Home | Back
to the Hayes Mizell Reader Index
[Remarks of Hayes Mizell on September 12, 1999 at a meeting of vertical
teams from the Corpus Christi, Long Beach, Louisville, and San Diego school
systems Participants on the vertical teams included school board members,
superintendents and assistant superintendents, central office staff responsible
for staff development and/or middle school reform, principals and teachers,
teacher union representatives, and community representatives. The meeting
was held at the Edith Macy Conference Center in Briarcliff Manor, NY. Mizell
is Director of the Program for Student Achievement at the Edna McConnell
Clark Foundation.]
Hitting the Wall
I am sure most of you are familiar with the expression "hitting the
wall." This phrase was originally used by runners to describe what
happens between the eighteenth and twenty-fifty mile of a marathon. At that
point the runners' legs stiffen and hurt and they have to work much harder
to lift their legs. But high-altitude climbers experience a similar debilitation.
Here is how one writer describes this kind of hitting the wall:
It usually happens high on the mountain, when every muscle is
screaming to quit. Here, the climber must mentally will the body to take
each small and halting step. Like the staggering marathon runner, the climber
must set small goals such as taking a hundred steps before looking up or
going just to the next corner and then the next and then the next. At the
same time, he or she must make sure each of thousands upon thousands of
steps are safely placed, a daunting task when the body is exhausted and
the oxygen-starved brain has difficulty concentrating. This muddled brain
must also contend with crampons that come loose or headlight batters that
go dead-apparently simple things that at high elevation can take many minutes
to correct. Overlying all this is the constant tension of knowing that one
mistake can send you hurtling to your death.
These symptoms of hitting the wall are not unfamiliar to those of you who
have now reached the higher altitudes of systemic, standards-based reform.
You have been trudging through knee-deep snow, cautiously climbing over
rocky ledges, and learning how to get across yawning crevasses. For some
of you, the summit that is represented by eighth grade students performing
at standard is within sight, for others it only momentarily appears before
heavy clouds obscure it again. All of you, I suspect. are tired because
you have been the leaders of your respective expeditions, trying to find
the best route to the summit while many others remain at the base camp.
There may be many reasons why you feel you are hitting the wall. Maybe you
underestimated just how long and difficult the climb would be, getting harder
with each step, not easier. Maybe you put too much faith in your equipment
-- not just in the written standards, but in all the materials and accompanying
tools that seem so logical and compelling on their face but which fail to
meet the real-world tests of teachers' lack of time, or know-how, or incentive,
or will to use them.
Or maybe for you hitting the wall is simply not knowing what to do next,
or not coming to grips with doing what you know in your heart must be done.
You have learned that no matter how inclusive your process for developing
standards might have been, or how committed your school board and superintendent
is to using them, this will not cause students to perform at standard. It
may finally be dawning on you that long-standing structures and practices
in your school systems and schools are more powerful than the standards.
You may be realizing that merely making changes at the margins of those
structures and practices is not enough to effect the deep changes in teaching
and learning that must occur to cause students to perform at standard.
The author of Matthew's gospel had it right: "Neither is new wine put
into old wineskins; if it is, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled,
and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and
so both are preserved." The new wine of standards requires the new
wineskins of reformed schools and classrooms.
Facing Up to the Real Limitations of Schools
If you are feeling that you are hitting the wall in standards-based reform,
I want to suggest that is not a bad thing. One of the toughest things to
do in public education is to face up to the very real limitations of schools.
The limitations I am talking about are not those of inadequate resources
or time, but rather the assumption that little or nothing can be done that
is substantially different from what is currently being done. It is almost
as though there is wide agreement among the public as well as educators
that the ways schools have operated for most of this century are, in fact,
the best ways to educate children. So long as we assume that schools and
classrooms must function substantially the same as they do now, this severely
limits what schools can do to cause students to perform at standard.
When we use the term "standards-based reforms" we are referring
to reforming school systems, schools, and instruction to achieve the result
of many more students performing at significantly higher levels than is
now the case. We are not talking about a vague awareness among teachers
that standards exist, or that teachers have standards posted in their classrooms,
or even that teachers link their lessons to standards. We are talking about
changing schools and instruction so both cause all students to perform at
standard.
Hitting the wall, then, is a signal for you to think more deeply about how
to best focus your energy. By now you should have learned that in spite
of the pressures on you from many sources, you have to focus on a limited
set of strategies and activities that have the greatest potential to increase
student performance. If you do not know what those strategies and activities
are, then it is no wonder you feel that you are hitting the wall. If you
cannot look back over the past four years and confidently describe whether
and how you know that your strategies and activities contributed directly
to improved student learning, it means you have been wasting your energy
and that of many other people. If you do not have such evidence, and if
that evidence has not propelled you forward towards better results, you
may just as well have been rolling dice.
