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Remarks of M. Hayes Mizell on January 25, 2000 as part of a panel presentation to approximately 30 middle school administrators from Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri. The meeting was sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and was held at the Foundation's offices in Kansas City, MO. Mizell is Director of the Program for Student Achievement at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.

The Beauty and Terror

Ten years ago the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation initiated its relationship with a few urban school systems to encourage and support them to reform their middle schools. We believed then and we believe now that middle schools need to have a much greater academic focus and be more academically challenging and engaging than is the case in most schools serving the middle grades.

This is not to suggest that middle schools should abandon or devote less attention to addressing students' developmental, social, and psycho-emotional needs. Indeed, no middle school can succeed if it fails both to value, respect, and support young adolescents as people, not just children, and if it does not devote great effort to developing these youth as students.

These roles of middle schools are complimentary and interdependent, not in opposition to one another. However, it was our belief that this equation for successful middle schools was seriously out of balance. Many, many middle schools were devoting more attention to nurturing young adolescents than to creatively challenging and engaging them academically.

But the problem was even greater. There were too many middle schools that felt too good about simply being middle schools, or that devoted more effort to developing the structures and processes typically associated with middle schools than to making sure these arrangements directly benefited students. These schools seemed to care more about what Howard Johnston and Ron Williamson call the "orthodoxy" of middle schools than whether student achievement increased or whether young people were developing into caring members of the school community.

By "orthodoxy" Johnston and Williamson mean unquestioning allegiance to such middle school components such as team, advisories, inter-disciplinary curricula, and block scheduling. We agree that it is less important whether these structures and processes exist than whether schools use them effectively as means to the end of more academically proficient students.

As we gained more experience with middle schools in Baltimore, Milwaukee, Oakland, and several other cities, we learned how pervasive the problems I have described were. We also became aware of another problem related to these issues. Many middle schools did not have a clear academic focus because they did not have clear academic goals. It was not readily apparent what the schools wanted students to achieve academically by the end of the eighth grade. The schools could not describe what they expected all students to know and be able to do as a result of the students' education in the middle grades. In most cases administrators and teachers could only say that they were "preparing students for high school" or would simply refer to the school's vague and sometimes incomprehensible mission statement.

It seemed to us that if the schools were unclear about their academic outcomes for students, then it was no wonder that students were not striving to achieve specific academic goals, or if the schools and students were not clear then one could not reasonably expect the students' families to support the school or the students. In other words, many middle schools were examples of the old saying: "If you don't know where you are going, any road will do."

For these reasons, we became interested in standards and supported several urban school systems to develop and use content and performance standards. On the surface, the concept of standards is simple and compelling. Content standards are broad statements of what students should know and be able to do by certain points in their academic careers. Some states and school systems delineate standards for each grade while others establish standards only for certain grades, such as four, eight, and eleven. Performance standards define the proficiency levels students much demonstrate to indicate that they have learned what the state or school system expects. We believe that standards have the potential to help middle schools clearly delineate academic goals for students and to engage teachers, families, and even whole communities in helping students achieve these goals.

While the concept of standards is simple, experience is teaching us that in practice all standards are not created equal nor implemented effectively. For example, all but one state now has standards but only 44 states have promulgated standards in the four content areas of mathematics, science, language arts, and social studies. Of course standards make sense only if they are accompanied by assessment systems that help determine whether students can perform at standard. The most recent survey of states indicated that only 21 states assess whether students perform at standard in all four of the core content subjects. Though 41 states have some type of assessment for one or more subject areas, only 10 ask students to maintain portfolios of written projects or write extended responses to questions in subjects other than English.(1)

Clearly, "having" standards is not enough, just as "being" a middle school is not enough. Neither ensure more effective education nor higher levels of learning. If the quality of standards matters, and it does, then Missouri and Kansas have real problems. Two ideologically opposite organizations, the "conservative" Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the "liberal" American Federation of Teachers, each have separately analyzed all the standards of states that have them. The Fordham Foundation gave the Missouri standards a grade of D- in 1998 and a grade of D+ this year. It gave Kansas a grade of D- in 1998 and a C+ this year.

