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Believing in Ourselves

Introduction



URBAN MIDDLE SCHOOL REFORM: THE BEGINNING

Pride.

It brims over in the eyes and words of John Perkins and Fanny Timmer as they describe their young students. At Western Middle School in Louisville their youngsters--poor, looked down upon by the rest of the system's schools, not expected ever to do anything spectacular--stunned the community with what they did do, not, as in all the years before, by what they didn't do. Their scores on Kentucky's new, tough performance assessments surpassed the threshold level assigned to the school. With no magnet programs and a high percentage of students considered learning disabled, Western outperformed all but three other middle schools in the district.

Others might have been surprised, but not these two sometimes crusty teachers, so accustomed to hoping -- and knowing how little hope there is to go around. Together, they have spent more than 50 years at this school isolated in the old port area of the city, doing their best to educate students who probably would not finish high school, just like the students' parents and grandparents who had attended Western. In the past few years, however, Perkins, Timmer, and the rest of the staff at Western began to believe they could break the thongs of failure wrapped so tightly around their students. The teachers and principal came together on a vision of higher student achievement for Western students and worked hard to make it real.

As a result, Perkins was sure his eighth-graders "were up for those assessments." And Timmer, too, "knew they could do it." Instead of just a handful of achievers, they could count on many like Stacy Irhke, a shy but determined youngster who learned to "love" Shakespeare because she played Juliet in a school production and set her sights on a career in veterinary medicine before she left Western. Her mother had dropped out of the same school after the seventh grade. Stacey is now on the way to becoming the first person in her family to graduate from high school.

What Stacey and her fellow students accomplished put Western in a positive spotlight for the first time in its 65-year history. And earned a $96,000 bonus from the state for the teachers to spend as they wish.

Sadness.

This is what Donna Blochwitz feels as she retires from teaching and from Frick Junior High School in Oakland. For the last five of the 10 years she taught at Frick, Blochwitz, in her always enthusiastic and sometimes zany way, tried everything and every way that came along to make teaching and learning better for her students. She volunteered to work out schedules for "castles," the houses that divided the school enrollment into smaller groups; started cooperative learning; and attended conferences with her own money to gather ideas on reform that she shared with other teachers.

The environment required troubleshooting principals, each stricter than before, less able to carry out reforms that would make the school a better place for students.


A succession of three principals in five years, however, wore down the resolve of Blochwitz and other teachers. Their daily crises outshouted the constant stream of reform plans handed down by the district's central office. Enrollment dropped so far that the district began to use Frick as a way station for students scheduled for disciplinary hearings. The environment then required troubleshooting principals, each one more strict than the one before--and less able to carry out reforms that would make the school a better place for students. Nothing improved, not student achievement, their behavior, or teacher morale.

The regular appearance of fire engines -- to put out fires that were symbols of student anger and lack of self control -- led a recent graduate of Frick, now in a high school health sciences magnet, to echo Blochwitz in describing her former school. "It's sad," she says, "to be in a public school in this city and have that kind of thing happening all the time."

Blochwitz left Frick with "a broken heart."


A PARTING OF THE WAYS

These two schools appear to be very different, but they share much more than it seems. Both are typical inner-city schools trying to cope with students who each year become poorer, whose families often are increasingly as alienated from their children's lives as they are from the schools, whose teachers must turn around years of low expectations for students. In both schools, almost all students were eligible for Title I services (federal compensatory aid for poor, underachieving students). Each school also has a core of teachers willing to experiment, teachers who believe their students are capable of learning much more than in the past.

For five years, beginning in 1989, both schools were able to draw upon unprecedented resources to raise expectations and make sure their students were ready for challenging work in high school. They were part of a foundation-funded network of 12 schools serving inner-city middle grades students in Baltimore, Louisville, Milwaukee, Oakland, and San Diego.

