CENTER>(Vol. 1, No. 2 - Spring 1997)

Practicing the impossible

By Anne C. Lewis

Remember the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland? Rushing from here to there, "so much to do," dashing, nibbling, never stopping long enough organize his thoughts, much less enjoy the taste of a really good carrot?

Teachers and principals in the Long Beach middle schools can sympathize with the White Rabbit. They spend their days with young teens and -- as much as they care -- the daily routines of teaching and making schools run smoothly for these highly energetic, unpredictable youngsters are exhausting.

After school, many teachers are in classes themselves -- working on additional teaching credentials or earning another college degree. And LBUSD's system of school-based decisionmaking requires everyone to do lots of committee work. If all these pressures weren't enough, each school has priorities the principal and teachers believe deserve all the attention they can muster.

As teachers rush like Alice's rabbit from one demand to another, many see the district's new emphasis on a standards-based curriculum at the edge of their vision and think: "It will just have to wait its turn" or "Prove to me it's more important than all the other pulls on my time."
I'll try.

I could say that standards-based reform is a national initiative that won't go away. President Clinton made standards a centerpiece of his State of the Union address. Political and education leaders who believe we need clear statements about what children should learn are working to build a public mandate for standards.

The "national trend" argument may not persuade overworked educators who have lived (and taught) through 15 years of high-level tinkering with the public schools. Looking out the school window, it may be hard to see where all this tinkering has brought us since the early 1980s and the watershed "A Nation at Risk" report.

School reformers have felt their way -- sometimes blindly -- through the complexities of public education, searching for the most effective way to demand more of students and schools. At first, the efforts focused on old ideas of improving, such as higher graduation requirements or better screening of teacher candidates. Then states began to write new curriculum frameworks (California's was among the first). Experts turned their attention to redesigning assessments so they would really tell what students know.

Finally, none too soon, reformers realized classrooms "are where it's at," and they began to call for quality teaching and learning. Results, policymakers said, are more important than inputs, putting a premium on greater accountability from teachers and schools. To make it all work, policymakers (and many educators) began pushing for academic standards -- literally, a description of what students should know. The proponents of standards argued that teachers could do their jobs better if they used standards as a blueprint to design instruction and measure student progress. They saw standards as the vehicle that would finally make it possible for schools to reach low-achieving students.

Which leads us to a second, and perhaps more powerful reason to move standards-based reform to the heart of what teachers and schools do in Long Beach. It's "the vision thing." No school district (or company, for that matter) will improve without a unifying vision. Long Beach is building its vision around standards. Standards have become the "hook" for most of the effort, energy, expertise, time, resources, and professional opportunities now building up in the public schools.

Individuals and schools may argue that their special agendas are more important than standards. But "the standards thing" is not just another project or priority. For standards to work, they have to become the motor that drives everything. What is the eighth-grade initiative except an effort to make sure students reach certain standards? When a school decides to focus on reading skills, what is that but a commitment to help students reach specific standards?

Third, the standards are realistic about what Long Beach students will need in to be successful in jobs, careers, and families. The standards adopted in Long Beach set higher expectations of students (and require greater effort from teachers). The math standards are tough, some teachers argue, but so are the basic requirements for math skills in the workplace and in careers. The history standards are too "conceptual," say some, but they stress skills young people will need, thinking through complicated issues, putting pieces together, discerning fact from fiction.

Instead of nibbling away at individual problems in their schools, teachers and principals can use standards-based reform to provide both a big picture for what they do and a guide that will assure every classroom is challenging for every student.

Is the move to standards-based reform daunting? Absolutely. It will require most teachers to move out of their comfort zones, to rethink well-established lesson plans, and to learn better ways to assess student work. Impossible? Alice said one can't believe impossible things. But the Red Queen disagreed. "I daresay you haven't had much practice."

The middle schools in Long Beach are practicing.

Anne C. Lewis writes a monthly column for KAPPAN, the nation's most widely read education magazine.