A conversation with Anne C. Lewis

Back to the IN CASE YOU MISSED IT index

Anne Lewis is the author of several books about urban middle school reform. The latest, Believing in Ourselves: Progress and Struggle in Urban Middle School Reform, describes the experiences of five school systems that pledged to raise student achievement in selected middle schools. In this interview, Lewis speaks frankly about the factors that limited reform in some schools and districts. This interview also appears -- along with other selections from recent issues of High Strides -- at the NMSA website.

A conversation with Anne C. Lewis

Six years, five cities and 12 schools ago, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation embarked on an ambitious project to improve the education of urban middle school students. After a competitive review process, the foundation decided to focus its attention on schools in Baltimore, Louisville, Milwaukee, Oakland and San Diego that had a record of low achievement, high poverty, poor parental involvement and rapid turnover of staff and students.

The five districts received a total of $5.7 million in assistance, and the Clark Foundation gave an additional $4 million to outside groups that provided different services to the schools. The results were mixed at best - only two districts and six schools demonstrated some improvement in student learning over the five-year grant period. Only two schools showed dramatic gains.

Anne C. Lewis, an education policy writer, has observed the Clark initiative from the beginning, documenting the struggles, the successes and the failures of change in these five urban districts. In Gaining Ground, Lewis' report on the first two years of Clark initiative, she discovered that the schools were focused on "doing lots of 'things' under the umbrella of reform." In Changing the Odds, she discussed the uneven movement toward a vision of reform. The last book in the trilogy, Believing in Ourselves, was released last fall. In it, Lewis concludes that large, urban school districts can make changes to substantially improve the futures of young adolescents, but too often they lack the vision and the vigor to do so.

"That the outcomes (among individual schools) were so different is not so much a reflection of what the schools did as the result of an uneven capacity of urban systems to change," she writes. "Schools individually may have their '15 minutes of fame' as reformers, but the moments of success flee unless the districts and communities support the schools in their efforts, reforming themselves in the process."

Lewis lives in Glen Echo, Maryland. She is the national columnist for Phi Delta Kappan magazine and the founding editor of High Strides.

High Strides: One of the most compelling points of the book was the way that community violence regularly invaded the 12 Clark schools -- the classroom murder of a staff member in Baltimore, the on-campus death of a student in Oakland, the Milwaukee students who had to sneak out the back door of school to avoid gang members. How did these safety issues affect the ability of schools to focus on education reform?

Anne Lewis: They replaced it. Discipline and safety became the focus of everybody's energy. One of the saddest stories was at Calverton (Middle School in Baltimore), for example, where the support staff member was murdered. The first time I went there the principal was spending all of her time working with outside groups -- churches and civic groups - to make sure the kids could make it to school safely...When I came to the school two years later, the focus was making people inside the school feel safe because it was the year of the murder...The principal said, "We were going to have our best year ever, then this murder happened on Halloween night." It changed the whole focus.

The schools where safety in the neighborhoods is such a problem, you know immediately without anybody telling you that. The doors are locked, or there are security people everywhere, there are hall sweeps. Everything turns toward discipline and controlWhen all of your conversations in a school are turned to something that's negative like discipline or control, it's very difficult to get to the positive sides of the discussion like student work or curriculum changes.

HS: In the book you mentioned an Oakland junior high school where the principal considered discipline to be under control but where students were fearful of showing up in the morning. As one girl put it so poignantly, "I knew when school began every September that there would be a new gang in charge" -- the Female Lynch Mob, Nothing But Trouble or the Lost Girls. Did you typically find that administrators and teachers were so out of touch with the reality of the school experience for the middle grades students they supervised?

AL: I don't think in the schools that were unsuccessful that teachers and administrators listened to kids very much. They heard the angry ones, and they rushed to judgment about all of them based on that. But I don't think they really heard kids...I didn't find strong student governments or peer mediation or other things like that in the schools that didn't succeed. They were not real student-centered schools.

HS: What was the result of that?

AL: I think it's this clinging to a fragile status quo. You just felt that these schools were afraid to twitch because it might mean that they would lose control. So everybody was kind of frozen into what they had always done and what they considered that they ought to be doing.

HS: When change was introduced, did it paralyze them more?

AL: In most cases it became such a limited change. For example, lots of schools used advisories, but instead of having small groups with one adult, the advisories became 15 minutes tacked onto a homeroom period, and the whole class was there. The content was directed by the teacher. The students had no say in what went on...I saw that a lot. It took them a long time to get what team teaching is all about. A lot of them never did. I think some of the interdisciplinary curriculum stuff was really bad. It didn't change anybody's way of teaching. It just kind of lumped together cutesy ideas that kids could do together, but it didn't change what they were learning. So, even though they said they were making these changes, they were very limited.

HS: Only two of the 12 schools had the same principal during the entire run of the Clark initiative. One school had four principals in five years. You have said that "as situations in schools change, so do they kinds of leadership they need." Most principals, for example, found it hard to move from an authoritarian to a more collaborative approach to leadership. If the transition was so difficult for these principals -- with all the resources provided by Clark -- can we really expect other troubled urban schools to train effective leaders?

AL: It can be done, but they have to make a priority of it. Even in the two districts that worked, they didn't set principal support and professional development as a priority until late in the game. Principals were given no support except what Clark gave them, which was twice a year meetings, long weekends really. As I said in the book, that was helpful, and principals liked it, but that's got to be done at the local level.

HS: One of the biggest success stories of the Clark initiative seems to be the increase in parental involvement at most of the schools. But you also suggest that while the seed has been planted, it will take a long time for a truly family-centered school to flower in places where educators and parents have a long history of hostility and alienation. How can urban schools uproot the past troubles?