Failure is acceptable if you know why you failed, and if you forthrightly
acknowledge that failure, and talk about it and analyze it, and subsequently
apply the lessons the failure taught you. Failure is acceptable if it causes
you to act smarter, and to achieve better results. This, after all, is what
learning is all about in the real world. Failure is not acceptable if you
just keep trying, making the same mistakes over and over, throwing the dice
again and again, never really understanding or acknowledging the reasons
for the failure, never really acting differently or achieving better results.
Hitting the wall is an opportunity to reassess your beliefs about how schools
and instruction have to change if they are going to cause nearly all students
to perform at standard, and how you will know whether the actions you take
move students closer to that goal.
Hitting the Wall Can Be a Valuable Experience
Hitting the wall can also be a valuable experience because it should cause
you to recognize the limits of your knowledge and skills. No matter what
your position, you come to a point when you do not know what to do to cause
persons to behave differently. Potentially effective strategies and activities
are elusive. Teachers hit the wall when they lack the content knowledge
or pedagogical skills to cause students to perform at higher levels. Principals
hit the wall when they lack an understanding of standards and the skills
to guide teachers towards improving instruction. Superintendents and central
office staff hit the wall when there is little evidence that their interventions
and special programs are increasing student learning in persistently low-performing
schools. Even school board members hit the wall when they realize that their
policies have only limited effect on the day-to-day practices of principals
and teachers.
But hitting the wall only means that you are human, not all-knowing or all-powerful.
If you can recognize that and take the initiative to find and draw upon
resources outside yourselves and beyond your classrooms, schools, and school
systems, there is potential to move forward more efficiently and productively.
You will almost certainly not find the convenient, risk-free solutions
you might like, or approaches that do not require courage and a strong will
to apply effectively, but that is the price of achieving significant results
rather than merely engaging in symbolic activity. We all admire the student
who asks for help and uses the resources of the school and the community
but too many educators do not model these behaviors in their professional
lives.
There are schools and classrooms where there is persuasive evidence that
when the schools operate differently and when teachers both learn and teach
differently, even low-achieving students perform at higher levels. Are you
looking for those places? Are you learning from them? Are you breaking through
the parochialism of your classrooms, your schools, your school districts,
and your cultures and ideologies to find and use practices that can cause
many more students to perform at standard, or are you clinging to that which
is comfortable and low-risk, even if it is ineffective?
Students Really Know What Hitting the Wall Is All About
What I am saying is that if you feel like you are hitting the wall, use
those feelings in ways that will help you to keep moving forward. As frustrated
as you may sometimes feel about your progress, keep in mind that you share
that feeling with many of the students in your classrooms and schools. They
really know what hitting the wall is all about because every day they experience
it in the educational settings you provide. They encounter structures and
practices that are quite often mysterious and sometimes malevolent. The
wall they hit is made up of many bricks: teachers who do not have a deep
understanding of the content they teach, curriculum units that are as boring
as they are arbitrary, standards that even the teachers do not understand,
grading practices that depend more on the mood of the teacher than on the
performance of the student, and pedagogy fashioned from the straw and mud
of another time, for another people. Even this does not deter some students,
and they are success stories you cling to and recount over and over to colleagues
and friends.
But what about all the other students? What about those that hit the wall
at the very time in their lives when they need someone to tell them they
can reach the summit, and to help them find their way? Just keep in mind
that when you feel like you are hitting the wall, and when it makes
you feel tired and powerless and unsure what to do next, that is exactly,
exactly how many students feel. It is useful to reflect on that,
and to use that awareness to shed your fear and exhaustion and to plow ahead,
"taking a hundred steps before looking up" or go "just to
the next corner and then the next and then the next."
Your students are counting on you. There are students, and their parents,
who are satisfied because they are performing well, but they should be performing
at even higher levels. There are students who are quite literally stuck
in the middle, satisfied with their average performance because it seems
to be all that their teachers and their schools require. There are many,
many students who have no idea what academic success is because there are
no living, breathing, practical performance standards that delineate the
specific levels of proficiency that represent academic success. None of
these groups of students can perform at increasingly higher levels unless
their schools and teachers routinely and demonstrably expect them to do
so, and unless their schools and teachers obtain and use the knowledge and
skills necessary to help them.
Standards are not enough. Accountability is not enough. What will really
make the difference is the educational contexts you provide and your will
to provide only those that cause students to make significant progress towards
and perform at standard. Your students, and we, are counting on you.
Thank you.