(Vol. 1, No. 1 - Winter 1996/1997)

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Barriers along the road
to middle school reform


As they travel the long, uphill road to middle school reform, Jefferson County's principals, teachers and support staff will have to negotiate several barriers that stand in the way of progress.
These roadblocks are not insurmountable, but they are formidable. Unless they are diminished or removed, it's unlikely that the school system's determined efforts to strengthen teaching and learning in the county's 27 middle schools will succeed.

1. Blaming the messenger


Louisville's middle schools won't dig deep enough to solve their problems until they quit blaming the messenger -- in this case, KERA and KIRIS. It's tempting to trace the decline of the district's middle schools to the passage of KERA and the beginning of KIRIS testing.

"KERA is so omnipresent and overwhelming that it's a convenient target," says one central office administrator. "The message we get from some teachers and principals and even some parents is that KERA and KIRIS are the problems."

But if the KERA standards represent reasonable academic expectations for Louisville's young teens, and if KIRIS fairly measures student progress toward those expectations, then the problem must lie elsewhere.

When some Louisville educators blame KERA for their problems, one might reasonably ask: why are the middle schools in Jefferson County performing below those in every other district in the state? And if the answer is, "It's the kind of kids we have," then blame low expectations, uninspired teaching, or the lack of community or parental support, but not KERA.

2. Something less than 20-20 vision


"The vision thing" may be a joke in many people's minds, but beneath the laughter there's an important point to be made. Without a clear idea of what you want to accomplish and how you're going to accomplish it, you're unlikely to make much progress.

In a recent report on the JCPS middle schools, an outside evaluator wrote this about the district's stated intention to use academic standards as the basis for teaching and learning: JCPS, she said, "has a strong foundation from which to build," but the district is "not quite clear on what it means to do standards-based reform in the context of KERA."

Teachers and principals point to mixed messages and conflicting central office agendas that make it more difficult to focus scarce time and resources on a common plan for improvement. "We are big bureaucracy here," one administrator said. "We too often think in terms of boxes and charts."

Today's successful organizations depend on collaboration and group problem-solving to clear away bureaucratic confusion, says Highland principal Robert Knight. "They focus on quality indicators that everyone in the corporation values and works towards.We do not have those kinds of norms in our school system."

One frequently cited "vision" problem: The school system has never pulled together a large sample of teachers and other educators from across the district to develop consensus about what children should know and be able to do as a result of their schooling.

"In the past, we've gotten the message at times from the central office that KERA's not that important, that we will do our own thing," says one middle school principal. "Then the scores come out and we go into a panic. We need to decide for ourselves what we expect students to learn, and it needs to grow out of KERA expectations."

More consensus about teaching and learning could help the district bring into line its professional development offerings, principal and teacher evaluation systems, hiring practices and site-based decisionmaking -- pieces that are now out of sync with each other.

Creating a common vision "that belongs to everyone" will require extraordinary leadership from the superintendent and the school board who must pull together a powerful teachers' union, individual school councils, and the community.

The current buzz of activity associated with the middle school "KIRIS crisis" has sparked some deeper thinking about the school system's direction. "It's a teachable moment," many JCPS educators are saying -- perhaps the perfect moment to finally address "the vision thing."

3. How do you make good teachers better?


Many "good" teachers do their best work with the kids who've had some advantages -- who come from homes where there are books and newspapers, where parents have high school or college degrees, where a high value is placed on education. Education researchers tell us that our public schools have done a pretty good job with these kids over the past decade (although there's plenty of room for improvement). But the same research shows we haven't done nearly as well with students nearer the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.

"The different kinds of students we serve have all kinds of learning needs," says Western Middle School principal Bob Strong. "They will not lap up knowledge that teachers give to them in lecture format." Yet most teachers will tell you their college training did not give them all the skills they need to teach the hardest-to-reach kids well.

When teachers are well-prepared, the achievement gap between "rich" and "poor" kids closes significantly. The only way to add to the skills and knowledge of teachers already on the job is through high-quality, sharply focused professional development.

In order to become morA versatile and more standards-based, teachers need to "hear it, see it, do it," says one middle school principal. But district policies that restrict the use of substitute teachers or require teachers be paid $20 a hour for any professional development beyond the basic requirements make it difficult for teachers to "hear it, see it, and do it" enough.

While the district offers a smorgasbord of good-quality training opportunities through the Gheens Academy, school and central office leaders and teachers have yet to grapple with the question of how to focus professional development on the issues that matter most.

Ultimately, the best professional development takes place inside the schools. The system needs to offer fewer workshops and more opportunities for teachers to explore professional issues together, to share good ideas, learn from their most accomplished colleagues, and serve as coaches in each others' classrooms. This is how teachers learn in other nations where students perform better on international tests of achievement.

Recently, the district has flooded declining middle schools with teams of teaching specialists. In these schools, at least, conversations about teaching and learning are taking place at unprecedented levels. Somehow those conversations have to be sustained when the specialists leave.

Eventually, it will all come down to finding the time for teachers to work together. It can be done (see the story about Central Park East on p. 14) and some school district leaders are already talking about ways to do it -- including reorganizing schools to create smaller clusters of students and teachers.

"Teachers could take their time, have more opportunity to learn from each other, and they will better know how their kids learn," says Highland principal Knight. "It's an exciting concept."

But Knight reminds us that reorganizing schools in this way will require more professional development for principals as well (see page 11). One principal who was asked if he could redesign his school to create more professional development time answered quite bluntly, "I don't know how. I would sure like for somebody to show me how that would work."

4. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing


Although some central office leaders insist that middle school teachers know enough about the subjects they teach, the evidence suggests otherwise. Most middle school teachers have elementary teaching certificates and many have not studied the content areas they teach much beyond a few basic college courses.

A recent JCPS survey found that most of the 250 science teachers in the middle grades are elementary-certified and science is their "last choice" to teach. "They may know how to help students build a volcano," says a district science specialist, referring to a popular middle school science lesson, "but many teachers don't have a clue how a volcano works."

The situation is much the same in mathematics. About 75 percent of middle school math teachers have elementary credentials, which means few have advanced as far as studying calculus. "When I first moved from high school to middle school, someone made the comment that a lot of teachers wanted to teach math because it was so easy," says one of the district's top middle school math teachers. "All you have to do is give them problems at the end of the chapter and then on tests you check off the answers."

Many believe the situation is slowly getting better, as more schools encourage teachers to specialize in a particular content area. But unless the district mounts a concerted effort to anchor teachers in a specialty and deepen the content knowledge of elementary-certified teachers, it's unlikely that these teachers will be able to help students learn at the sophisticated levels necessary to reach high standards and score well on KIRIS tests.

It's true that knowing your subject is only part of the answer. You also have to know how to get it across to a diverse group of students. But as Will Rogers once said, "You can't teach what you don't know anymore than you can come back from where you ain't been."
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