The standards of these states differ in quality by subject area; the standards for some subjects are better than for others. In the critical area of English, or what the Missouri "Show Me Standards" call "communication arts," the Fordham Foundation concluded the standards "are not specific or measurable" and "do not show increasing complexity through the grades." The American Federation of Teachers found that the Missouri standards in communication arts "do not provide the basic knowledge and skills students need to learn to develop into proficient readers and writers." The AFT further concluded that the "clearest standards [relate to 'what students should be able to do'] resulting in a heavy skills focus with little or no specific content." (2)

This suggests that the state standards may be doing more harm than good. Under the guise of providing direction about what teachers should teach and what students should learn, the standards are misleading educators to believe that by using the standards they are doing the right thing when in fact they are dong the wrong thing. If the Fordham Foundation and the AFT analyses are correct, then the standards are fraudulent; they are not what they purport to be. Even worse, they foster teaching that ill serves students. I want to make sure you understand that not all the standards in all the subjects are this bad, but the standards I have described suggest that both Missouri and Kansas need to devote serious attention to strengthening their standards so they are more useful to educators and more productive for students.

Does this mean that standards are an inappropriate catalyst to improve middle school education. No, it means that standards must serve the needs of educators and students, rather than educators and students serving standards that have been poorly conceived and are of low quality. My advice would be that school systems take their states inadequate standards and strengthen them through a deliberate, inclusive process that involves representatives of such stakeholders as principals, teachers, unions, parents, students, business persons, and community-based organizations.

Ironically, low quality state standards may be an opportunity for local school systems, collaborating with their communities, to engage more people in developing and understanding higher quality standards whose implementation will merit broader support than would otherwise be the case. One way or another, educators and communities need to come together and agree on what students should know and be able to do, and be comfortable and secure in the means for assessing how well students know it and can do it.

But even high quality standards will not guarantee that students will perform at higher levels. For that to happen middle schools will also have to perform at higher levels. And middle schools can only perform at higher levels if their principals and teachers perform at higher levels as well. This is the beauty and terror of standards. They set in motion a chain of events that spark change throughout the school system.

Let us examine that chain.
The central office also has to have sophisticated systems of data collection and analysis, as well as qualitative evaluation, to understand which school and classroom practices most effectively cause students to perform at standard, and it has to engage principals and teachers in analytical and reflective experiences that use the results of the school system's data. Finally, there is the bottom line of how the school system reports to families whether and to what extent their students are performing at standard. This will require a new report card system based less on letter grades and more on information about what students actually know and can do. When school systems use standards as this kind of linchpin of reform, it can provide a focus and coherence that is currently lacking.

You will want to know whether there is a school system that has all of these elements in place, and the answer is "of course not." There are not many school systems that are really serious about either the middle grades, student achievement, or standards. Among the relatively few that are, they are finding that there is a massive job to do in changing teachers' beliefs and attitudes, as well as their skills. Because the challenge of standards is for all students to perform at significantly higher levels, teachers have to believe that all students can potentially do so, and that teachers can cause that result. This is counter to the beliefs of many teachers.

One way, and it is only one way, some schools are addressing this problem is to engage teachers systematically and consistently in a process called analyzing student work. While this can operate in many different ways, in its most simple form it involves a small group of subject area teachers meeting regularly and sharing with each other examples of their students' work. The teachers do not share their students best work but rather a collection that represents the full range of their students' performance levels.

The teachers use a common rubric to review, assess, and discuss the students' work and even the teachers' assignments that prompted it. In most cases this process quickly reveals that the teachers have their own "internal standards" that cause them to grade student work differently. They begin to understand that by using standards-based assignments and standards-based rubrics that they can improve the quality of the students' work and accelerate their progress towards performing at standard.

In this way the teachers support each other, share critical feedback, and collectively advance their professional development, all within the context of their students' actual performance. This process of analyzing student work also has the benefit of providing teachers with immediate feedback as they begin to alter their practice, and it can increase their self-efficacy as the teachers see that changing their practice in certain ways can improve their students' performance.

There are many, many challenges in standards-based reform, and these challenges are both exciting and scary. They require a great deal of will and a relentless determination to find, try, and fine more effective practices, and to evaluate, evaluate, evaluate whether the application of those practices cause students to perform at standard. For too long too many middle schools and their students have focused on surviving the middle grades. Now it is time for all members of the middle school community-administrators, teachers, and students-to focus on improving their performance to bring students to higher levels of achievement.

Thank you.


Footnote 2 Links
http://www.edexcellence.net/library/soss2000/2000soss.html#Missouri http://www.edexcellence.net/library/soss2000/2000soss.html#Kansas http://www.aft.org/edissues/standards99/states/Missouri.htm http://www.aft.org/edissues/standards99/states/Kansas.htm