LBUSD's leaders have a powerful vision of reform, but many on the front lines are frustrated and confused. The challenge, evaluators say, is helping teachers make sense of all the changes -- and convincing them they can really make a difference for kids.
by John Norton
School reform, like love, is a good and necessary thing. But school reform
hurts.
If you don't believe it, ask the leaders of Long Beach Unified School District,
whose inspired pursuit of standards-based reform has drawn attention and
praise across the United States - and more than a few rumbles of discontent
back home.
The rumbles were heard most recently when the Teachers Association of Long
Beach turned down a 4-percent raise that would have required them to dedicate
three more days a year to their professional work - opting instead for a
3.5 percent pay hike with no strings attached.
"It's a sign that our teachers are really feeling stressed by all the
change," says one district administrator. "From their point of
view, we've just piled one thing after another on them, and they're drawing
a line in the sand."
A school-level administrator agrees. "Teachers keep asking for less
paperwork and more time to process what they're being asked to do, and instead
they feel like they're getting more paperwork and no time to recoup. I think
all the things we are doing to improve teaching and learning are probably
good, but when it all happens at once, it's just so hard to keep people
from falling apart."
Most district insiders would agree that if Long Beach educators in general
are feeling stressed out by the district's reform agenda, middle grades
educators are topping the blood-pressure charts. LBUSD middle schools have
been at the forefront of the change process - fueled in part by multi-million
dollar grants to the district from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation,
a national leader in standards-based middle grades reform.
The Long Beach middle schools have served as the staging ground for most
of the district's innovations, and they continue to be the place where many
new ideas and mid-course refinements play out first.
In a recent assessment of LBUSD's four-year march toward middle grades reform,
independent evaluators from Education Matters, Inc. wrote that "1998-99
was a challenging school year...filled with several new initiatives: the
introduction of standards coaches, the Math Assessment Portfolio, curriculum
mapping, thinking maps training, piloting of Reading Development classes,
and the expansion and refinement of two middle school reading initiatives."
In addition, the evaluators noted, the district continued to experiment
with student performance assessments, "while the inevitable SAT-9 testing
required by the state...stimulated a new emphasis on test preparation."
Throw in an intensive effort to pass a major bond issue, the opening or
revamping of several schools, and a rapidly growing student population,
the evaluators said, and it's not surprising that "the rapid pace of
change produced a significant amount of stress, and at the same time significant
progress, continuing to build on the foundation laid in recent years."
In some sense, the quest to improve the Long Beach schools has become a
race, as district leaders - and a small but growing core of educators who
understand the "grand plan" and believe it will work - scramble
to bring more teachers on board before resistance, built of frustration,
brings the whole effort to a slow, grinding halt.
Trekking Through Unknown Country
Imagine you're Lewis and Clark, trekking through unknown country, drawing
your map as you go. School reform in LBUSD is a lot like that.
"The frustrating thing about this whole work of implementing change,"
says Chris Dominguez, assistant superintendent for instruction and professional
development and a chief architect of the reform program, "(is that)
there isn't a real roadmap for how to create and implement all these pieces.
We're learning and creating as we're getting input from teachers. And to
me that's what makes this so powerful and meaningful. Yet it also makes
it frustrating."
As Dominguez sat in her office last April and traced the evolution of Long
Beach's standards-based school reform, a visitor could not help but be awed
by all the school system is trying to accomplish. Like any good "learning
organization," LBUSD constantly draws new knowledge from its mistakes
and tries to reinforce and extend its successes. Outside experts who have
spent time in the Long Beach system testify to the high quality of its central
staff members, who keep themselves abreast of the latest research and can
distinguish between a education fad and a workable solution. "They're
pretty honest with themselves," says one. "They don't pretend
something's working when it's not."
Looking back over the last four or five years, Dominguez highlighted the
important lessons about standards-based school reform the district has learned
along the way. After creating a set of content standards for every subject,
the district realized that its professional development programs for teachers
did not support the new standards approach. "Our professional development
lacked focus," she said. "We had lots of one-day types of training
and it certainly wasn't anchored in the standards in any way, shape, or
form. We saw that if we were going to have professional development make
a significant difference in teacher practice and student achievement, that
we really needed to rethink what we were doing."
