Scenes of progress and struggle
along the road to school reform

• Students at Hill Middle School explore the founding of the American nation by assuming the roles of historical characters and staging a day-long press conference to debate the pros and cons of representative democracy.
  
  
• The district's academic standards become increasingly visible as teachers post them on classroom walls and parents receive brochures describing the new expectations for students. But district leaders continue to search for effective ways to explain standards-based reform to LBUSD's diverse constituency.
  
  
• Teacher shortages force LBUSD educators to hire hundreds of underqualified teachers, many of whom have little training in working with students who are not yet fluent in English.
  
  
• A delegation of LBUSD educators draw national attention to their middle school reform efforts when they present widely praised seminars and workshops at the Urban Conference of the National Middle School Association in Chicago.
  
  
• Teachers at Cubberly School work to create an accelerated "catch-up" plan for a pair of home-schooled students who've arrived in 8th grade with 3rd-grade reading skills.
  
  
• LBUSD completes standards for English Language Development, creating the district's first detailed roadmap to fluency in English.
  
  
• Teachers at more than a dozen LBUSD middle schools carry out their own "action research" to solve specific problems identified by school faculty. At Avalon School on Catalina Island, for example, a four-teacher team investigates whether a schoolwide reading program is really strengthening student skills.
  
  
• District surveys of middle school science and language arts teachers reveal that while more teachers are using academic standards in their everyday teaching, many teachers have still not made changes in their curriculum to meet the standards.
  
  
• Students at Constellation Charter Middle School uncover mistakes in their own textbooks during a hands-on exploration of internal combustion engines.
  
  
• Teachers at Hughes Middle School develop and share with other schools a system to collect annual samples of every student's work and pass them from grade to grade, giving teachers a better idea of each child's academic progress.
  
  
• More than 800 educators, parents, and community members attempt to "seize the day" at LBUSD's annual Carpe Diem conference, where the emphasis is on using academic standards to improve teaching and learning.
  
  
• Results from the district's ITAS testing in reading, language, and mathematics showed little or no improvement between 1995 and 1996 among LBUSD 8th graders, underscoring the urgency for standards-based curriculum reform. District officials say that this year's ITAS results (available in the fall) will be a better test of LBUSD's reform efforts.