The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation's Program for Student Achievement created the network, providing unfettered resources so long as the funds went toward using pivotal schools as wedges for systemic middle school reform. Launched at a time when concerns about young children and at-risk high school students took center stage in the media and policymaking, the program sought to draw attention to students at very formative ages -- when they make crucial choices in education and in their lives. For young adolescents living in distressed urban areas, the choices were limited, indeed.

Selected from about 20 urban districts that had responded to the foundation's request for proposals, the network's five districts pledged to focus on three goals-high expectations, high content, and high support. Translated into specific objectives, being successful at the "three highs" would mean that between leaving the fifth grade and entering the 10th, students in the schools would: In selecting the sites for the project, the foundation looked for district leadership willing to undertake reforms that would be uncomfortable for the status quo. The districts, in turn, used their own criteria to choose the participating schools. For the most part, they selected schools that were really troubled
-- two each in Baltimore, Milwaukee, and San Diego; three each in Oakland and Louisville.

The only true exception was a San Diego middle school -- Muirlands -- whose La Jolla neighborhood is one of the wealthiest in the district and where parents demand much from the school. However, one-third of Muirlands' students come from Barrio Logan across town as part of San Diego's voluntary desegregation plan. Muirlands' challenge was to bring the achievement of its minority students much closer to that of its neighborhood students.

If the Clark Foundation had wanted a comfortable project with guaranteed successes, it would not have chosen these particular urban districts. Highly distressed neighborhoods, where most of the students in the Clark schools live, are isolated from services, offer few employment opportunities, and are overrun with social problems. Baltimore and Milwaukee, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, rank eighth and ninth in the number of residents living in distressed neighborhoods. The other three cities rank from 31st to 44th.

Another approach, according to a study for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, defines the health of cities by their "elasticity," or their capacity for population growth. Four of the five Clark sites are in the bottom category here--no elasticity whatsoever. San Diego is placed in the highest elasticity group (out of five categories).

If the Clark Foundation had wanted
a comfortable project with guaranteed successes,
it would not have chosen these particular urban districts.

When cities can no longer grow, their populations become even more isolated, usually along racial as well as poverty lines; unemployment rises; and social problems increase. Traditional power structures that often marginalize the influence of school boards and superintendents hold sway, more comfortable with their habits of control than with undertaking any radical action.

The conditions and performance of urban schools in situations like these are in crisis, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching observed in a 1988 report. "No other crisis--a flood, a health epidemic, a garbage strike or even snow removal--would be as calmly accepted without full-scale emergency intervention." Yet, as the Clark project began, most of the cities-or their school districts-lacked any sense of urgency on school reform and particularly within the middle grades.

Very seldom do policymakers -- or many teachers or principals -- see the crisis as young people do. At an Oakland junior high school where the principal considered discipline to be under control, recent graduates told of fearing to go to school. "I knew when school began every September," said one young girl, "that there would be a new gang in charge." In seventh grade, it was the Female Lynch Mob; in eighth grade, it became Nothing But Trouble; and in ninth grade, the Lost Girls. The progression of these gang names in itself vividly tells a desperate story of life for young teens.

In Baltimore, living in a distressed neighborhood means that Calverton Middle School students must rush home each day after school -- to get through Poplar Grove before the drug pushers come. In Milwaukee, Parkman Middle School Principal Lafayette Golden wants one small change in district policy -- to allow students living closer than two miles to ride a bus. Many of his students must walk through dangerous streets or parks; the absentee rate is high because, he says, students are too scared to come to school.

The majority of students in the Clark network schools were from very poor families, eligible for free or reduced-price lunch programs. (Muirlands again was an exception, but almost all of its barrio students were eligible for the lunch programs.) Put simply, poverty levels were a given: in all the schools but Muirlands, at least two-thirds of the students qualified for poverty programs.

