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Remarks of M. Hayes Mizell at the conference, "The Promise of
Standards for Middle School Reform: A Working Institute for Reforming Middle
Schools." The conference was held on November 18-20, 1994 in Raleigh,
North Carolina and was organized by the Center for Innovation in Urban Education
at Northeastern University and the Center for Early Adolescence at the University
of North Carolina. Conference participants were teams from the following
school systems: Birmingham, Chattanooga, Corpus Christi, Jackson, Long Beach,
Louisville, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and San Diego. Mizell is Director of
the Program for Student Achievement of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.
What It Will Take
"Will standards really work?" I suspect this question is very
much on the mind of each person here, even if you have not asked it aloud.
The answer is that no one knows.
We believe academic standards are necessary because we have seen the results
of middle schools that have lost their academic focus. We know that caring,
understanding, and supportive education environments are essential, but
when they eclipse high expectations and high content, students do not learn
as much as they can and should. A middle school grade structure is not enough.
Middle school characteristics are not enough. Even more money, technology,
and new school buildings are not enough.
If we have learned anything from many different school improvement initiatives,
it is that no single intervention or reform will produce significantly higher
levels of achievement for all students. On the other hand, the blend
of factors that will produce this result is no secret. Begin with a school
that is not just safe and orderly, but safe for learning, creativity, and
collaboration. Add a school culture that expects and values achievement
by all students and all staff. Combine with an administration that expands
and protects time for learning. Mix with teachers knowledgeable and excited
about the subjects they teach, skilled in engaging students to learn subject
content. Blend with genuine caring, sacrifice, and hard work by teachers
and students alike. Sprinkle with attention, patience, and support at school
and at home. These, I suggest, are the "opportunity to learn"
standards that count most.
Even though I did not mention content and performance standards, these are
and always have been integral to schools where academic performance is a
priority. These standards may not have been formalized or codified, but
high performing schools and teachers have always been clear about what they
wanted students to learn. A culture of achievement in a school is not possible
without standards, whether they are written or unwritten.
Why are we so interested in standards?
If standards have always been important, what accounts for the current interest
in standards? There are several reasons. First, existing standards, in whatever
form, are too low. This is largely the result of the basic skills and minimum
competency movements that sought to define and disaggregate the most essential
skills high school graduates should have. State accountability systems followed
suit and they, in turn, drove curricula and instruction. Schools focused
on teaching "the basics," usually in discrete, bite-sized chunks
that made education even more boring than it already was, and impeded rather
than advanced learning. In many cases, states defined the minimums at such
low levels that within a few years most students could meet the standards.
Second, current standards, written or unwritten, vary a great deal from
school to school or teacher to teacher. A student who happens to attend
a school where high standards are an operational reality is more likely
to learn more and perform at a higher level than a student who attends a
school with lower standards. A student who happens to get a teacher who
combines high standards with engaging instruction is more likely to learn
more and perform at a high level than a student whose teacher combines lower
standards with a dependence on direct instruction. These variations are
aggravated by systemic patterns of organization and student assignment which,
combined with the extraordinary vigilance and advocacy of some parents,
result in the most advantaged students getting most of the seats in the
schools and classrooms with the highest standards.
Existing standards, in whatever form, are too low.
This is largely the result of the minimum competency movements that sought
to define and disaggregate the most essential skills high school graduates
should have.
High standards, and the quality of teaching students must have to meet
the standards, are not available for all students. De facto, school
systems leave it to the schools and teachers to decide whether students
should jump three feet or six feet. What we have, in every school system,
are three-feet schools and six-feet schools. It is not surprising that students
in six feet schools practice more, become stronger over time, and take home
most of the prizes.
Third, many schools have simply lost their way. Their academic focus is
no longer sharp and clear. Schools have been overwhelmed by many serious
problems and issues not of their making, and time and again they have set
their academic mission aside to respond to the problems or attend to the
issues. We need standards not only to emphasize the academic purpose of
schooling, but to provide school boards, superintendents and principals
with an anchor they can use to resist shifting currents. There is no substitute
for intestinal fortitude, but perhaps the leaders of our school systems
and schools can use standards to focus the attention, energies, and resources
of educators and the public.
Who are these standards for?
What will it take for standards to fulfill their intended purpose? I hope
you will begin by assessing your own attitudes. In your school systems,
you have the responsibility for developing or guiding the development of
the standards. Many of you are agonizing over which words to use, writing
and rewriting, producing one draft after another. When the standards emerge,
they will bear the stain of your sweat, at least figuratively if not literally.
Under these circumstances, it is natural that you will understand the intent
and meaning behind every sentence, and perhaps every word. This will have
been a constructionist experience in which you have created your own meaning
from the text you have prepared. You probably will not be able to avoid
feeling some pride of authorship, and perhaps ownership.
How you think about the audience for the standards, and its
use of them, will determine whether standards will enhance student performance,
or become one more bureaucratic exercise doomed to failure.
