Myths and opportunities in urban middle school reform

Remarks of M. Hayes Mizell at the conclusion of the National Middle School Association Regional Conference "Urban Middle Level Reform: 'It's for the Kids'". The conference was held on March 13 -15, 1992 in Baltimore, Maryland. Mizell is Director of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation's Program for Student Achievement.

Myths and Opportunities in
Urban Middle School Reform

Is "school improvement" enough? To me, the term school improvement connotes a painfully slow, piecemeal, and unending process that suggests that someday -- nobody can say exactly when, but "someday" -- urban middle schools will become the places they need to be for kids.

"School improvement" means you cannot promise yourselves or your students anything because the horizon of high quality education is always receding before you. When change comes, it is often too little, too late because while your school systems or schools have been "improving" the world has been changing at an even faster pace. The effect is that your students never get the education they deserve and need, and year after year we lose students that need not be lost.

Perhaps as a result of this conference you will decide to lay down your burden of mere school improvement, and pick up your sword and shield of school reform. Maybe more people will straighten out their language. Your students don't need "improved" schools, they need re-formed schools and re-formed curriculum and re-formed instruction and yes, re-formed teachers. In the context of high quality education, they need schools and teachers who have been born again.

Given the fragile credibility of public education, perhaps it's better not to begin reform at all than to extend it over many years without the school system ever rendering an ultimate judgement about what reform achieved for kids.

If you can leave school improvement behind and return to your school systems and schools as advocates for urban middle school reform, you need to know this role carries with it certain obligations. If you are going to be advocates for reform, I urge you to view the process of reform as a finite rather than an infinite experience. Establish a time-table that communicates your expectation that by a certain year, school reform will have been accomplished and its benefits to students will be reflected in their personal and academic achievement. If you are not prepared to do this, both the perception and experience of school reform may be that it is more empty rhetoric.

Given the fragile credibility of public education, perhaps it is better not to begin reform at all than for it to extend over many years without the school system ever rendering an ultimate judgement about what reform achieved for kids. Maybe school reform is a one year, three year, five year, or seven year process, but whatever its length the people you want to go on the journey -- taxpayers, teachers, and parents -- need to know how long it will take. This is one example of the self-discipline and honesty that school reform requires.

Be prepared to give up certain myths

If you leave this conference as an advocate for urban middle school reform, be prepared to give up certain myths. The biggest myth -- that nearly all young adolescents cannot learn at high levels -- has been effectively exploded here by Lorraine Monroe and Jeff Howard, so I will not address it. But there are other myths we need to lay down as well.

Myth #1: The right structures and processes make a "good" middle school

"We have a good middle school because we have teaming, a house system, exploratory courses, inter-disciplinary curricula, common prep periods, and multi-age grouping". As far as I know, no one has conducted a study to identify schools which have many of the structures and processes usually associated with good middle schools but which also have a significant percentage of their students performing at low levels. Perhaps no such schools exist, but I doubt it.

School reform is not a checklist. School reform has not been achieved simply when a school has put in place many of the structures and processes generally associated with good middle grades education. Instead, school reform occurs when these structures and processes significantly increase all students' personal and academic achievement. Whatever your approach, if it is not benefitting large numbers of students, it is not school reform.

You have to be willing to revisit the structures and practices in your school to determine whether and how they contribute to student achievement. You may conclude that teaming and a house system are like prep periods, cafeterias, and carpet on the floor; you could do without them, but they offer certain advantages that make the school a more productive place for students and teachers. You may also conclude that while these and other practices associated with middle school provide a strong foundation for your schools, they are not enough. School reform will not occur unless we go beyond the "good middle school" to develop and implement new attitudes among teachers and administrators, more engaging instruction, and more challenging curriculum that results in significantly increased achievement among all students.

Myth #2: We cannot overcome the problems that plague our students

"No matter what we do in this school, we cannot overcome the violence, drugs, gangs, poverty, dysfunctional families, and the physical and psycho-emotional health problems that plague our students." There is no question that your students encounter many serious problems outside the classroom that affect their performance inside the classroom. You cannot turn a blind eye to these realities. Your central office and area administrators should take the lead in working with other community agencies to address these problems, and mobilize resources to help your school do so. But there is a difference between identifying and addressing the problems outside the school that affect your students' classroom behavior and performance, and citing these problems as reasons why your school cannot institute certain reforms.

Are the discussions about your students' external problems an analysis that leads to action, or an excuse that legitimizes inaction? I hear too many conversations among educators that seem tinged with the latter. They seem to be saying that school reform is not really possible, or will do little good, because students' problems outside the school are too overwhelming. These conversations among educators focus on issues which are beyond their control rather than on issues which they do control. These discussions remind me of the evening news; the attention is on the graphic symptoms of deep and complex problems, rather than the problems themselves and what can be done to solve them. Just as there is a book about dropouts with the subtitle, "Enough Is Known For Action", these conversations could be subtitled, "Enough Is Known For Inaction."

