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Text of Hayes Mizell's remarks presented by videotape on May 22, 2001 at the first retreat of the Inner-City Schools Coalition in Long Beach, California. The Coalition is composed of Franklin Middle School, the Jefferson Leadership Academies, and Washington Middle School. The retreat was held on May 22-23 at the Queen Mary Hotel in Long Beach. Participating in the retreat were 35 members of the three schools' leadership teams. Mizell is Director of the Program for Student Achievement at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.

Taking Responsibility

Good afternoon, and congratulations to you all for participating in this retreat and exploring how your schools can work and learn together to raise the performance levels of your students. This meeting represents an important and unusual first step. How many school systems have you heard of where three schools take the initiative, on their own, with no prodding or incentives from the central office, to determine how they can collaborate to improve student learning? Believe me, it is a rare event.

As you know better than I, most schools think of themselves as islands with a unique set of circumstances that other schools cannot appreciate. These schools are quick to cite their challenges but reluctant to acknowledge their internal weaknesses. They are eager to accept support but wary of partnerships that expect staff to develop more productive behaviors, knowledge, and skills.

Most schools plead that they do not have the time or opportunity to break out of their self-imposed isolation, but I think the truth is that they are afraid of what they might learn. In most cases, a school's isolation is a defense mechanism against uncomfortable learning and the self-examination and hard work that has to occur if the school is open to applying what it learns.

Let us consider two schools, School A and School B. If School A learns that School B is using an approach that is more effective in improving student learning, then School A is faced with three choices: (1) It can claim that School B's circumstances are more favorable than those of School A and thereby deny that the approach of School B has potential for replication. (2) It can argue that School B's approach is interesting but the evidence of results is flawed. (3) It can more deeply analyze School B's approach and determine what School A should learn from it and how School A could apply that learning to improve. Most schools choose one of the first two options; I hope you will choose the third, more difficult way.

This is why your meeting is so impressive. You are taking the risk of exposing your schools and yourselves. Just by coming here this afternoon, you are indicating that you do not have all the answers. You are asking for help. You are hopeful that perhaps your schools can accomplish more together than they are accomplishing alone. You are willing to invest time and effort to learn. These are indicators of your schools' maturity as institutions and of your professionalism as educators.

The decisions are yours

During this meeting you will begin to identify the challenges you have in common, the strengths you can share with one another, and the opportunities you want to pursue. However, it is important to understand that what occurs during this meeting and what comes after it, if anything, is up to you. No one, neither the school system nor the Foundation, has an agenda for you.

It is possible that at the end of this retreat you will conclude that the concept of an Inner-City Schools Coalition is an interesting idea, but will add little of value to your respective struggles. If that is your decision, so be it. You may also decide that while there might be some benefits from your schools' participating in this collaboration, you are too busy and exhausted to make the effort. If that is how you feel, do yourselves...the favor of coming to terms with that fact sooner rather than later.

But what are the potential benefits? When you come together as a Coalition you are acknowledging that your three schools have common interests and common problems. You are joining with colleagues who, as it were, speak your language. In fact, there is much that you do not even have to say because you know that you share some common experiences, though as individuals you are very different. You are swimming against the same current. By coming together in the Coalition, you are choosing community over isolation.

When you voluntarily participate in the Coalition, you are expressing your belief that together you can more successfully accomplish some things than you can achieve individually. However, the three schools represented here are not giving up their identities, their structures, their cultures, or their styles. The purpose of the Coalition is not to create Super School. You are who you are, but you believe that you have something to gain by working with others to attain a larger goal.

It is up to you to determine what that goal is, but,whatever it is, the Coalition exists to use the talents and experiences of representatives from the participating schools to make all your schools more effective. In this way, each school contributes to and gains from the Coalition's activities, and everyone benefits because your combined efforts make it more likely that you will achieve the overall goal to which you are committed.