Before you reach this point, I urge you to check your attitude. The
standards are not for you. If you develop them to satisfy yourselves, there
is no chance they will produce the results you seek. You do not own the
standards. You cannot implement them. You will not bear the burden of helping
students meet them. You will not suffer life-long consequences if students
do not meet them. The standards belong to teachers who will have to bring
them to life in the classroom. They belong to low-performing students whose
futures depend on whether the standards spur schools and teachers to perform
at higher levels. Most of all, they belong to parents who have a right to
know what their children's middle school education will enable students
to know and do. How you think about the audience for the standards, and
its use of them, will determine whether standards will enhance student performance,
or become one more bureaucratic exercise doomed to failure.
Will your standards be practical and useful?
Standards will only achieve their purpose if they are practical and useful.
They are more likely to be so if they speak to the priorities and interests
of both teachers and parents. This means taking an inclusive and collaborative
approach to developing the standards, and hammering out the strategy and
tactics to make them workable in classrooms. For these reasons, I urge you
to avoid developing standards that are so complex that only their authors
understand them, or so difficult to implement that teachers will resist
them. There may be sound philosophical, educational, and pedagogical reasons
for developing more complex standards, but if you lose teachers and parents
in the process, your efforts will collapse under their own weight.
You may want to consider your standards in relation to these questions.
Will teachers experience the standards as a burdensome distraction, or as
a tool to help focus their instruction and their students? Can middle school
students understand what the standards mean and how they relate to student
performance? Will the standards win allies in the community for the school
system's efforts to raise levels of student performance, or will the community
perceive the standards as irrelevant or unrealistic? The challenge is to
expand your vision and strategy beyond what professional organizations think
you should do and beyond the normal practice of curriculum and policy development
in your school systems.
How will you prepare schools to take standards seriously?
At the same time you are developing the standards, you will want to also
develop a realistic plan for implementing them, and monitoring how schools
and teachers use them. No matter how effectively you develop the standards,
there is no guarantee schools and teachers will take them seriously. How
will the preparation of schools and teachers to implement the standards
differ from your school system's previous unsuccessful efforts to implement
new district policies?
Assuming the process of standards development has been inclusive and collaborative,
this paves the way for teachers or teams of teachers to assume responsibility
for monitoring and assessing the implementation of standards in their respective
schools. Each November, February and May, teachers with this responsibility
from middle schools across the district could gather to meet with the school
board chairperson, superintendent, and central office leaders to review
how the standards are working. The implementation of standards will be very
difficult for classroom teachers, and they must know that their schools
and the central office will listen to their problems and provide support.
This process of a district meeting three times a year would signal schools
and teachers that the implementation of standards is a district priority,
and that the school system is serious about making the standards dynamic
and useful to enhance student performance.
How will you reform professional development to help make standards
work?
As daunting as it now seems, developing and implementing the standards will
be easy compared to enabling students to meet the standards. Students, particularly
low-performing students, will not meet the standards unless middle schools
reform themselves and teachers significantly change their classroom practice.
Teachers will not change without a great deal of focused professional development
and sustained follow-up and support. This requires the reform of professional
development as we now know it in most school systems.
No more one- to two-hour staff development sessions tacked onto the end
of the school day. No more speakers talking at teachers for a half day or
a whole day or more. If teachers are going to change their practice they,
like students, will learn best if they are immersed in hands-on practice,
problem solving, and inquiry. This will take time and school systems must
find ways to make time available.
No more one- to two-hour staff development sessions tacked onto
the end of the school day. No more speakers talking at teachers for a half
day or a whole day or more.
Even more important, as school systems and schools conceive staff development,
they must address four questions. The first relates to the purpose of staff
development. What new attitudes/behaviors/knowledge/skills do teachers need
to enable students to meet academic standards? The second question relates
to method. What are the best means for teachers to develop new attitudes/behaviors/knowledge/skills
they need to enable students to meet academic standards? The third question
addresses implementation. What support do teachers need to successfully
apply their new attitudes/behaviors/knowledge/skills to enable students
to meet academic standards? The final question concerns results. How will
we know whether teachers' new attitudes/behaviors/knowledge/skills will
enable students to meet academic standards?
The staff development resources of urban school systems are limited and
precious. Most school systems and schools do not use these resources well.
In many cases, there is no expectation that staff development will result
in higher levels of student performance. This kind of wasteful, inefficient,
and uncoordinated staff development is a luxury no school system can afford.
Reform of staff development is an important corollary to implementing academic
standards. It can begin by school boards and superintendents insisting that
answers to the four questions I have just listed shape future professional
development.
What other reforms are needed to help students meet standards?
Your challenge is to go beyond simply developing and implementing standards.
You must reform schools so they enable students to meet the standards. Do
not develop and implement standards unless you are serious about fundamentally
reforming your middle schools. Standards alone will not cause your students
to perform at higher levels. If your school system currently has a significant
achievement gap between certain groups of students, standards will not close
that gap.
