8CENTER>(Vol. 1, No. 2 - Spring 1997)
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Momentum builds for school reform
as LBUSD educators explore standards
Last fall the Focused Reporting Project published the first of four community
reports on the Long Beach Unified School District's enterprising plan to
help at least 75 percent of the 6th, 7th, and 8th graders in your schools
meet challenging academic standards by the year 2001.
We promised to keep you up-to-date on how it's going. And after we remind
you that we're an independent group of writers who do not work for the school
district or ask their approval for what we do, we'll tell you that we think
it's going about as well as the community could reasonably hope.
On the surface, the district's progress toward middle school reform may
not be all that apparent. Standardized test scores haven't rocketed upward
(yet) and many children are still underserved and underachieving. But we
spend a lot of time in schools all over the United States, and we see evidence
of something in Long Beach Unified that we observe all too rarely in our
classroom journeys.
We see signs that teachers, principals and administrators are beginning
to believe they can make a difference -- that they can transform the Long
Beach middle schools into centers of learning where all kids achieve. More
educators and community leaders, we believe, are taking responsibility for
what happens in school each day. More of them are refusing to accept the
stumbling blocks of poverty, racial strife, and broken homes as excuses
for kids' failure to learn what they need to know to succeed in life.
And we're not the only folks who see this. Read the interview
with Wilma Powell, a top executive with the Port of Long Beach, who
is deeply involved with the LBUSD middle schools. "The school system
has come a long way in a very short time," she says.
What's making the difference? The leadership of superintendent Carl Cohn
and the top-notch staff he has assembled is part of the explanation. Most
important, though, is what our reporter Anne Lewis in her article "Practicing
the Impossible" calls "the vision thing."
No school system, Lewis says, can transform itself without a unifying vision
-- a vision that emerges from a deep understanding of why schools have
failed in the past and what needs to change to make success possible. Long
Beach is building its vision around high academic standards. As many of
the stories in this issue of Changing Schools explain, standards
have become the "hook" for most of the effort, energy, expertise,
time, resources, and professional opportunities now building up in the public
schools.
To understand why standards are so important, think about what it's like
to move to a new city and try to find your way around without any maps or
directions. Most of us wander here and there, slowly figuring out enough
about the city to get by, without ever really grasping "the big picture."
Many schools and school districts operate in much the same way.
Standards supply the roadmap schools and teachers need to travel with purpose
and direction through the complex terrain of teaching and learning. Standards
not only make it clear what students need to know and be able to do, they
make it possible for schools to accurately measure how far students have
progressed toward the goal.
For several years, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation has been a partner
in LBUSD's campaign for standards-based middle school reform. The Foundation,
which has invested nearly $2 million in the district's efforts, can be a
tough taskmaster. Hayes Mizell, who directs
Clark's Program for Student Achievement, is a hands-on foundation officer
who constantly challenges districts that re-ceive Clark funds to live up
to their promises to improve the lives of urban youth.
Mizell offers praise very sparingly, but even he was impressed by a
recent report from Barbara Berns, a Cambridge-based education consultant
who evaluates LBUSD's reform efforts for the Clark Foundation. "The
report indicates that the school system is moving in the right direction,
with resolve and quality," Mizell wrote to Superintendent Cohn in mid-March.
"I am especially encouraged when I read that standards and enabling
students to meet them are increasingly at the core of the school system's
myriad activities."
In her report Berns wrote: "Our general sense is that LBUSD, at all
levels of the system, is deeply committed to standards-based middle school
reform . . . . In many situations, we observed a growing recognition of
the importance of standards to drive teaching and learning. In many schools,
educators are changing their approaches to instruction and assessment."
These comments by two close, independent observers of the Long Beach middle
schools should be heartening to educators and the larger community. We believe
the stories in this issue of Changing Schools offer further evidence
that LBUSD teachers, principals and administrators are beginning to move
the complex school bureaucracy in a positive direction -- one that could
bring the district
close to meeting its goal for the year 2001.
None of this should suggest, of course, that the task is all but accomplished
or that Long Beach educators can rest assured of ultimate victory. As Carl
Cohn himself wrote recently, "There is much work to do and we need
to push (our principals and teachers) to truly examine what they are doing,
take more risks, and make more aggressive changes."
Most of what has been accomplished so far might be described as "building
up steam." In our stories, we also describe many of the challenges
still facing the district. The urgent need to change has certainly not penetrated
every school or classroom, and even now the odds are no better than even
that lasting change will come about.
But the time has certainly come for educators who believe better schools
are possible to give up their comfortable cynicism and join the fray. And
it's time for the community to do the same. Many of us who live in America's
great cities have fallen into the habit of projecting the blame for society's
problems on our schools. The truth is, our schools share the blame with
all of us. In Long Beach Unified, unlike so many urban school systems, educators
are beginning to shoulder their portion of the responsibility. They need
the larger community to do the same by rallying behind them as they work
to improve the lives of your city's children.
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