(Vol. 2, No. 1 - Winter 1998)
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UPDATE ON MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT
School reform enters mainstream
as JCPS pushes performance standards
By John Norton and the Focused Reporting Project team
Deep in the Kentucky countryside, not too far from downtown Louisville,
a trio of math teachers are talking about raising student achievement. With
snow-covered fences as a backdrop, they're debating the merits of a plan
by the Jefferson County Public Schools to raise academic standards for all
students.
"I'm just concerned that so many kids don't put in the effort,"
says one gray-haired middle school veteran. "Having all kids meet high
standards is a good goal, but is it really achievable? My principal came
in yesterday and asked 'what are we going to do with all these kids that
are failing?' And I said I don't know. And I really don't."
"Do you know what I'm thinking?" asks another, equally gray-haired
classroom vet. "We may have to change our teaching to help them."
"But don't you think we're already doing that?" says the first.
"Not nearly enough," says the other.
Scores are up, but not enough
This snippet of conversation from a recent JCPS retreat at the Foxhollow
conference center near Brownsboro crystalizes the debate that's likely to
preoccupy Jefferson County educators and parents over the next several years,
as district leaders push schools to shift to standards-based teaching.
What will it take to raise the achievement of most if not all kids in the
JCPS schools to a "proficient" level? Are teachers doing all they
can? Is the problem really mostly with the kids and their families? Is it
really possible to change teaching enough to eliminate the "academic
losers" that make up as much as half the students in the JCPS system
today? Will more and more JCPS schools find themselves in decline or crisis
under KERA's tough accountability system? Is it just a problem with the
state tests?
The answers to these questions are particularly urgent for the JCPS middle
schools, which continue to trail the state in middle grades performance.
True, the news from the latest round of KIRIS scores is somewhat encouraging.
All the scores are up some. Novice readers in the JCPS middle schools dropped
from 31 percent in 1992 to 9 percent in the spring of 1997. Since success
on any written test turns in part on how well students can read and understand
the questions, this is a hopeful sign.
Still, the 1997 KIRIS scores suggest that every middle school in Jefferson
County has a lot of work left to do. Even in the middle schools that many
Louisville residents consider the most successful, proficiency levels are
far from satisfying. At Meyzeek, for example, only 33 percent of readers
were proficient or distinguished (up from 20 percent the year before)-in
a school where 60 percent of the students are in an accelerated academic
program. Meyzeek's other numbers (39% p/d in math, 20% in social studies,
2% in science) are also troubling-although they are among the highest in
the district's middle schools.
And we don't mean to pick on Meyzeek. Only 35% of Barret's 7th graders were
proficient or distinguished in reading (50% of 8th graders in math); only
15% in reading at Highland (40% in math); only 20% in reading at Jefferson
County Traditional (54% in math); only 20% in reading at Johnson Traditional
(50% in math).
For those who suspect that most of the novices and apprentices are poor
and black, the actual figures offer little comfort. For example, only 43
percent of the white students at Meyzeek are proficient or distinguished
in reading. And the table on this page shows that while there is a districtwide
gap between white and black middle schoolers in reading, writing and arithmetic,
neither group has a large percentage performing at a proficient level.
KIRIS Performance by Race JCPS Middle Schools (1996-97)
N=Novice, A=Apprentice, P/D=Proficient or Distinguished
33% of 7th graders (reading, writing) and 31% of 8th Graders (math) were
black.
A quote from Ed Reidy, Kentucky's state testing director, makes the point:
"The message that hasn't penetrated yet is that this reform program
expects virtually all kids to meet academic standards (that) we haven't
even pushed our most able kids to meet yet. This is not just about expecting
poor kids to catch up."
A year ago, the members of our team (we're independent reporters who regularly
visit the JCPS middle schools) would have said that the Jefferson County
Public Schools fit Reidy's description perfectly. But in our visits this
fall and winter, we can see evidence that the message is being to penetrate-even
through the thick layers of the JCPS school bureaucracy.
Fundamental reform entering the mainstream
When the KIRIS scores were published in early December, they showed that
14 middle schools were less than 40 percent of the way towards their 1998
goal. But Sandy Ledford, the JCPS assistant superintendent responsible for
middle schools, reminded newspaper readers that the tests were given last
April, just a few months after the district began to give maximum attention
to middle school reform. KIRIS testing in the spring of 1998 will "be
the real test to see if the (reform) plan has worked," she said.
In fact, the district has invested millions in middle school reform since
1990, much of it from outside grants. But the ideas about school change
generated by those reform dollars remained isolated from the mainstream
of district policy. It was not until the November 1996 "wakeup call,"
when KIRIS results showed 12 middle schools in the decline or crisis categories,
that middle school reform vaulted to the top of the JCPS agenda.