In some, poverty had conditioned the students' expectations for themselves over several generations. "Many of our students rented the limo for the eighth-grade prom because they knew this was the only graduation they ever will have," says Fanny Timmer of Western Middle School in Louisville. In some cases, an inner-city school -- or any school at all -- was a new experience. Horace Mann Middle School in San Diego became a predominantly English-as-a-second-language school during the Clark grant years. Many students have had few years, some none, of schooling, and the staff must scramble not only to find ways of communicating with a student body speaking more than two dozen languages but also to learn how to deal with tribal conflicts within groups of students, such as the Somalis. Just as San Diego has become a beacon for immigrants from around the world, Mann is "the first-stop middle school," Principal Julie Elliott says of her diverse student body.

The Clark network schools shared other characteristics --l ow student performance, alienation from parents, high student and teacher turnover, and a loss of purpose (if they ever had one) of being a middle-grades school. Some had been reconfigured as "middle" schools years ago from junior high schools (usually by changing to grades six through eight), but few of the philosophical changes that are supposed to define a middle school seemed apparent, such as interdisciplinary learning, family groupings, or student-centered support services. In Oakland, the three participating schools still spanned the junior high school grades of seven through nine, and they followed the typical "junior" model, with departments and a "sink-or-swim" attitude toward the developmental needs of students.

Low-performing schools become, over a long period of time, "safe" schools for mediocre teachers.


Low-performing schools seem alike in many other ways. They become, over a long period of time, "safe" schools for mediocre teachers. They are the last stop for these teachers, schools without the energy or vision to help them improve their instruction and without the recourse of sending them on to some other school. Urban districts that use magnet schools to hang on to white/affluent families are blind to the effect on the schools left out of the picture.

"Every bright kid that I lose hurts us all," said Cheryl DeMarsh just before she left as principal of Iroquois Middle School in Louisville. The magnets might have been started for the right reasons, "but why should magnet schools be the only ones that motivate students?" she asks. "Why shouldn't we have such expectations and values for all children?"

Sometimes when a school is at the bottom, districts treat it as a goner. Oakland did this by using Frick as a last stop for juvenile offenders. The Clark schools that slipped backward over the five years of the grant rarely were seen to be in a crisis situation by their own districts until outsiders, such as the state, made them take notice.

By the end of the foundation's project (the 1993­p;94 school year), the districts altogether had received $5.7 million to implement reforms. The foundation gave another $4 million to external organizations, each one offering a different service. They brought in curriculum ideas and experts to provide technical assistance to schools and districts, created local partnerships, developed parent involvement efforts, and conducted ongoing evaluation of the reforms.

During the five years of the project, about one-half of the schools made progress. The other half had little to show for the time and investment. That the outcomes were so different is not so much a reflection of what the schools did as the result of an uneven capacity of urban systems to change. Schools individually may have their "15 minutes of fame" as reformers, but the moments of success flee unless the districts and communities support the schools in their efforts, reforming themselves in the process.

This book is the third and final chronicle of the Clark middle school network. In Gaining Ground, a report at the end of the first two years of the project, schools were doing lots of "things" under the umbrella of reform. Two years later, Changing the Odds found some schools shaping a vision, focusing resources on it, and spreading best practices to other schools. That volume also began to document success and failure, trying to understand why, with the same resources and opportunities, schools produced such uneven results from their reform efforts.

No definitive answers are possible even now that the project is over. Yet, five years of experience with middle grades reform in these districts provides the basis for perceptions to become clear pictures, ideas to gel, success to be defined, and the author's impatience to grow. Schools that floundered from the very beginning were still doing so at the end of the project, not because anyone intentionally wanted to fail, but because the desired reforms could not overcome the unwillingness of systems to change or leadership unable to move the systems.

This report is about successes, some of them extraordinary, but it gives equal attention to the context for urban middle grades reform, which is unfortunately almost always full of struggles. For some schools, this meant failure at reform. But we hope that Believing In Ourselves will help us understand why many students now in high schools in some of the five cities have more secure futures than many others just like them in different cities.

There had been high hopes for all.



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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.