As for the practical benefits of the Coalition, it is up to you to produce them. I can only speculate what they might be. At a minimum, you can learn from each other. Each school has something to teach the others, each school has something to learn from the others. If one effect of the Coalition is that your schools interact more frequently, it increases the chances you will draw on each other's strengths, and help each other remedy your respective weaknesses. Perhaps by working together your schools will experiment with some joint staff development. You might find there are some efficiencies in jointly retaining an external expert to work with a small group of teachers from several schools rather than just one.

Look for the hard answers

Your schools' might also create a small subject-focused working group that would bring teachers together to review curriculum your schools use and explore how you could strengthen that curriculum to raise student performance levels. Certainly there could be value in organizing cross-school groups of teachers to examine and discuss student work, and subsequently observe each other's classes. There are many possibilities, and as you consider them, I urge you not to gravitate to the easy answers. Do not merely initiate activities that any one of your schools could just as easily mount alone. The whole purpose of the Coalition is to enable you to do collectively what you cannot or will not do separately.

Let us be clear, however, that participating in the Coalition has costs as well as benefits. You have to let go of beliefs that one school is superior to the others. You have to be willing to listen and learn as well as talk and share. You have to search for common ground and build upon it in ways that benefit all your schools.

As you consider the benefits and costs of working together, I hope you will take the time you need to be clear about the purpose of your collaboration. What do the schools' principals and leadership teams want to accomplish through the Inner-City Schools Coalition? It is very important that you develop a powerful focus that is compelling on its face and easy for the staffs of your schools to understand. There are many ways you might describe the Coalition's purpose, but it is my hope that improving student performance will be central to it.

A possible statement of purpose

Perhaps it would be a useful exercise for you to consider how you would describe in a simple declarative sentence the purpose of the Coalition. For example, and this is only an example, you might say:
The Inner-City Schools Coalition is a collaboration among three Long
Beach middle schools committed to raising student performance levels by
improving the practices of each school's administration, faculty, and staff.

What does this statement mean? By including the name, The Inner-City Schools Coalition, it communicates that your collaboration is formal and on-going rather than an informal or occasional meeting of schools. The phrase "among three Long Beach middle schools" implies that the schools, not the central office or any other organization, are responsible for the Coalition, and it indicates that the membership of the Coalition consists of just your schools rather than all schools in the inner-city.

The sentence also clearly states what the Coalition wants to accomplish -- "raising student performance levels" -- and how it will seek to achieve that end -- "by improving the practices of each school's administration, faculty, and staff." If we deconstruct the sentence further, we see that the term "raising student performance levels" has implications different than if the phrase had been "increase test scores" or even "increase student learning." In other words, the phrase suggests that your goal is for students to be able to demonstrate what they have learned, perhaps in many different ways.

Also, the sentence makes clear how the Coalition will achieve this result. It will improve the practice of all the adults employed by each school: the administrators, the teachers, and the non-certificated staff. This phrase indicates that regardless of the current performance of people in these roles, their practices can and must improve to raise student performance levels. This means the Coalition understands that there is a connection between the performance levels of adults in the schools and the performance levels of the schools' students. It communicates an assumption that if the adults perform at higher levels it will raise the performance levels of students.

At least implicitly, the sentence also commits the Coalition to improving the practices of all adults in the schools, and to do so through not just any staff development, but that which will have the effect of increasing student performance.

Again, this is only an example of how you can use the exercise of describing the Coalition's focus to develop clarity and consensus about what you want the Coalition to accomplish. If you go through such a process, remember that every word counts and has a specific meaning. Do not use more words than necessary, and make sure you understand and believe what you say.

Another virtue of such a statement is that is can help you hold yourselves accountable for the Coalition's performance. In the instance of the statement above, you will be able to assess whether the Coalition's activities are faithful to its declared purpose. Will the activities of the Coalition likely improve the practices of the schools' adults to the extent that the adults are then more effective in increasing student performance?