These discussions remind me of the evening news; the attention is on the graphic symptoms of deep and complex problems, rather than the problems themselves and what can be done to solve them.

I know that the symptoms your students bring to school are a powerful magnet that threaten to pull you away from your mission of providing them a high quality education. These are symptoms you cannot and should not ignore. But I also urge you, plead with you, to remember that precisely because the lives of so many students are dangerous, troubled, and stressful, that is why they need schools that help them develop high levels of competence. Yes, these schools need to be safe, structured, and caring, but these are only the first steps.

Perhaps more than anything else, your students need to gain power. You can help them develop power to manipulate symbols, power to shape facts and information, power to analyze and interpret objective reality, and even power to create knowledge. Because all of us in this room have been educated to achieve at high levels, we know this power is more compelling than any drug and more useful, and sometime dangerous than any gun. For all your students to develop this power, school reform is essential. The power of the classroom can compete with the power of the streets, but for that to happen we have to fundamentally change what goes on in the classroom.

Myth #3: School success isn't important for all students

"Well, you know, all students do not need to go to college". You will recognize this myth as a logical progression of the myths "all students cannot learn," and "all students cannot learn at high levels." You can hear this myth anywhere but it is planted and cultivated in those middle schools where the priority is helping students get through young adolescence rather than preparing them for the future. In my view, middle schools should have on overriding objective, to prepare their students so that during their adult working lives in the next century they will be able to keep themselves and their families out of poverty. This is a minimal expectation for what public education should be about, but for millions of students the schools have not met this expectation.

Unfortunately, most middle schools do a poor job of providing students with basic facts about the labor market, workplace, and wage scales they will encounter in only a few years. These facts are not buried in obscure publications of the Bureau of Labor Statistics; they appear on the general news and business pages of daily newspapers.

For example:

-- American companies are regularly eliminating thousands of full and part-time jobs for entry-level workers or workers with relatively low skill.

-- Under the government's poverty definition, a single mother with three children, who works full time, and earns five dollars an hour, or about $10,400 a year, is not "poor".

-- When the Gallup polling organization asked people how much money it takes for a family of four to "get along" in their respective communities, the average answer was $20,913 or 73 percent higher than the government's poverty line.

-- In 1990, the median family income was $35,353, a two percent drop from 1989, while the number of persons in poverty increased by two million. In 1990, the earning of the typical full-time male worker fell $1,046. Analysts of the Census cite "long-term erosion in wages" as the principal reason more people are in poverty.

-- Economists predict that the occupational areas that will grow the fastest are those "that require relatively higher levels of education or training." While they say that "this clearly does not mean that everyone must have a four-year college degree to find a job...it does point out that an increasingly important opportunity difference is emerging along the lines of educational preparation."

In other words, your students will enter a labor market where there is more competition for jobs, where it will be harder for them to earn the income they believe they need, and where they cannot assume their jobs will be secure. To further complicate this scenario, the United States Department of Labor concludes that "a very small pool of young people today appear educationally prepared for many of the occupations projected to grow most rapidly" between now and the year 2005.

Middle schools should be covered with posters from surrounding technical schools, community colleges, and four year colleges and universities. Catalogues should be scattered around the school, not confined to the library.

It seems clear that you do your students no favors if you assume these are issues for high school rather than middle school. It is in middle school that students take the first tentative steps towards considering their futures, and your job is to help them understand what the future may be like, and educate them so they will know their options and have the power to pursue them. There is no substitute for school reform to prepare your students to perform at levels necessary for them to pursue one or more years of post-secondary education. This reform should be buttressed by relatively simple measures to encourage students to begin to think about seeking one or more years of post-secondary training.

Schools can create an ethos of achievement that also emphasizes post-secondary education as a desirable and necessary goal. Middle schools should be covered with posters from surrounding technical schools, community colleges, and four year colleges and universities. Catalogues from these institutions should be scattered around the school, not confined to the library, freely available for browsing and for teachers to work into the curriculum. Partnerships with post-secondary institutions should yield sweatshirts, tee shirts, pencils, mugs, and tickets to the institutions' sports and cultural events that your schools can use as incentives for student achievement. Mentors, tutors, and guest teachers from these institutions should be frequent visitors to the school building. The possibilities for raising students' exposure and aspirations to post-secondary education are almost endless.

In dozens of ways, your schools should be directly and indirectly telling your students that the mission of your schools is to prepare them to have the option of pursuing one or more years of post-secondary education. Is this necessary? I think it is. The more high quality education your students have, the better able they will be to withstand changing economic and social forces in the next century. After all, the 1990 Census found that if householders had at least one year of college, there was a more than 200% chance that they were not in poverty, compared to householders with only a high school education. If you ignore the implications of this and other data for school reform, you do so at your students peril, and your own.