As a result, the district has increasingly linked its professional development
dollars (estimated at between $3-4 million this year for middle schools)
to its standards initiatives. For example, district leaders concluded early
on that many middle grades teachers did not have the deep subject knowledge
they needed to help students meet rigorous standards. So the district -
working in conjunction with higher education - began investing in seminars
where teachers learned more about the subjects they were teaching.
But knowing the subject matter wasn't enough, Dominguez says. "Then
the question became what does it mean to take that content and put it into
a lesson, and then assess how well the kids are learning so you can improve
your lessons and vary your instructional strategies." This insight
triggered an outpouring of interconnected initiatives - from encouraging
teachers to develop standards-based units and examine the quality of student
work together, to the development of districtwide performance assessments
and portfolios that could be used in classrooms to measure individual student
progress toward standards. At the same time, the district began addressing
one of its most fundamental middle grades problems - low reading skills
- by creating special literacy institutes (see page 11).
A 1998 study of principals' roles in reform underscored another missing
component in the reform process. "We realized there was a need to bring
principals into the loop," says Dominguez. "One of the common
comments we heard from teachers is 'I'm learning all these wonderful things
in training; it's making a difference with my kids; but my principal doesn't
understand what I'm doing and why I'm doing it and why I might need certain
resources." Principals attended seminars in how to supervise learning
in a standards-based classroom and also began literacy training that paralleled
what teachers were learning in their workshops.
Fitting the Pieces Together
Although each district initiative was underpinned with more professional
development, it became clear by the summer of 1998 that teachers were still
confused about how all the elements of reform fit into a whole. As district
leaders searched for some way to pull all of the pieces together, they hit
on the concept of "curriculum mapping." They reasoned that if
subject-area departments in every school used the district standards to
create a map of what they would teach during the year, teachers and principals
would have a framework that could help make sense out of all the new learning.
Curriculum mapping, Dominguez says, "grew out of what teachers were
telling us in their evaluations of professional development. We don't roll
out anything in our standards-based reform effort unless teachers identify
it as a need. Teachers were saying that they didn't understand how to take
the standards and the curriculum objectives and the assessments and do something
with them. They really lacked that whole planning tool. We realized that
we had kind of lost sight of long-range planning."
"Here we had some high stakes assessments, but we were just kind of
marching blindly through the school year," she says. "We thought
curriculum maps could help."
Despite the district's good intentions, the introduction of curriculum mapping
set off something of a fire storm among middle grades teachers. It was a
classic example of miscommunication in a large bureaucracy. Even though
Dominguez says that "teachers who were initially involved in developing
the mapping idea said 'this is the missing piece. This makes sense,'"
rank-and-file teachers were dismayed that the district was adding "another
layer" to all their responsibilities.
"What we expected was that departments would spend the year experimenting
with developing curriculum maps and then really implement them in the fall
of 1999," Dominguez says. "But they didn't hear that. Our message
was misunderstood and many teachers were left with the impression that this
was something that had to be accomplished right now."
A similar problem developed among math teachers, who were asked to experiment
with student portfolios. The district's ultimate goal, says Lynn Winters,
assistant superintendent for research and assessment, is to create individual
portfolios for each student in each subject area. The portfolios will contain
student work, assessment results, and teacher commentary - all designed
to measure student progress toward standards at a level of detail that simply
can't be measured by the SAT-9 or district-level testing.
The portfolios were developed in consultation with math department chairs.
The district's attitude was "let's put it out there for everyone and
let them work with it and play with it," says Dominguez, but "it
was perceived as 'I have to use it.' To us and to the teachers who developed
it, this didn't seem like a high-stress issue, but it was." Dominguez
says the negative response revealed that many teachers - somewhat to the
district's surprise - were not using classroom assessments based on standards.
To those teachers, the request to place such assessments in a portfolio
represented a much bigger task than the district perceived.
The stress was compounded by a rumor that the district would audit the portfolios.
