The 2024-2025 District 90 school year brings with it a new director of curriculum and instruction and a cautious optimism River Forest schools will once again make curriculum and instruction the mantle of public education. To this end, E3 recently asked new hire Christine Trendel to respond to the question:
“How do you define differentiated instruction in K-8”?
Superintendent Ed Condon responded for her saying: “…requests for information from you will be responded to by my office or through the Director of Communication, Stephanie Rath”.
Trendle was asked again for an interview, sit-down, phone call, anything on how she feels about differentiation for ability level.
After being cut off by her boss, it seems reasonable any unique insights from Christine may be limited going forward. Often times organizations will replace a leader to interject new ideas, break up groupthink, or bring proficiency that is otherwise lacking. An open slot for director of curriculum and instruction seemed like an opportunity ripe for the picking, and here is why.
At the center of River Forest's 2016 policy induced learning loss is abandonment of differentiated instruction: curricula and instructional practices meant to deliver rigor to a range of student abilities (rigor: challenge just above ability level). The D90 board’s argument at the time – there is no way to deliver rigor without racism, students should not be on academic tracks, and D90’s antidote was the mediocre academic middle, disappointing most district teachers.
Depriving children of an ability to read, write, and do arithmetic at their full potential seemed unfair not equitable, and the opposite of social justice. Pulling off a social experiment of this magnitude in tiny River Forest required (at least) a combination of language manipulation and withholding information; both good causes for asking questions of new school leaders.
A famous example of maleficence comes from D90’s former curriculum director to parents where she uses fear and new phrases to avoid clear articulation of district changes to math.
“If leveled math instruction begins prematurely, there is a risk that some students who might otherwise qualify for acceleration might not have the opportunity to participate.”
This should sound very familiar to current OPRF parents experiencing a detracked freshman year – or in the parlance of administrators a “re-structured” freshman year. Okay, one without “leveling.”
In her letter on math, “align curricula and learning experiences” could have read the same way then board president Ralph Martire explained it – “a single lesson where students already mastering content help teach other students before the whole class moves on”. She could have said, the old math curricula relied on a “teacher-to-student pathway” for learning and the new uses a “student-led pathway”. She could have said we’ve brought back the losing side of the math and reading wars.
Instead of clarifying the switch to student-led curricula, the district distracted a trusting community by appealing to parent emotions. Now, “differentiation” ignored curricula and instead was linked to the style of instruction preferred by individual students (visually, with books or video, games, groups). Wow that district cares about my kid, huh?
When asked about changes to differentiated instruction back in 2018, the former curriculum director justified todays questions saying, “there seem to be several different definitions of differentiation.” The district had already moved on from treating classrooms as a collection of individuals and was grappling with how not to say it to parents. A few years later you can listen to OPRF administrators refrain on detracking.
So we wait, still with high hopes, that who D90 picked sees classrooms as individuals with different abilities, values clear communication, and is willing to take a stand for developing full potential.