Standards are not a kind of powerful magnet that will somehow magically
pull students to higher levels of performance. Standards are necessary to
clarify expectations, to focus schools' missions and teachers' instruction,
and to rally family and public support for greater emphasis on academic
achievement. However, other reforms are necessary. You want to know what
they are. I am not going to tell you.
I am not going to tell you because the first reform is to accept responsibility
for acting on what you know. Each of you know, better than I, why some
of your school are six-feet schools and others are three-feet schools. Each
of you know, better than I, why some classrooms are six-feet classrooms
and others are three-feet classrooms, year after year after year. Each of
you know, better than I, why some students keep ending up, year after year,
in three-feet schools and classrooms while others glide effortlessly into
six-feet schools and classrooms.
Reform begins with you acting on what you know. Keep in mind that we are
talking about systemic reform. You do not have to act alone nor can you
wait on the system to act. Every school system here now has a district-wide
middle school team, each with principals and teachers from each middle school.
You are "the system." Whether the system reforms and
whether schools reform depends on your middle school team acting on what
it knows.
The are probably models for improving student performance in
your school system . . . some classes where the bar is at six feet, and
students are clearing it, even though the school sets its bar at three feet.
At the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, we want to know that you are
honestly confronting and grappling with the unpleasant truths about your
central offices and middle schools. We want to know that during the next
year you will be thinking hard about specific reforms your central offices
and schools can implement to enable students to meet academic standards.
This will require even more courage than you have demonstrated in the past.
To broaden your vision and to encourage and inspire you, seek out the experiences
of other school systems and middle schools. There is much you can learn
from each other and from various programs, projects, and technical assistance
organizations. They will not provide you with easy answers because there
is nothing easy about reform, and the answers that will mean the most to
you are the ones you discover for yourselves. They can, however, provide
guidance and lessons and experiences you can put to good use.
The models for improving student performance are probably in your own school
system. There are at least some classes where the bar is at six feet, and
students are clearing it, even though the school sets its bar at three feet.
There may even be some schools where students are performing at levels significantly
higher than their peers in other schools. How can your central office and
middle school team act on what they know to chart the course for reforms
that will enable all students to meet academic standards?
How can you link standards to on-going student assessments?
If students in your middle schools are going to meet the standards,
teachers and parents will have to understand much more about what students
really know and can do. This means your schools will want to assume more
responsibility for developing and using performance assessments, separate
from large-scale accountability assessments conducted by the state or school
district. Because enabling students to meet eighth grade standards is a
responsibility of teachers at all grade levels, not just eighth grade teachers,
all teachers need to participate in an assessment of rising sixth graders.
It is in the interest of the entire faculty to systematically assess what
each student entering the sixth grade knows and can do. This process can
provide the school with a realistic understanding of how far each student
has to go to meet the standards.
At the end of each school year, a similar process can assess student growth.
This approach, or one similar to it, is probably the only way schools can
really know the performance levels of students when they enter school, and
the growth in students' performance due to school interventions. Schools
will want to be systematic about these assessments, and develop ways either
for students to demonstrate to the larger community what they know and can
do, or develop more accurate ways of reporting student performance to parents
and the community.
I know many of you came here expecting to find "answers " and
the "right way" to develop and implement standards. Perhaps you
have been disappointed. The truth is that you are pioneers. I suspect this
is the first national conference on standards in the middle grades. The
conference sponsors have assembled the experts, to the extent that experts
exist. As far as I know, no urban school district has much experience implementing
content and performance standards for students in the middle grades. If
you choose to do it, you will be among the first. There is no "right
way" to develop and implement standards because there is an inadequate
base of experience to determine the most effective approach. I hope you
will take what you have learned here and combine it with common sense and
sensitivity to the realities of your schools and teachers.
Students cannot learn at high levels without standards, written
or unwritten. Students who have the most to gain from effective standards
depend, as always, on you.
The primary consideration should be making standards practical enough
that teachers can and will use them. If your standards do not meet this
test, you are wasting your time. The theories and constructs of experts
are important for the discipline and thoughtfulness they contribute to the
development of standards. However, none of the experts will bear the responsibility
of making the standards work for the teachers, students, and parents in
your school systems. Make sure your standards are informed by experts, but
above all, make sure they will work for your teachers, students, and parents.
Can standards really work?
I believe standards are necessary, but it is counterproductive for them
to become an art form in and of themselves. In the eyes of the public, standards
may become one more example of educators making things more complicated
than they need to be, spending their limited time and energy on something
that will make no difference to student learning. This is why it is so important
to develop and implement standards in ways that win teacher and public support
rather than alienate it.
Students cannot learn at high levels without standards, whether they are
written or unwritten. Students who have the most to gain from effective
standards are depending, as always, on you. Can standards really work? No
one knows, but there can be no reform without standards. Your challenge
is to use your experience and good sense to move beyond standards as a formula
to making them work for teachers, students, and parents. Thank you.
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