Myth #4: All middle schools have the same needs

"There is no difference between the needs of urban middle schools and other middle schools." In fact, urban middle schools have to take into account factors that either are not present, or not present to the same degree, as in most non-urban middle schools. Faculty and staff of urban middle schools have to learn how to work and teach effectively in a multi-cultural environment, and how to change the school to address the needs of newly immigrated students.

Urban middle schools have to contend with massive and intractable school system bureaucracies that pursue their own interests, offer little or no help to building level staff, and issue directives and demands that impede rather than enhance education. Urban middle schools are also more likely to have teacher unions that challenge reform at every step. Urban middle schools are in areas of high concentrations of poverty but they suffer from inequitable state school finance systems that provide more resources to non-urban school districts where citizens are taxed at a lower rate than in urban districts.

Myth #5: Efforts to involve middle school parents are a waste of time

"Parents of young adolescents do not want to be involved in their children's schools." The conventional wisdom is that even if parents have been involved in their childrens' elementary schools, they quit coming to the school when their children enter the middle grades. Educators often assume that this is because either the parents are burned out, have lost interest, or know their children are embarrassed to have them come to school. In fact, these parents are trying to understand and cope with their childrens' development and their new behaviors. Most of them are as confused and baffled as their children. What happened to their loving, cuddly, and compliant children? These parents would like to have allies. They would like to be able to talk with someone who can help them understand their children and how to respond to their new behaviors and needs.

There is a tremendous opportunity in the middle grades for schools and parents to forge an alliance that is productive for both parties, and beneficial to the kids.

The fact that parents do not see the school and its staff as an ally is testimony to their estrangement from the school, and their assumption that the school is only interested in the parent as an enforcer of standards of behavior. But there is a tremendous opportunity in the middle grades for schools and parents to forge an alliance that is productive for both parties, and beneficial to the kids. As Daisy Cubias and Shirley Owens have demonstrated in Milwaukee, and as Jocelyn Garlington has shown in Baltimore, these alliances can be developed when urban middle schools reach out to parents and work with them on the parents' terms, rather than the schools terms. The parents' interests and concerns provide the common ground; the schools just have to be willing to go meet them there.

There are many more myths you must lay down if you are going to be advocates for urban middle school reform. In fact there are so many I cannot discuss them all at length. Keep your ears open, you can hear them all around you. I know it is not easy for you to challenge these myths. Peer pressure is just as powerful a force in your professional lives as it is in the lives of your students.

Yet, so much depends on what you and NMSA have learned at this conference. I hope all of you see a little more clearly that reform, not improvement, is the issue. I hope all of us have a deeper understanding that the challenge is to enable all children to learn at high levels, not just help all children learn. I hope we are determined to move beyond the "good middle school" to providing the education young adolescents need to increase significantly their personal and academic achievement.

Who should lead the way?

Recently, the President of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, spoke to the World Economic Forum. Parts of his address, entitled "The End of the Modern Era," are as relevant to urban middle school reform as to the state of the world:

We are looking for new scientific recipes, new ideologies, new control systems, new institutions, new instruments to eliminate the dreadful consequences of our previous recipes, ideologies, control systems, institutions and instruments. We treat the fatal consequences of technology as though they were a technical defect that could be remedied by technology alone. We are looking for an objective way out of the crisis of objectivism...
Things must once more be given a chance to present themselves as they are, to be perceived in their individuality. We must see the pluralism of the world, and not bind it by seeking common denominators or reducing everything to a single common equation.

We must try harder to understand than to explain. The way forward is not in the mere construction of universal systemic solutions, to be applied to reality from the outside; it is also in seeking to get to the heart of reality through personal experience. Such an approach promotes an atmosphere of tolerant solidarity and unity in diversity based on mutual respect, genuine pluralism and parallelism. In a word, human uniqueness, human action and the human spirit must be rehabilitated...

It is not that we should simply seek new and better ways of managing society, the economy and the world. The point is that we should fundamentally change how we behave. And who but politicians should lead the way? Their changed attitude toward the world, themselves and their responsibilities can give rise to truly effective systemic and institutional changes.

If we change this last paragraph ever so slightly, the import of Havel's message for you becomes even more clear:

"It is not that we should simply seek new and better ways of managing schools. The point is that we should fundamentally change how we behave. And who but teachers and administrators should lead the way? Their changed attitude towards students, themselves and their responsibility can give rise to truly effective systemic and institutional changes."

This is the challenge for you to take away from this conference. Go forward as advocates for reform and translate Vaclav Havel's admonition into action in your school systems, schools, and classrooms. Thank you.

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