Among all the activities the Coalition might consider to achieve this result, which ones are most likely to have the effect the Coalition wants? Does the Coalition keep its eye and effort on "raising student performance levels" or do its activities have the effect of uncoupling "improving.practices" from that goal? Does your joint staff development become an end in and of itself, or does it become a means that is tightly linked to the goal of raising student performance levels?

Common goals for student performance

How you describe the Coalition is up to you, but if you decide its purpose is to raise student performance levels, I encourage you to define more explicitly what this means for the Coalition. Maybe this is a task for the near future, not this meeting, but it is important. Because the student populations of your schools are similar, perhaps you will want to take on the challenge of developing some common goals for student performance. You might begin with only one critical area of student performance, such as reading comprehension. If the Coalition participants agree that focusing on this or some other aspect of student performance is important, it could help sharpen the Coalition's focus and ground its activities.

If you conclude that it is not feasible or desirable to develop common goals for student performance, there may be utility in each school using the Coalition as a venue for developing its own goals for a narrow area of student performance, such as reading. The Coalition could serve as a continuing workshop for each school to develop student performance goals and assess progress towards reaching them, drawing on the advice and feedback of Coalition participants from other schools, perhaps augmented by invited experts from the school system or a university. This experience could become even more powerful if the Coalition schools agree to periodically share and discuss student performance data related to their goals.

The role of standards

Whatever your decision about setting student performance goals, you will want to consider how content and performance standards relate to your work together. If the standards the Long Beach Unified School District and/or California developed for your schools really describe what students should know and be able to do, it seems to me the standards should provide you some guidance for setting student performance goals.

I do not know how you use these standards within the operational realities of your schools, and perhaps that is something you should discuss, but the essential issue is what are the performance levels which you want your students to attain? How do you describe and discuss and use those performance levels so that everyone in the school, including students, clearly understand the performance goals your schools want students to reach? Are those goals the standards, that is, written descriptions of student performance, and, if so, which standards, those of the school system or the state? Or are the goals numerical SAT-9 scores? Or are the goals represented by your schools' rankings on the California Academic Performance Index?

You probably feel that in one way or another you are accountable for student performance based on all these indicators, but the most important thing for you to think about is the levels of student performance for which you want to hold yourselves accountable.

What levels of student performance do your schools, as institutions, value and strive to attain? If you and others in your schools are clear about that, then the Inner-City Schools Coalition can focus its activities to help your schools achieve those goals, and you can also assess the utility of the Coalition based on whether and to what extent it adds value to your efforts.

A safe haven for accountability

Some of you may think of the Coalition only as a means for your schools to share and learn together, but one of its potentially exciting aspects is that it can provide a safe place for schools to hold each other accountable. If the Coalition agrees that its participating schools will seek to reach certain student performance goals, then what can the schools learn from and teach each other about what they are doing to achieve their goals, and the results?

I hope the Coalition will be able to create a culture of expectation that schools' representatives will be candid about their dilemmas, the problems they do not know how to solve, and the setbacks as well as the progress they are experiencing. But this is not to say that Coalition meetings should be just one more place for hand-wringing and complaining. That is not the culture you want to create. For the Coalition to play a unique role, it should expect that its participants will face hard truths and talk about uncomfortable issues of practice but do so in a context of helping and supporting one another.

It is very important to establish a climate of collaboration and trust where your colleagues provide critical feedback with care and understanding, and you accept it with a generosity of spirit. If you can do this, it should help you ask each other hard questions about what your schools are doing to raise students' performance levels, how you know what you are doing is effective, and whether there is credible evidence that students are performing at higher levels as a result.

I know this is not how most schools relate to one another and that is why many schools are slow to improve; denial and blame are so much more comfortable than taking responsibility. The Coalition should aspire to a higher standard of professionalism not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is essential for you to work and progress together.

You deserve great credit for taking the initiative to join ranks and find productive ways in which your schools can work together to raise the performance levels of all students. I am confident that opportunities abound for the Coalition, but it is up to you to identify and take advantage of them.

Thank you.