Two months ago at a woodland retreat not far from New York City, Long
Beach administrators, teachers and school board member Karin Polacheck sat
with middle school reform leaders from other school systems supported by
grants from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. Heads nodded as Hayes Mizell,
director of Clark's Program for Student Achievement, drew an analogy between
the hard work of standards-based school reform and the challenge faced by
high-altitude mountain climbers when they "hit the wall" high
on the mountain "and every muscle is screaming to quit."
"There may be many reasons why you feel you are hitting the wall,"
Mizell told the group. "Maybe you underestimated just how long and
difficult the climb would be, getting harder with each step, not easier.
Maybe you put too much faith in your equipment - not just in the written
standards, but in all the materials and accompanying tools that seem so
logical and compelling on their face but which fail to meet the real-world
tests of teachers' lack of time, or know-how, or incentive, or will to use
them."
The problem, Mizell suggested, is not a lack of commitment on the part of
reform leaders, but the reality that "long-standing structures and
practices in your school systems and schools are more powerful than the
standards. You may be realizing that merely making changes at the margins
of those structures and practices is not enough to effect the deep changes
in teaching and learning that must occur to cause students to perform at
standard."
Standards-based reforms, Mizell reminded his audience, are intended to clarify
for everyone - teachers, students and parents - what we expect students
to learn. By assessing students' progress toward high standards, educators,
in effect, establish a quality-control system that can identify what works,
and what does not work, for kids. Using this information, teachers and schools
can make the changes in curriculum, teaching practice, and student support
programs that will cause students to perform at increasingly higher levels.
This common-sense model, which reflects the "quality" approach
of many successful businesses and industries, runs counter to the traditional
hit-or-miss practices of most schools, where little attention is paid to
the results of what is being taught.
"One of the toughest things to do in public education is to face up
to the very real limitations of schools," Mizell said. "The limitations
I am talking about are not those of inadequate resources or time, but rather
the assumption that little or nothing can be done that is substantially
different from what is currently being done.
"It is almost as though there is wide agreement among the public as
well as educators that the ways schools have operated for most of this century
are, in fact, the best ways to educate children. So long as we assume that
schools and classrooms must function substantially the same as they do now,
this severely limits what schools can do to cause students to perform at
standard."
Students will not perform at higher levels, Mizell said, "unless their
schools and teachers routinely and demonstrably expect them to do so, and
unless their schools and teachers obtain and use the knowledge and skills
necessary to help them. We are not talking about a vague awareness among
teachers that standards exist, or that teachers have standards posted in
their classrooms, or even that teachers link their lessons to standards.
We are talking about changing schools and instruction so both cause all
students to perform at standard."
Mizell urged the school reformers from Long Beach, San Deigo, Corpus Christi
and Louisville to use the experience of "hitting the wall" as
"a signal for you to think more deeply about how to best focus your
energy... on a limited set of strategies and activities that have the greatest
potential to increase student performance."
After four years of working on standards-based reform, he said, Long Beach
and other districts should be able to "confidently describe" what
actions are most likely to improve student learning. If not, he concluded,
"you have been wasting your energy and that of many other people you
may just as well have been rolling dice."
In this issue of Changing Schools, we examine some ramifications
of Long Beach Unified's "high altitude" reform experiment and
look at some of the steps the district is taking to work through its own
"wall-hitting" experience, change classroom practice, and help
all children achieve at higher levels.
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