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Remarks of Hayes Mizell at a briefing for representatives of Minneapolis funders and community organizations. The meeting was held on June 7, 1995 and sponsored by the Minneapolis Public Schools. Approximately 70 persons attended the briefing. Mizell is Director of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation's Program for Student Achievement.

Raging Intellects

People often ask me why the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation is interested in middle schools. The answer is that we are concerned about the educational and life futures of eleven to fourteen-year olds, and how middle schools prepare them for the future. We believe that middle grades represent the last best hope for influencing the choices young adolescents make, and to shape their understanding of how to develop their talents.

The Foundation is also interested in the education of eleven to fourteen year-olds because their education has often been neglected by funders, school systems, and even parents. The truth is that our culture has a hard time dealing with young adolescents. Because they are experiencing an intense period of physical, emotional, psychological, and sexual development, students in the middle grades exhibit unpredictable behaviors that confound many adults. While this developmental period is normal -- indeed, it is not possible for children to make the transition to young adulthood without it -- adults often react negatively to the behaviors and stresses associated with young adolescence.

Adult interactions with middle school students can be so disconcerting that they give rise to audible sighs, rolling eyes, clinched teeth, and even screams, by adults and students. Indeed, the symptoms of the developmental period we call young adolescence can be so compelling that adults find it hard to see past the behaviors to the needs, feelings, and potential of the young person in formation. This stage of development can be difficult, for both young people and adults, but it is also a time of opportunity.

Young adolescents are seeking to understand who they are and how to relate to the world around them. They are curious and seek new opportunities to test and prove themselves. They are, to use Jeff Howard's term, "learning machines." The issue is what they are learning and how they are learning it.

If you listen carefully to their supposedly light-hearted references to young adolescents as "wacky," victims of "raging hormones," or, "a little brain-dead," you hear characterizations that translate into low expectations.


Unfortunately, many adults (and the education institutions they operate) fail to recognize the strengths of young adolescents and to capitalize on them. Instead, they focus on the sometimes erratic behaviors and risk-taking of middle school students, and spend disproportionate energy and time trying to straight-jacket the symptoms of this normal developmental period. Other adults appear to take a more benign approach, but if you listen carefully to their supposedly light-hearted references to young adolescents as being "wacky," or victims of "raging hormones," -- or, as one leader of the middle school movement even put it, "a little brain-dead," -- you hear pejorative characterizations that translate into low expectations. These adults regard young adolescents as not only out of control but disabled.

Students in the middle grades are going through a difficult period in their lives, these adults feel, and it is important to support and nurture them, but one should not really expect too much academically of these young people. This attitude is deeply rooted in many schools serving grades six, seven, and eight, even in middle schools. I wonder, however, whether this view is unique to schools or whether it mirrors attitudes in the community at large. Do communities pay so little attention to their middle schools, and expect so little of them, because citizens also wish the challenges of young adolescence to silently pass them by?

Look at the evidence: We need to pay more attention to middle schools

Each community has to struggle with the answer to this question, but there is ample evidence indicating that all of us need to pay more attention to middle schools and expect more of them and their students: These data demonstrate that the middle grades are a critical time for both students and educators. How do school systems and schools respond?

Too many middle school teachers aren't middle school teachers

Before I address this question, I want to mention a problem that compromises even the best efforts of school systems and schools. There are, in most every middle school, teachers who neither want to be there nor were prepared to teach young adolescents. In some schools, the same is true for the principal. There are many reasons for this, and I won't discuss them at length here, but I will mention them. One reason is historical. The middle school movement is fairly young, and most states still certify teachers as either elementary or secondary. Consequently, teachers prepare themselves to teach the little kids or the big kids, but not the in-between kids. They get little or no training in understanding young adolescent development or how to teach these students effectively.

Teachers also end up in the middle grades because that is where vacancies occur, or because the central office reassigns teachers when grade configurations change or schools are closed, or for other reasons that have little or nothing to do with whether a teacher is prepared to be effective in a middle school or wants to be there. Fortunately, there are many teachers who choose to be in middle schools because they like the energy and unpredictability that characterizes middle school life. However, the fact that there are others who are not as enthusiastic impedes efforts to reform middle schools.

How do schools better serve young adolescents?

So, back to the question of how schools seek to better serve young adolescents. For many, the first step is to implement structures that create smaller, more personalized learning environments for students. Many larger schools subdivide into "houses," units that constitute schools within schools. A house may have its own administrator and its own wing or floor of the school building. Students in one house may rarely interact with students from another house.