AL: I just think they have to start looking at parents, and this is trite, as the child's first and always most important teacher. And I know school people fault parents because they feel they're not raising their kids right, the way they would do. But I found early, when we did interviews with kids, that their point of reference, no matter how poor their situation, was always their mother or a parent, mostly the mother. No matter how bad things are, kids are not willing to break away, at least at this age. I think that schools have to recognize that, to take parents where they are.

I don't think parental involvement is how often parents show up at school or for a meeting. Those are old, suburban ways of measuring parents' interest. Being on the school side means that the parent values what the school is trying to do and teaches that to the kids at home. And going deeper, it means you have to convince parents that you're on their side. Because these parents have terrific problems for the most part. And schools are not listening to them, just like they're not listening to students.

HS: You quoted an Oakland administrator who said that for teachers to change their practice and beliefs, "they must have...some powerful outcome that would make those sitting on the fence get off of it and those who want to effect change get something immediate to hold on to." Were there any outcomes that made a difference to these schools?

AL: It doesn't happen as fast as that person in Oakland would have liked, but I do think it happened. Certainly in the Louisville schools, they tried out everything that came through the door. And then they realized after the first two years that that was just fracturing everything. But teachers were beginning to get interested enough in new ideas, in the networks that were developing around Writing to Learn and Foxfire and the Algebra Project that they got hooked. Once you are hooked into looking at new ideas, then you can participate better in developing a vision across the school and district and talking to each other. There has to be a wedge first. That might come from a particular program that you were exposed to. But then you couldn't stop there...It's about trying out something new and finding success with it and then evaluating it and learning how to share those experiences.

HS: I was fascinated by some of the teachers mentioned in the book, particularly in Louisville and San Diego, who learned to trust students to take charge of their own learning -- having seventh-graders write portfolio standards for incoming sixth-graders, for example, or asking students to keep their own records of class participation by their peers. What will it take to spread these kind of practices to other classrooms?

AL: It goes back to the difference between a school that is focused on control and one that sees itself as student centered. If you're not afraid of kids, then you can find all kinds of ways for them to shape what they're learning and get more out of it. If you're only focused on control, you can't see that.

At Mann (Middle School in San Diego), for instance, they had this terrific peer mediation program where the students really went on to become advocates for each other. They instituted a buddy system for new students. They set up programs that parents were invited to.They just sort of felt like they were part of the decision-making going on.

HS: What was the most interesting thing you got out of all this project?

AL: It was gratifying to see people mature and grow over the years in their ability to be professional leaders. That was true of both principals and teachers...As a journalist, what I found most interesting was the final report's emphasis on the context for change. The first two reports looked at what was going on in schools and district policies. The latest report tried to look at why things worked in some schools and not others. You can't generalize, but I found that there are certain dynamics of communities that need to be studied really hard to find out what's most important...I say this with some regret, but I don't think at this point that foundations or government programs should go into urban districts unless there's proof that the districts can handle the changes that are needed. I think a lot of outside money goes into districts and the people who give the outside money learn a lot, but the districts don't learn anything because they're not willing to learn.

HS: I wonder if you would take a few minutes to discuss some of the policy implications from your research.

AL: I think one of the major ones is that districts really need to do an inventory of their professional development -- what they're spending money on, what it's getting them -- and line it up with specific goals for kids. Right now in many districts it's very sporadic. It's whatever a teacher wants. It's not directed at school goals or district goals. There are a lot of resources out there to pull on to do this, but it's all got to be focused...Then you have to also change your assessment policies. Because you can't have higher standards and use the same old tests. This project pointed that out. Because the standardized tests showed little improvement in student learning. However, if you looked at other things that were happening, it does indicate that there was some other progress.

HS: Based on your observations during the past six years, what are the chances for sustainable education reform in urban middle schools - possible, probable, pitiful?

AL: I think it's very possible, very possible. But it's very hard work. It has to be sustained. It has to be enveloped by a vision with real strong accountability behind it. And it has to be given time to work. I mean, none of these places showed much improvement until the end of this project. Milwaukee schools began to show some after the project ended, but that's five years...I think urban districts are going to have a difficult dilemma in that they're in this limbo period where so many teachers are retiring...It's both an opportunity and a crisis. It's an opportunity to bring in people who are skilled at working with urban kids, but at the same time there aren't enough of those.

...I think what was so neat about this whole project was that there were so many people willing to work so hard and eventually to change their own attitudes. And sure, you know, you would hope that there more of them or that they had changed more. But the fact that they were really out there and, maybe for the first time, sharing with other teachers. And out of that came, I think, some teachers who are very exited and satisfied about what they were trying to do. I think that's pretty encouraging. If you just give teachers the time and resources to learn new ideas and try them out and share them with other people, they're just delighted.

I think that, just like the quote that's in the title of the book, what it eventually leads to as (Louisville's Western Middle School teacher) Fanny (Timmer) says"It is not so important that teachers here believe students can learn at the high level. What's most important is that our students now believe that, too."

HOW TO ORDER HIGH STRIDES

High Strides is published five times a year by the
National Middle School Association
2600 Corporate Exchange Drive, Suite 370
Columbus, OH 43231-1672.

Editorial offices are at 4004 Alton Road, Louisville, KY 40207
TEL 502-899-1924, FAX 502-899-1961.

High Strides is a benefit included in all levels of NMSA membership.
Other subscriptions: U.S. $20 yearly rate, $6 per issue; International:
$35 yearly rate, $9 per issue. To order call 1-800-528-NMSA.

Back to "IN CASE YOU MISSED IT . . ."

Return to Believing in Ourselves title page