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[Remarks of M. Hayes Mizell on April 29, 1999 at a Middle Grades Education Conference sponsored by the Southern Regional Education Board. The meeting was held in Atlanta, Georgia and attended by approximately 70 persons from 15 Southern states. Participants included members of state legislatures, state boards of education, state departments of education, and institutions of higher education. Mizell is Director of the Program for Student Achievement at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.]

Thirty And Counting

Thirty years ago, the middle school movement began as a reaction to junior high schools that did not adequately take into account the development of young adolescents between the ages of 11 and fourteen. As the movement picked up steam, more and more local school systems converted from schools with configurations of grades seven through nine, or seven and eight, and adopted schools serving only grades six through eight. School districts apparently embraced middle schools because they believed such schools would provide a better education for young adolescents.

However, you are attending this meeting during the next two days because across this region, as well as throughout the United States, there is deep dissatisfaction with education at the middle level. This stems primarily from the rise during the past fifteen years of state accountability and assessment systems, and the subsequent increase in information about the academic performance of students in grades six, seven, and eight.

More and more people have become aware that academic achievement in the middle grades is unimpressive. Even recent publicity about the improved reading performance of eighth graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress is good news only in relative terms. The proportion of eighth grade students scoring at the "proficient" level on NAEP did increase by four percent between 1992 and 1998 but even this means that only 33 percent of students are now scoring at the proficient level.

While there are other quantitative indicators of students' poor performance in the middle grades, I want to mention one qualitative example that illustrates many middle schools are not what we would like for them to be. The National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform is a collaborative of leaders in the middle school movement. It includes representatives of the major associations of middle school educators, as well as researchers, foundation program officers, intermediary organizations with major programs focused on the middle grades, and state and local practitioners.

The Search for Successful Middle Schools

One current project of the Forum is to identify what it calls "schools to watch." These are schools that appear to be implementing practices and achieving results consistent with the Forum's vision for middle schools. [Read the Forum's vision statement.] That vision is not revolutionary. It has three primary elements described by the terms "academic excellence," "developmentally responsive," and "socially equitable." I am not going to take the time to explain these terms more fully, but I think you can see that they are descriptive of qualities that we would hope would characterize most middle schools.

Unfortunately, the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform has not been overwhelmed with nominations of middle schools that can provide evidence that they are academically excellent, developmentally responsive, and socially equitable, or that they are making impressive progress towards meeting these goals. The Forum has identified a small number of such schools, and representatives of the Forum will soon conduct site visits to validate the schools' practices and results. My point is that 30 years after the beginning of the middle school movement, it is very difficult to identify individual middle schools that meet qualitative criteria we should expect of every school with grades six, seven, and eight.

One might reasonably ask why, after three decades of the middle school movement, we are meeting here to talk about reforming middle schools to improve students' academic performance. Based on my dozen years of experience at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and the Foundation's decade-long support for middle school reform, I would like to share my personal observation about why so many middle schools have not lived up to their potential, and to suggest what must be done to ratchet up the performance of these schools, their staffs, and their students.

Why Middle Schools Have Not Lived Up to Their Potential

First, most school boards have been very unclear about their purpose in creating middle schools, and equally imprecise about exactly what they wanted middle schools to accomplish. If you check most school board policies, I suspect you will find no statement of either the purpose of middle schools or the results they should achieve. Yes, you may find some vague language about meeting students' developmental needs or preparing them for high school, but I doubt there is the clear direction necessary to guide middle school educators or hold them accountable for results.

Unfortunately, if you talk with most superintendents you will have a similar experience. They will be able to discuss in only the most general terms their expectations and plans for the middle grades. It is unlikely they will have a clear, concrete vision for middle schools, or a coherent strategy for how to achieve it. Many school systems converted to middle schools not because the school board or the superintendent understood and were committed to the philosophical, educational, and operational reasons for doing so, but because a school system committee recommended it.

In other words, in most school systems the district level leadership for middle schools does not provide the clear direction and oversight that middle level educators deserve and must have to educate young adolescent effectively. If the leaders of a school system did not and do not understand the purpose of middle schools and are not committed to providing them the support necessary to carry out that purpose, and if school boards and superintendents do not clearly communicate their expectations for the results middle schools should achieve, it is not just principals and teachers who should be held accountable if their middle schools are adrift.

Second, many middle schools fall short simply because they are not middle schools at all, or they are not what we might call "complete middle schools." Even today, 30 years after the origin of the middle school movement, there are schools with grades, six, seven and eight that call themselves "middle schools" but which have changed little from the junior high schools of previous generations. Students change classes every 40 to 50 minutes, the faculty is departmentalized, and teachers give priority to presenting subject content rather than engaging students in learning.