Since then, a rather remarkable transformation has taken place. The ideas
that had been percolating among some middle school leaders for several years
began to gain mainstream acceptance. One key concept: Schools will never
"beat" the KIRIS tests by simply focusing on better test-taking
skills or punching up students' writing skills a bit. The Kentucky reform
will keep raising the achievement bar in the belief that most kids can reach
the proficient level eventually. So schools have to make some fundamental
changes in the way teachers teach and students learn.
Enter standards.
In the past six months, Superintendent Steve Daeschner and his leadership
team have embraced standards-based reform for all JCPS schools. Now they
are in the process of trying to convince principals and teachers to change
the way they approach instruction-to believe that by building academic standards
into everything they teach, they can move all kids up the achievement ladder
and increase KIRIS scores at the same time.
JCPS plans to build its teaching renaissance around performance standards.
Put as simply as possible, a performance standard describes something a
student should know or be able to do and includes actual examples of student
work that teachers agree meets the standard. (See
the Q&A about standards.)
The district hopes that teachers will learn to use the performance standards
(which are being developed in every subject) and examples of proficient
work to redesign their teaching. In the new teaching model, teachers will
(ideally) begin with the standard and plan lessons backwards, figuring out
what books, activities, lectures, hands-on experiments, drills, homework,
and so forth will be needed to get students to the standard. A very important
part of this process requires teachers to assess (through writing assignments,
tests, etc.) students along each step of the way to guage whether the instruction
is working and what needs to change.
Covering the basics
Concerned that kids won't be able to do the more challenging work without
a strong foundation in the basics, the district says it will begin a parallel
effort to identify every student's specific weaknesses in the Three R's
and design ways to repair those shortcomings. The district will use diagnostic
tests to ferret out the basic skills deficiencies and says teachers will
keep testing and offering special help to each student until the weaknesses
are overcome.
The district likes to say, using KIRIS terminology, that this basic or "support"
skills strategy is designed to move kids from "novice" to "apprentice"
and that the performance standards piece of the reform will move them from
"apprentice" to "proficient" and "distinguished."
In less than a year's time, JCPS has moved from vague conversations about
raising standards and expectations (mostly in the middle schools) to a fairly
sharply focused plan of improvement across all grades. In a giant bureaucracy,
known for its "turfdoms" and poor communication, that's no small
accomplishment.
The curriculum people, the assessment people, the professional development
people, and the teacher support people have developed a common plan of attack
and communicate regularly about it among themselves and, increasingly, with
principals and teachers. Will it make a difference for kids? It's still
too early to say.
What it will take to change
You've probably heard the popular analogy about how long it takes to turn
around an aircraft carrier. JCPS is certainly the "aircraft carrier
of school bureaucracies." When you have more than 150 schools, 80,000
students and 5600 teachers, any kind of change is hard. And what JCPS leaders
want to do is fundamentally change how schools do their business.
A couple of things will have to happen for the JCPS plan to be successful:
== Professional development - There will have to be a lot
of it, and it will have to penetrate down through the ranks to every teacher.
There will have to be continuous discussions about how to teach using standards
and performance assessments. If teachers aren't having daily conversations
about improving teaching within a year or two, you'll know the reform has
failed.
== Teacher involvement - Reforms fail when teachers don't
participate in the early conversations about the "what and why"
of change. JCPS has committed this mistake in the past, and even today,
the performance standards are being developed without broad teacher involvement.
But the district is asking for teacher feedback before the formal implementation
begins. "We want to make sure this works before we role it out for
everyone," professional development director Lennie Hay told a group
of teachers recently. "We don't want to just frustrate teachers more."
That's progress.
== Union and community support - Time is the big bugaboo
in school change. Schools won't change unless they restructure the school
day and week to build in more time for teachers to work together to improve
their teaching. Traditions are the biggest roadblocks to altering the school
schedule; teachers, parents, cafeteria workers and bus drivers have built
their lives around the today's status quo school schedule. They have to
be convinced and accommodated. "This is new work and new work requires
more time," says one middle school leader. "But there are a whole
host of people who don't understand why we need that time."
== Persistent messages - Veteran teachers have been through
many waves of reform, and many are cynical about change. As a middle school
principal told district leaders recently, "Your communication has to
be deliberate. We have to be bombarded with the change message. People have
to understand that there's no way out."
== Continuity - We sat in on an early briefing about the
district's plan to move to performance standards quickly over the next year.
One of the first teacher questions was this: "How do we know you're
serious? How do we know that once we're in the middle of all this academic
renovation, the district leadership won't change and somebody else will
come in with an entirely different solution to all our problems?" The
answer,we thought, was a good one-if not completely satisfying for teachers
who have to do bear the brunt of all this change.
"If you make this work, and kids are achieving more than they've ever
achieved before, nobody will dare mess with it."
Imagine that.
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