Dominguez and Winters say that was never the plan, although Winters notes
that the portfolios eventually will be audited so that samples can be used
to measure districtwide progress toward standards. "Another reason
for the stress, perhaps, it that the portfolio made teachers see that we're
taking another step toward accountability," says Dominguez.
Managing All the Teacher Learning
Few teachers question the value of the district's professional development
programs. Many agree with Judy Guess, a former teacher at Hughes Middle
School who now serves as a teacher-coach. Guess is a veteran who taught
in several school districts in Florida and California before coming to Long
Beach. "I feel that I really learned to teach from taking professional
development classes in Long Beach," she says. "It was much more
powerful than any higher education training I've had."
The problem, many teachers say, is trying to manage all the new learning,
meet the district's higher expectations, and still teaching up to 200 kids
a day.
"We've done a lot of training in this district, and we have a huge
amount of materials available," says John McVay, a veteran middle grades
teacher who moved from Stephens to Hill last year. "But sometimes you
get so much training that you never get time to apply it and make it coherent."
McVay says "it's hard to build in planning time so that it doesn't
get stolen by other duties and other things that come up - like parent conferences,
assessing, correcting papers, getting report cards ready. So many things
take your time that planning becomes rather low on the list of priorities."
The problem of time, McVay says, is well- illustrated by the district's
push to have teachers regularly assess their students' progress toward standards
in their own classrooms. "We have had some excellent training in how
to do more performance assessment," he says. "And it's very important
to do that - to track how well students are learning and how well you are
teaching. But I don't have any class with less than 37 students. I have
to limit the amount of assessment I do, or the truth is I would never get
a chance to look at it with any kind of analytic eye."
McVay notes that if he does a culminating assessment at the end of a unit,
and spends 15 minutes with each student's work (187 students last year),
he will spend about 47 work hours on this task. If a teacher did six culminating
activities a year, the grading and analyzing would require about 35 (student-free)
eight-hour workdays. Or eighteen weekends. "So the numbers of students
creates a disability for the teacher as they're trying to improve and help
students improve," McVay says.
The heavy workload and all the new learning is driving some teachers out
of the system - or out of middle schools like Hamilton, where teachers are
under extra pressure to help low-achieving students. Last spring, Hamilton
math department chair Ed Samuels said that "some teachers are going
to other districts or schools, and some are leaving teaching altogether.
It's sad. And I've talked to department heads at other schools and they're
losing them, too. My impression has been that some districts are considered
less stressful because they aren't as innovative or as cutting-edge as Long
Beach."
Although Samuels believes that the district's goals are important and says
he is becoming a better teacher with the help of coaching and professional
development, "many teachers are just really frustrated with all the
extra stuff. The hammer is coming down and some people are just leaving."
Slowing Down and Making Connections
In October 1999, LBUSD submitted a proposal to the Clark Foundation to continue
support for middle grades reform. In the proposal, the district frankly
admits that "LBUSD's commitment to improving the academic achievement
of all students, and the states new assessment system, resulted in a rapid
pace of reform efforts that at times overwhelmed schools and offices."
The one word that described teachers' reactions to all they were being asked
to undertake, the proposal's authors said, "was the word 'stressed.'"
Sensing the need "to avert the potential deleterious effects of this
stress and frustration," the district slowed the pace of reform midway
through the 1998-99 school year and "made a commitment to refrain from
introducing new initiatives for the 1999-2000 year, choosing instead to
work on refining the ones already in place."
"We've been trying to lay out the big picture for teachers, but they
are often internalizing that as 'you have to do everything right now,'"
said Lisa Isbell, who helps Chris Dominguez coordinate professional development
and curriculum reform. "We have to do a better job saying 'this is
how it all maps out, this is where we're going, but we don't expect to get
there immediately.' We've tended to try and roll things out and go for it,
and now we're trying to be more strategic about it all."
In its proposal to the Clark Foundation, Long Beach Unified described some
of its "learnings" over the past two years:
-- "Change takes time," the proposal writers observed. "If
individuals must learn and implement new strategies in order for change
to occur, then the system must allow time for individuals to study, practice
and reflect on those new concepts and strategies."