Other schools have to a greater or lesser extent tried to implement many of the commonly accepted practices of middle schools but for various reasons they have not implemented them effectively, or understood how to use them to improve student performance.

For example, many middle schools use "teaming," an approach in which a group of two to four teachers are responsible throughout the school day for the core instruction of a group of about 150 to 175 students. This arrangement is supposed to facilitate collaborative planning among the teachers, promote the development of inter-disciplinary curricula, and enable the teachers to work together over time to identify and respond to the strengths and weaknesses of individual students.

However, teaming is not self-actualizing. It requires a great deal of hard work. The personalities and philosophies of the team members have to mesh. They have to be committed to planning lessons jointly, and to engaging in deep discussions about how to best meet students' academic and developmental needs. Teaming can work. Many schools use teaming successfully. But there are two important caveats to keep in mind: (a) many schools have teams, or some other structures or processes traditionally associated with middle schools, but do not provide them the support and oversight to ensure that they function effectively; and (b) many schools have teams, or some other structures or processes traditionally associated with middle schools, but that is all they have -- they stop well short of using these approaches as building blocks for increasing student performance.

Suffering from the "Plateau Effect"

Third, many middle schools suffer from what we might call a "plateau effect." They work hard to implement the structures and processes associated with middle schools. But whether the implementation is complete or incomplete, of high quality or only half-hearted, these schools often consider their task accomplished once the structures and processes are in place. Again, this occurs because, from the beginning, the schools have been unclear about the results they were seeking to achieve. Perhaps they thought that if they were named a middle school, had a middle school grade configuration, and had some of the structures and processes associated with middle schools, they would, in fact, be a middle school. They assumed that once they were a middle school students would be happier, better behaved, and more "successful."

However, because these goals were never explicit, and the results never evaluated, the school believed that it had accomplished its task once it looked like a duck, walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck, even if still could not lay eggs. This is when schools plateau. They focus on how the "middle school concept is working" rather than on how much better students are learning. These schools move on to other agendas and eventually the structures and processes they implemented to become a middle school lose their vitality and their positive effects. What was once innovative and promising becomes business as usual, and students know it. That is why so many students characterize their middle schools as "boring."

Fourth, middle schools have not lived up to their potential because neither school systems nor schools have paid attention to the fundamentals. By "fundamentals," I mean (a) expectations and support of students, (b) expectations, support, and accountability of teachers and administrators, (c) students' preparation for and access to challenging academic content, and (d) students' engagement in meaningful learning experiences.

Meeting the Developmental and Academic Needs of Adolescents

The problem of expectations and support for students is complex. It begins with how schools perceive and treat young adolescents. It is true that these young people are unique. They enter middle school beginning to emerge from childhood, and they leave the eighth grade on the threshold of young adulthood. Their journeys from the end of the fifth grade to the beginning of the ninth grade occur in dramatically different ways, and developmentally they move through these years at significantly different rates. They are challenged by the rip tides of rapid physical, cognitive, psychological, emotional, and social development.

As they seek to understandwho they are becoming, and how to negotiate the temptations and opportunities of their culture and that of our adult world, young adolescents necessarily take risks. In fact, it is only by testing limits that they locate the boundaries of social norms and learn the consequences of crossing them. If many middle school students are difficult to tolerate, it is because their behaviors mirror the intensity of whatthey have to tolerate at this stage of their lives. Middle school students are, in other words, under normal developmental stress. Unfortunately, there is no way to get from age 10 to age 14 without passing through ages 11, 12, and 13.

Even if educators understand intellectually why young adolescents behave as they do, on an emotional level they find it challenging to respond to the ups and downs of their students. It is not unusual to encounter middle school educators who are so focused on responding to students' developmental challenges, or so determined to straightjacket students' development, that they push student learning to the margins of the students' educational experiences. It is not learning, but sympathy for students or control of students that sets the school's agenda.

You know educators who hold these beliefs and whose practices reflect them. One group believes young adolescents are so vulnerable that about all the school can do is take care of them, not expect too much of them academically, and hope that the students make it through middle school without harming themselves or others. These educators intend to help students but that is not the result. Instead of becoming stronger, students become weaker because their schools do not provide the quality academic challenges and support students need to grow.

Another group of educators see young adolescents as more volatile than vulnerable. They seek to control students' behaviors by limiting opportunities that foster student inter-action, movement, experimentation, discussion, questioning, debating, and even talking. In these schools, it is very difficult for deep learning to occur because the school's priority is on controlling the inquiry and dialogue that fosters learning. This is not the intention of the schools, but it is the effect.