Within each house, there may be "teams" of teachers. A team may consist of two or three or four teachers who work together to teach the core academic subjects to a group of approximately 150 students. The team and the students constitute a kind of self-contained family in which students and teachers get to know each other very well. In some cases, the same team of teachers stays with the same group of students all three years of middle school.

I am familiar with a large urban middle school that has most of the common features of a middle school and a strong principal, but has been on the brink of being cited by the state for its unimpressive student performance.


Teachers in many middle schools have two preparation periods; one to prepare individually for the subject he or she teaches, and one to meet with other teachers on the team to discuss problems of individual students, or to develop interdisciplinary curriculum units. This curricula helps students understand the connections between discreet subjects.

Some middle schools also offer exploratory courses in which students are able to participate in short-term technology, community service, arts or other programs. Many middle schools also have advisory programs where for perhaps 20 minutes a day, a teacher meets with a small group of students to enhance their decision making and other life skills. These and other structures and programs are hallmarks of middle schools. One team of researchers refers to them as "enabling mechanisms." In fact, many schools define themselves as being middle schools by whether they have these structures in place. There are still more schools that devote enormous energy and many years implementing and perfecting these classical components of middle schools.

While many of these characteristics of middle schools are necessary first steps to providing a more effective learning environment for young adolescents, in and of themselves they are not likely to have much effect on student performance. The key variable is whether and how schools intentionally use these structures to increase student learning. I know this from experience and observation. Unfortunately, I am very familiar with a large urban middle school that has most of the common features of a middle school and a strong principal, but has been on the brink of being cited by the state for its unimpressive student performance.

Researchers Penny Oldfather and James McLaughlin have also observed that more than middle school characteristics are necessary to increase student learning. They write:
Many of the characteristics of middle level education over the last three decades...have been structural changes that were beneficial for students in easing the transition into early adolescence. But regardless of these changes, students' intrinsic motivation -- what we refer to as their continuing impulse to learn -- is diminished by unresponsive classroom environments, and by conceptions of learning as transmitted, rather than constructed. Innovations such as interdisciplinary unit planning will fail to fulfill their promise without the nurturing of students' voices. And teachers' actions to create an environment that is more responsive to students' interests and experiences -- to their lives -- cannot be divorced from how teachers and students think about learning.

Oldfather and McLaughlin describe honored voice "as a deep responsiveness in the classroom culture to students' ideas, opinions, feelings, interests and need." They say that, "Voice comes from our hearts, from our minds, and from the deepest places of knowing and feeling. If learners become connected to their literacy activities in ways that engage all aspects of themselves, they become motivated for literacy learning."

Too few schools have "honored voices"

I have seen middle school classrooms where there are "honored voices, a collaborative construction of meaning, and a sense of shared knowing between student and teacher." I am certain there are some classrooms like this in Minneapolis. Yet, in any city they are too few. There are too many middle schools where neither students nor teachers want to be.

A problem typical of many middle schools is that they fail to strike a balance between supporting and nurturing students on the one hand, and academically challenging them on the other. In part, this is a reaction to the junior high school experience where schools were departmentalized, focused on subject matter content, and insensitive to the developmental needs of young adolescents. In many middle school circles, "content" is a pejorative term and I believe this results in achievement becoming secondary to the mission of middle schools, rather than central to it. This view is illustrated by the following message I found on a middle school news group on the Internet. A middle school teacher named Kathy wrote:
In California, we are more concerned with students learning concepts and not just being a "factored" machine. In this information age, facts can be looked up easily. We feel it is more important for students to have an idea of the overall concept so they can be informed citizens of our global community.

It is easy to dismiss Kathy's view as stereotypical Californian, but in fact it is widespread. Writing correctly, reading for understanding, using mathematics, and knowing what and where Bosnia is -- these are secondary to the greater goal of "an idea of the overall concept." But content and achievement are important, particularly for low-performing students who are the most dependent on high quality education. If schools only want students to get "an idea of the overall concept" I am not sure why schools are necessary at all. Television and talk radio will suffice.

It's time to quit obsessing on students' weaknesses and build on their strengths

At the Clark Foundation, we are focused not on young adolescents' raging hormones but on their raging intellect. We would like to find a few school systems and communities with the courage to abandon the myths associated with the developmental stage know as young adolescence. We believe it is time to structure and staff middle schools so they build on students' strengths rather than obsess about their weaknesses. We have no tidy prescriptions, but our experience to date has led us to some broad approaches. They do not constitute "answers" to vexing problems of low student performance, but they offer direction that may be useful.

If schools treat standards as they have the structures
that are characteristic of middle schools, standards can become one more narrow, formulistic tool that have
little positive effect. The key is how educators use standards to improve teaching and learning.