-- "Just as it is important to tailor student interventions to specific
student needs, so, too, must professional development opportunities be differentiated
to meet specific teacher and administrator needs. Teachers are on a learning
continuum with individuals in different places in the continuum. To be effective,
professional development must meet teachers and administrators where they
are."
---The ultimate key to student and teacher success, according to the proposal,
is to "simplify our message about standards, show how all of our efforts
are connected, and focus on implementing just a few initiatives at a time."
The proposal admits that, thusfar, the district's reform efforts have not
produced major improvements in student performance - at least not when measured
by district assessments and the SAT-9. The proposal addresses the issue
by identifying three major "focus areas" for the coming year:
the middle school reading problem; the lack of coherence and rigor in the
curriculum, and the improvement of classroom instruction.
Among the strategies the district is using to bring more "coherence"
to reform, Dominguez says, has been the creation of a district task force
which is inventorying and rethinking the system's entire professional development
program. Working with the Long Beach teacher union, two committees (one
made up of teachers and another that includes the providers of training)
are "coming to agreement about what good professional development is"
and developing a strategic plan that ties it all together. "In the
same light," she says, "we're trying to more clearly identify
the district's role in professional development and what is the role of
the school site, and how do they support one another."
Working with outside consultants, the district is also improving its evaluation
of professional development. "We're learning to reflect on the courses
that we're offering, asking ourselves if we know what we expect teachers
to be able to do at the end of each course - and do the teachers know?"
Dominguez says. "I think we realized that we had not clearly articulated
that to the participants and that was part of the frustration."
The district has also extended its commitment to a
teacher-coaching program launched in the fall of 1998 , which Dominguez
and others believe can both improve teaching practice and place a core of
teacher educators on the front lines who can communicate the district's
intentions more clearly. And in a move that demonstrates LBUSD is thinking
more strategically, the district is working closely with Long Beach State
and other area universities to prepare new teachers for standards-based
classrooms. For example, Dominguez says, "we have introduced the curriculum
maps in the teacher preparation programs at the university so the new teachers
coming into the system will know how to use them to plan instruction and
meet standards. And they love them."
In the Vanguard of National Reform
The district's frankness about the challenges it faces might leave the impression
that middle grades reform in Long Beach Unified has not made much progress.
In fact, as outside evaluators and district leaders observe, reform is a
massive undertaking and few urban school systems in the United States have
"stayed the course" or learned as much about improving schools
as LBUSD.
Long-time observers are hopeful that recent changes in the district's administrative
structure will increase the central office's ability to send a single, clear
message to middle school principals and teachers about the direction of
reform. Under the previous structure, schools in Areas A, B and C answered
to their specific area superintendents, who often had the final word on
how the district's reform agenda would be implemented.
"It created a bizarre reporting structure," says one observer.
"What was going on in one area often did not match what was going on
in another." Designs for change "were filtered through many different
lenses," the observer says. "There was no clear line of authority
or accountability. Something might work one place but not another, for reasons
that had more to do with a particular area superintendent's proclivities
than with the basic soundness of the original idea."
Under the new system, middle schools will operate under a single assistant
superintendent and the areas will be combined into a single jurisdiction.
At press time, the details of the new structure were still being worked
out, but one proposal called for the new deputy superintendent to supervise
the district's lowest performing middle schools.
Questions remained about the lines of authority among the deputy superintendent,
the assistant superintendent for middle schools, and the assistant superintendents
for research and testing, and for instruction and professional development.
How these relationships develop, several observers agree, may determine
whether the district is able to align its vision of reform with the day-to-day
practices of principals and teachers.
In a September letter to LBUSD superintendent Carl Cohn, Clark Foundation
director Hayes Mizell reflected on the recent report of the Foundation's
independent evaluators and expressed his admiration for the district's determination
to make school reform work. "There is nothing in this report,"
he concluded, "that shakes our confidence that Long Beach is in the
national vanguard of systemic, standards-based reform."
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