Educators Who Are Committed to Middle Graders

However, there are also many middle school educators who perceive their students quite differently than those I have described. These teachers and administrators like the energy and unpredictability of young adolescents. They regard these qualities as assets rather than liabilities. They are sensitive to the developmental challenges students face, but they also recognize that their students are earnest young people, desperately seeking to be taken seriously by adults and eager for adults' respect and support. These teachers and administrators know that many students react negatively to schooling because it is often shallow andnot serious.

All this means that to have higher expectations of middle school students, states, school systems, and schools must also have higher expectations of middle school teachers and administrators. \Is it too much to expect that these educators should like and understand the age group for which they are responsible? Is it too much to expect that middle school teachers and administrators should be knowledgeable about the most effective ways to engage students in learning? Is it too much to expect that they should be steeped in the content they are teaching and be confident that they can help young adolescents learn this content at increasingly more difficult levels? Is it too much to expect that middle school principals should be leading, monitoring, supporting, and assessing teachers' performance, not just occasionally but for a significant part of every school day?

I do not think such expectations are unreasonable but the problem is bringing them to fruition. As in so many areas of education, knowing what to do and doing it are two different things. We know that the current preparation of teachers does not guarantee that middle schools will have teachers who are experts in their subject content, or who even understand adolescent development.

The Problem of Underprepared Middle Grades Teachers

A recent scholarly article reported that across grades seven through twelve, it is students in the seventh and eighth grades who are most likely to be taught by teachers without a college majoror minor in the subjects they are teaching. As many as 75 percent of eighth grade students taking physical science are taught by teachers without a major or minor in this field. In life science 60 percent of seventh graders are taught by out-of-field teachers, and 48 percent of students taking mathematics in the seventh grade are taught by teachers without a major or minor in this field.

It is interesting that the author of this article attributes the responsibility for this problem primarily to how school systems and principals actually employ and assign teachers, in spite of state laws or regulations. The fact that "misassignment is an accepted administrative technique" is the problem the author says, and he goes on to point out:

Good teaching entails a complex combination of art, craft, and science that the best contemporary research has begun to insightfully illuminate. It requires expertise in at least three areas: knowledge of the subject (knowing what to teach), skill in teaching (knowing how to teach) and also what [a leading researcher on teaching] has called pedagogical content knowledge -- knowing which method to use with particular topics, with particular kinds of students, and in particular kinds of settings. In short, the managerial choice to misassign teachers may save time and money for the school and, ultimately, for the taxpayer, but it is not cost-free.

I think that in the case of middle schools, there is abundant evidence that the cost is undereducated students who are therefore unable to perform at the higher levels states are demanding of them.

In Standards-Based Reform, Everyone Has To Be Held Accountable

This brings me to the issue of academic standards. As you know, nearly all states have promulgated standards of some type. When these standards delineate what students should know and be able to do by the end of their middle school education, and when there are reasonable benchmarks of proficiency to determine whether students can, in fact, perform at standard, academic standards perform a useful function. Indeed, one of the problems in middle school education has been that neither teachers, nor students, nor parents have been clear on what students should know and be able to do as a result of their learning experiences in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades.

However, if states or school systems believe that standards, in combination with high stakes assessments of student performance, will in and of themselves increase student learning, not just increase test scores, they are sadly mistaken. Students bear more than a little responsibility for their academic performance, but they should not bear all the responsibility. When students do not perform at standard, it is not appropriate to retain students in grade if there are not also comparable consequences for middle school teachers and principals.

In standards-based reform, the maxim is that everyone has to work harder, everyone has to be supported at high levels, everyone has to perform better, and everyone has to be held accountable. Whether states and school systems have the intestinal fortitude to do this is another matter, but if standards and assessment are to have any significant impact across-the-board accountability is essential.

The Promise of Quality Staff Development

The only way middle school students will perform better, and the only way middle school teachers and administrators will perform better is if they all get a great deal more support than is now the case. It is true that there is what we call "staff development" or "professional development" in every state and every school system but it is in great crisis. It is diffuse and of very low quality. There is virtually no meaningful evaluation of the results of staff development. In most cases it does not engage teachers and principals in developing the knowledge and skills they need to cause students to perform at standard. In fact, most staff development is held in such low esteem by practitioners that they seek to avoid it.

