Deviating from the Traditional Tracking System
“In my mind, the most egregious thing we do is that around third, fourth or fifth grade, we tell kids, ‘You’re smart, and you’re not,’” says Kelly. “What we should be telling them is, ‘We’re going to do everything we can to help you be successful, regardless of how you learn or anything else.’” 

As a teacher, Kelly remembers getting class rosters before school started that would label kids Honors Geometry, College Geometry or Standard Geometry. “I would make decisions about what those kids knew, and could do, without having ever met them. I would plan lessons that would challenge kids and push their thinking and give them to the honors kids, but not to the other kids,” she says. 

The practice of tracking was originally established in the 1900s following an influx of poor immigrants from Italy and Ireland. Children from those countries were given less challenging coursework because they were expected to work in factories rather than attend college. It has since become standard practice in K-12 schools. “It was always a construct that was meant to separate,” Kelly says. “And as we see people move here from different countries, we see that same narrative repeat itself.” 

Today, tracking disproportionately affects low-income, Black and Latino students. Over 65% of students in Revere Public Schools are considered low-income. The majority of its student body is Hispanic, and English is a second language for over 70% of students. As a teacher, Kelly didn’t know how to address the inequity tracking created. But when she became superintendent, she worked to do away with honors classes and put students at every academic level in the same classroom, thereby giving every student access to the same rigorous curriculum. 

Despite Kelly’s efforts to pivot from the traditional tracking system to competency-based learning, the Revere Public Schools Committee has pushed the district to reinstate honors classes for the 2024-25 school year. Some parents and guardians were concerned their children would be negatively affected by eliminating honors classes. “They want what’s best for their kids, and they should,” Kelly says. 

However, Kelly’s research does not bear this out. In fact, the numbers suggest the students who would have been tracked for honors classes—a majority of whom are white—were not negatively impacted by combining classrooms. In 2021, every single group of students measured completed a higher percentage of advanced coursework than in 2020. Between 2020 and 2021, white students’ completion rate jumped from 83.8% to 86.5%. At the same time, the completion rate for high needs students—English language learners, students from low-income households and students with special needs—increased from 65.9% to 77.2%. 

Despite the setback, Kelly has not given up on making advanced coursework available to all students. She and her staff are taking teacher recommendations into account to identify strong candidates for honors level courses next year. But the district is also giving parents and guardians the choice to enroll their children in honors classes even if they are not recommended. “It’s quasi-open enrollment,” Kelly explains. “If we move back to a detracked system, that’s going to take time. But I think that we have deviated from the traditional enough to still say that we’re making progress and that more kids are going to have access to the rigorous kind of work that we want all kids to have.”

Deeper Learning
To further assist those students who have struggled in traditional learning environments, Kelly has partnered with the Harvard Graduate School of Education to modernize outdated, industrial-era systems in schools that harm both students and teachers. “I’ve never actually met a kid who doesn’t want to learn—I’ve just met kids who feel like school is an affront to them as a human being,” she says. “If you take that same kid and put them in an environment that is more nurturing, and where there’s more hands-on learning and deeper learning, those kids thrive.”

Deeper competency-based learning aims to help students understand the underlying structures or ideas of a lesson rather than simply memorize facts. At the end of a unit on the American Revolution, for instance, a teacher might ask students to compare and contrast it to a revolution in another country rather than test them, or assign an essay which asks students to articulate pivotal moments of a single war. 

“It might be something that they literally experienced in their lifetime, or it could be something that their parents and grandparents have told them about because they fled a country that was enduring a revolution,” Kelly explains. “They would be so much more attached to that than just giving a rundown of what happened in the American Revolution—and they are still required to demonstrate their understanding of the revolution, but in a way that’s meaningful to them.” 

To measure the success of shifting from detracking to deeper learning and other initiatives, Revere Public Schools is a member of the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA). The collective of eight school districts and their local teachers unions works to develop methods that assess staff and student performance more fairly and effectively. In addition to measuring parent and student satisfaction with their school environments, the MCIEA emphasizes performance assessments in the classroom, such as asking students to write a paper on revolutions as described above, to determine their deep mastery of content and skills. “By having curriculum-embedded performance tasks, we can keep engaging kids instead of stopping the learning so that we can do the assessment,” Kelly says. “It goes hand in hand with what we’re doing around deeper learning.”

Continuing Education
Kelly shares her parents’ appreciation for postsecondary education and has worked hard to lower barriers to access for her students. In addition to Revere High School, the district is home to CityLab Innovation High School. The school was designed to give students an advantage in an ever-evolving job market through experiential learning. 

Students at CityLab attend classes in their freshman and sophomore years. Then, as juniors and seniors, they’re given the option to train on partner campuses such as the Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology and Roxbury Community College. “The program is targeted at students who struggle to be successful in a traditional learning environment,” Kelly says. CityLab students graduate with up to a year’s worth of college credits. “When you’re struggling financially, that can be a game changer,” she says.

Both high schools have dual enrollment agreements, and the district has an early college partnership with North Shore Community College. “We’re really trying to encourage kids to scoop up as many of those credits as they can,” Kelly says. She is proud of the long list of colleges and universities her 2023 graduates were accepted into, many of which are ranked among the top 100 schools in the nation. 

But continuing education doesn’t stop with her students. Kelly is also passionate about providing the teachers in her district with adequate training and support. She believes the tenets of deeper learning apply both to students and teachers. To that end, the district has implemented the Colleague to Colleague (C2C) program. Participating teachers choose an academic topic they want to learn more about, in the same way students are given the option to explore revolutions in other countries. They agree to work with a consulting teacher who conducts research on the topic, helps to plan lessons, collects data in the classroom during implementation and sometimes co-teaches lessons. 

The program is designed to benefit every teacher involved. Consulting teachers are released from classroom duties for two years to act in this role. Having built their own expertise in the process, they then return to the classroom, and another teacher steps into the consulting teacher position. At the end of each year, participating teachers will have earned 80 hours of professional development on their topic. 

With Kelly’s guidance, the district has created over 100 teacher leadership positions. In addition to consulting teachers, those positions include professional learning group facilitators and curriculum-based lead teachers. “The reason we’ve invested so heavily in coaching positions, and the C2C program, is so that teachers can have that long-lasting embedded professional development that will really help them differentiate instruction, or learn how to engage kids in deeper learning themselves. We just have brilliant teachers and brilliant students,” Kelly gushes. 

Needless to say, Kelly has made changing the education game a constant in her work. She has stayed committed to updating her schools from industrial-era models, right down to the buildings themselves. “Right now we have too few science labs, because this school was built when most kids didn’t take more than one year of science in high school. Now our kids are required to complete three years of lab science before they graduate, but our facilities don’t support that,” Kelly says. 

So the Revere City Council recently approved a bond authorization worth almost half a billion dollars to build a new 21st-century high school, due in part to Kelly’s perseverance. However, she is quick to point out that the bond would not have been authorized without the students, families and elected officials who worked so hard to make it a reality. 

“I will not deny the fact that I am tired,” Kelly says about her near decade-long career as superintendent of Revere Public Schools. It’s a long tenure, given it’s such a demanding role full of setbacks and restarts. Then again, there’s nothing standard about the way Kelly does things. “It’s the kind of job where you have to face a lot of negativity, but when you see the little rewards, it’s like, This is why we’re here,” she says. Seeing struggling students, who remind her of her brother, thrive with some individual attention is just one of those rewards. Although many challenges remain, change is coming to K-12 education—at least if Kelly has anything to say about it.