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Believing in Ourselves
Part I - For the Record
MIDDLE SCHOOL REFORM IN PROGRESS
How very naive everyone was!
In their 1989 proposals, the five school districts rightly diagnosed the
problems urban middle grades students faced-low expectations by teachers,
impersonal environments, lack of knowledge about adolescent development
by teachers, and bumpy transitions from the elementary grades, among the
most common.
None of the districts looked at their own organization and relationships
with schools as sources of problems. Nor did they anticipate any such soul
searching along the way. If they conceived a role for central offices at
all, it was to run projects and collect the data required by the grant.
Similarly, as they'd done with foundation grants for years, the schools
planned to undertake "activities" to meet the objectives of the
Clark grant. They said they wanted to add a period to the daily schedule,
or provide staff development to increase teachers' sensitivities about early
adolescents, or reduce tracking (with few details about how), or expand
parent involvement, or provide two-day seminars (or summer institutes, or
monthly meetings) to train teachers in various ways, or create cross-grade
committees.
While both the districts and the schools seemed to understand, in global
terms, that there were problems to be solved, they underestimated what it
meant to attempt real change. They also probably didn't think very much
about the barriers. Ahead of them would be school and district politics,
a smattering (and smothering) of programs/ideas they would be asked to assess
for their needs, competing priorities, the excruciatingly slow process of
developing a critical core of teachers excited about change, and a new experience
for most-the use of data to determine where they were and where they needed
to go.
In candor, the foundation also was unrealistic about the capacity of the
districts and schools to internalize middle grades reforms, as well as the
time it would take to see significant change.
Nevertheless, in the midst of all these difficulties, a few of the systems
found a voice for districtwide middle school change largely because of the
lessons they were learning from the project schools. Many of the schools
reshaped their "activities" into a vision and actions that moved
them forward. Those that changed the most only faintly resemble the schools
they were at the beginning of the project. The truly profound change, of
course, took place between teachers and students.#
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from Believing in Ourselves: Progress and Struggle in Middle
School Reform. By Anne C. Lewis. Published in 1995 by the Edna McConnell
Clark Foundation.