By the way, I should mention that under a grant from the Foundation, the National Staff Development Council has identified 25 subject-specific staff development programs for middle schools for which there is also evidence that the staff development increased student achievement. The Council had to study more than 400 programs to find these twenty-five. The Council has just published a directory describing these programs and you may be interested in obtaining this publication.

Based on the results staff development has achieved to date, it may be tempting to dismiss staff development as a key strategy to improve the performance levels of middle school teachers and administrators. It would be a mistake to do so. Not only are there resources available for staff development, but it is a process for professional growth that is at least familiar though not loved by practitioners. It also has the potential to be an important tool for reform. For this to happen, however, staff development itself must be reformed so it provides the support current teachers and principals need to improve their practice.

The first step in this reform process is to abandon staff development practices that waste precious resources of time and money while, at the same time, alienating the very educators they should be helping. These practices include discrete "one-shot" workshops that may increase "awareness" but are not deep enough or engaging enough for educators to develop new knowledge and skills they can apply with confidence to their teaching or leadership. Instead, all staff development needs to be explicitly focused on helping middle school educators develop the three kinds of expertise I referred to earlier: knowledge of the subject, skill in teaching, and "pedagogical content knowledge --knowing which method to use with particular topics, with particular kinds of students, and in particular kinds of settings." In light of the appallingly high percentage of middle school students taught by teachers without a college major or minor in the field in which they are teaching, there is no time to waste in making better use of currently available staff development resources.

There is a comparable urgency to encourage and support low-performing students so they can make greater progress towards performing at standard. Some of this can be done within the framework of existing school operations. For example, the practice called "looping," keeping a group of students with the same team of teachers for all three years of middle school, has great potential as a supportive learning environment. Many school systems are also providing extra help for students through Saturday classes, standards-based summer schools, and extended learning opportunities after the regular school day. One school system I know has instituted a "zero period" for students who would otherwise be retained. The students come to school an hour earlier each day to work on performing at standard in domains where they were deficient the preceding school year.

Moving Beyond "Safety Net" Programs

The challenge, however, is how to move beyond special safety-net programs to change more fundamentally what middle schools do and how they do it. In other words, while the creation and development of middle schools themselves was a first phase in reforming the education of young adolescents, it is now time to move into a second phase.

As I have described, one of the problems with the first phase was that many educators thought that merely creating middle schools would result in what they vaguely described as "more successful" students. With the benefit of hindsight, we now understand that the first phase of middle school reform placed too much emphasis on school structures and processes, as well as on the affective dimension of education. In the second phase of middle school reform it is necessary to emphasize increasing the knowledge and skills of principals and teachers, strengthening curriculum, and significantly increasing what all students know and can do.

It is important to recognize that the state-of-the-art of school reform is now much more sophisticated than it was thirty years ago. In fact, there are now what are called "designs" for whole-school reform. These are, in effect, blueprints for how to systematically reform an entire school.

These designs are not magic. They require money, hard work, and consistent, high-quality staff development over time. An advantage of employing such a design is that a school does not have to conceive its reform from scratch, or subsequently figure out how to get from one point to another on the reform continuum. Instead, a school is able to draw on the expertise and experience of a team of national researchers who created the reform design and have assisted other schools in implementing it. With periodic technical support from the design team, a school is able to implement whole-school reform in an orderly manner, and to get external feedback about its progress, as well as assistance to address implementation problems that arise.

The second phase of middle school reform can benefit from the new technology of whole-school reform designs, but only if school systems make use of this resource. School systems have to take the initiative to learn about the many designs that are available and determine the potential cost-benefit of using them. There are designs for middle school reform, such as the John Hopkins' Talent Development Model, and there are even catalogs that provide information on all the major designs in use, and describe their respective experiences and results. The use of the designs, at least the most promising of them, can potentially accelerate the second phase of middle school reform so we begin to see higher levels of student performance sooner rather than later.

Not "Improvement" But "Results"

Finally, we need to keep in mind that the focus of the second phase must not be "middle school improvement" but "improving middle schools' results." During the past three decades there has been a lot of loose talk about middle schools being "student-centered." If this had truly been the case, we would not be meeting here today. If middle schools had truly been student-centered there would be more impressive evidence of student performance than is currently the case. In fact, most middle schools have been more adult-centered than anything else. It is, after all, the adults in the schools who have been the most resistant to change and who have been inclined to expect so little of themselves and their students.

In the second phase of middle school reform, the emphasis must be on expecting, demanding, and strongly supporting adult performance that causes higher levels of student performance. If we fail to do that, I fear that 20 or 30 years from now, a new generation of education leaders will meet here to analyze our failures and discuss how to make student learning the centerpiece of middle schools.

Thank you.