifeline.
Jean Hager is with the Great Schools Partnership, a non-profit that supports improvement at the school, district and state levels.
"There were 12 to 15 schools that we started working with," she says.
The Great Maine School Project gave these high schools grants to essentially tear up their existing plans for teaching and learning and start over. But Hager, who worked on the project, says chronic staff turnover and other problems prevented some schools from fully taking advantege of the opportunity.
"Searsport was one of the few schools that took the opportunity to use the funding, resources and supports to reinvent who they were and how they could serve students better," Hager says.
This initial work a decade ago helped Searsport become what it is today: a high school where students only advance and get a diploma if they master the state learning standards.
On this day, the journey towards proficiency in English language arts in Nancy Raymond's freshmen English class has her ninth graders, working in teams, brainstorm in questions about some significant people in recent world history.
"They're doing a mini-research project, using collaboration and the research process," Raymond says, "so they can cover the literacy community standard and the research standard."
Raymond says these are the final two of six different sets of language arts skills that the students have been immersed in all year.
"So the first standard is being a critical reader," she explains. "The second standard is understanding literature. The third standard is writing and speaking effectively. The fourth standard is using grammar and mechanics, effectively."
Set foot in Raymond's room and it's hard to miss all these objectives. They're plastered everywhere - on blackboards, whiteboards, sketch pads on easels and laminated posters of various sizes. Students go through similar progressions, at each grade level, in all their classes.
Kids who struggle can attend daily in-school and afterschool extra help sessions. There's also end-of-semester options to help students who are really in trouble. In a district - RSU 20 - that, like so many others, is struggling with how best to allocate limited resources, Brian Campbell, Searsport's principal, says proficiency-based education at Searsport High is about one thing: equity in education.
"It's an equitable system because every single kid is being measured by the same standards," he says, "is expected to do the same high-quality work. And no one is being told, 'You can't achieve this.'"
Campbell says the school's proficiency-based system works just as well for the kids who want to go to college as it does for the ones who would rather become pastry chefs, lobstermen or master mechanics.
For years, the school has been getting calls from other parts of the country, seeking information on its programs and how they work. It also gets a lot of calls from Maine high schools and districts, and it's likely those will continue to come in consistently in the coming years, as the state nears the deadline for awarding proficiency-based diplomas.