Because it is our belief that many middle schools are unclear about their academic mission, we are asking school systems seeking Foundation support to develop standards for what students should know and be able to do by the end of the eighth grade, specifically in math, science, language arts, and social studies. It is our hope school systems and middle schools will use these standards to mobilize teacher, parent, student, and community support for academic achievement.

On the other hand, we also know that if schools treat standards as they have the structures that are characteristic of middle schools, standards can become one more narrow, formulistic tool that have little positive effect. Again, the key variable is whether and how educators use standards to improve teaching and learning.

We are also asking school systems and their middle schools to tell us what proportion of graduating eighth graders they want to meet the standards by June, 2001. In other words, we think it is important for the school system and individual middle schools to have a clear academic target they will try to hit. We hope this not only focuses school improvement and teacher professional development, but encourages school systems to use sensible assessment and techniques that more accurately determine students' progress towards meeting the standards.

We are convinced, however, that students will not perform at higher levels if schools operate the same and teachers teach the same. We want to know how teachers will change their practice to enable students to meet the standards. We also want to know how schools will change their structures to provide more time and productive environments for teacher and student learning. There are many things schools could do to enable students to meet standards, and it is up to them to determine what actions to take that will most likely achieve that result. They will, of course, have to convince us that what they propose is a credible strategy for advancing increasing proportions of students towards the standards by June, 2001.

To achieve this goal, the Clark Foundation is seeking to develop a partnership with a school system and its community so that each year, one million dollars in new or reallocated funds will be available to support systemic, standards-based reform in the middle grades. We expect school systems and their middle schools will use most of these resources for professional development. That is where the need is and that is where there is the greatest potential to strengthen teachers' self-efficacy, improve their practice, and raise their expectations for the performance of their students. There are several other reasons it is important to provide this professional development.

Many teachers have lost confidence in themselves

Many teachers in middle schools, particularly those with high proportions of low-performing students, do not believe their students can perform at significantly higher levels. Aside from whatever assumptions they make about their students' abilities because of the students' family backgrounds, economic status, races, cultures, or languages, many teachers do not expect high performance from their students because they do not expect it from themselves. They have lost confidence that they can make a difference in the performance and lives of their students.

It has been our experience, however, that large, consistent doses of intensive, high-quality staff development can increase teachers' self-efficacy and improve their classroom practice. When teachers experience success in learning and applying new skills they also begin to believe that students can do the same. When teachers raise their expectations for their performance, they raise their expectations for their students' performance as well.

Large, consistent doses of intensive, high-quality
staff development can improve classroom practice. When teachers succeed in learning and applying new skills
they begin to believe students can do the same.


Providing more high quality staff development is also important because there are middle school teachers, particularly in science and math, who are not secure in their knowledge of the content they teach. Some of them have had only one or two math courses in college, or have not seriously pursued in-service educational opportunities that deepen their understanding of their subject. Just as some of the best jazz musicians are those who have had classical training, teachers feel more free to innovate and experiment when they are confident about their mastery of content.

It is this lack of confidence that causes so many teachers to cling to the security textbooks provide. When middle school students are asked to describe their classrooms, the word they most often use is "boring." In fact, researchers who have methodically shadowed students throughout the school day report that they too experience this boredom. This is not likely to change unless teachers participate in staff development that causes their classroom pedagogy to become more engaging and challenging. However, improved pedagogy will only result from professional development that is qualitatively different from traditional in-service training.

In many school systems, the staff development is disparate, fragmented, and unconnected to either teachers' classroom experiences or needs. In fact, it may not even be based on an expectation by the school system that teachers will use what they learn to improve student performance. The staff development may be just as didactic and boring to teachers as their teaching is to their students. This will have to change. School systems will have to make more effective use of their staff development resources, and provide staff development that models the kind of high content, engaging instruction we want to see in classrooms. Indeed, high quality staff development, like the responsive classroom, needs to exemplify "honored voice, a collaborative construction of meaning, and a shared sense of knowing between student and teacher." Thankfully, there are models of this kind of professional development, but there is a lot of work to be done to make it standard practice.

These challenges are great, and even they are only the tip of the iceberg, but the Clark Foundation believes that school systems, schools, middle school educators, and communities can meet them. I know of no school system that has done so, though individual schools have. Like most urban school systems, Minneapolis has examples of classrooms and schools that serve young adolescents well. The challenge, however, is to move beyond these isolated exemplars so all middle level schools enable students to meet academic standards. This will require a sea change in attitude and practice. Middle schools will have to forge a new vision and mission; one that goes beyond grade configuration or enabling mechanisms or even nurturing and support. It is important for all students, particularly low performers, to significantly increase what they know and can do and it is essential for middle schools to make learning central to their purpose.

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