At the side of a narrow two-lane ribbon of road in southern Maine, a low-slung sign marks the entrance to Noble High School. The school itself stands at the end of a long, curving asphalt driveway surrounded by woods on either side. Each year, the school buses that roll along this stretch of road and driveway collectively travel 1.3 million miles. They carry students between home and school across a wide, rural swath of the state.
Along the driveway, beyond a thicket of pine trees, a set of green wooden bleachers surrounds a modest but well-kept football field. Past the field the driveway circles a small parking lot. Visitors will find themselves in front of an immaculate and modern two-story structure of wood, brick and glass. Two prominent features face the front lot: a clock tower with silent hands that dutifully track time and Noble's mascot, a medieval knight astride a galloping horse. These are the totems of an iconic American high school.
At Noble's main entrance a wooden arbor leads up to a small bank of glass doors. On one side of the doors is a large concrete plaque that announces the building's opening date in 2001. Inside the school, sunlight streams through skylights and large plate-glass windows, illuminating the warm, blond, hardwood windowsills and reddish-brown brick walls. A large American flag hangs from the exposed wood rafters of Town Hall, the spacious foyer where the main corridors and central stairwell of the school converge like spokes to a hub. Inviting wooden benches are interspersed throughout Town Hall and its connected hallways, many placed in bright, window-framed alcoves where students can be found talking, reading and working.
Although Noble has the striking physical features of an Architectural Digest cover school, its beauty is more than skin deep. At the heart of its purposeful design is the school's instructional vision. This vision, built around teacher teams and personal relationships with students, is consistent with and supports the key design features of smaller learning communities. Before the new building first opened, its physical layout had been carefully drafted by teachers and administrators engaged in organizational and instructional reforms since the early 1990s. Broadly speaking, these reforms occurred in two phases.
The first phase occurred between 1990 and 1997 as Noble's staff, led by visionary Principal Pam Fisher, attempted to promote academic success beyond a small group of students. In Noble's rural, racially homogeneous but socioeconomically diverse community, the students who succeeded in school and went on to college generally came from families on the upper rungs of the economic ladder. Noble was less successful at educating students whose parents occupied lower rungs or had not attended college. Spurred by the goal of reducing achievement gaps between these groups, Noble's staff implemented a variety of curricular and instructional reforms designed to foster and promote equity, rigor and personalization at the school. These reforms included heterogeneous grouping of students into classrooms, a core academic curriculum for all, the formation of grade-level teacher teams and the adoption of block scheduling.
The vigorous reform agenda of the early to mid-1990s gave way to a period of relative constancy following Fisher's departure in 1997. Because school and district leaders believed that the reforms of the 1990s were necessary but not sufficient to achieve academic goals, however, Noble initiated a second phase of reform in 2002, which it implemented in fall 2003. Phase two, spearheaded by Principal Christian Elkington, involved Noble's conversion from a comprehensive high school serving 1,200 students into three smaller learning communities, or academies, serving 400 students each. Phase two reforms built on and extended the changes adopted during phase one.
For example, one key instructional reform at Noble — grade-level teacher teams for core classes in English, social studies, mathematics and science — were developed during phase one and remain entrenched elements of Noble's educational culture. During Noble's phase-two conversion, these teaching teams have become the building blocks for Noble's three academies. Currently, each academy is composed of four grade-level teams (one each for grades 9-12) that are designed to enhance personalization during a four-year period.
This case study describes Noble High School's reforms beginning in the early 1990s and continuing through the present. A review of the first phase of reform provides history and context for the current smaller learning communities reform effort. Underpinning Noble's past and present improvement efforts are a sustained commitment to high school redesign that serves all students well, a focus on heterogeneity as a lever for distributing academic success broadly and a record of engaging the community in the change process.
At this writing in 2005, Noble has completed two years of its transition to academies, and is showing early signs of improvement in the areas of discipline, attendance and academics. For example, between 2002 and 2005 in-school suspensions and class cuts have been reduced by more than 50 percent, and absences have declined from 7.26 percent to 5.2 percent. Academically, the percentage of Noble students meeting or exceeding proficiency on the Maine Educational Assessment (MEA) in mathematics doubled from 8 percent to 16 percent between 2003 and 2004. In addition, Noble had established a set of ambitious long-term academic goals and incorporated a rigorous, performance-based graduation requirement as the senior-year capstone for all students.
