Making middle school standards a reality

Remarks of Hayes Mizell at a conference on standards implementation. The conference was sponsored by the Council on Basic Education, and was held at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport Holiday Inn North on November 17-19, 1995. Approximately 55 central office administrators, principals, and teachers from Chattanooga, Corpus Christi, Long Beach, Louisville, Minneapolis, and San Diego participated in the conference. Consultants to the conference were Patte Barth, Beverly Bimes-Michalak, Everett Kline, Ruth Mitchell, and Anne Wheelock. Mizell is Director of the Program for Student Achievement at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.

Standards in Context

For the past day-and-a-half, we have been learning more about how to make standards a reality for teachers, students, and parents. This task is important to us because we believe standards can improve instruction, assessment, and student performance. If we are honest with ourselves, however, we have to acknowledge that few people share our enthusiasm.

Many teachers and parents do not understand what standards are all about. When they begin to learn about standards, they often question the need for them. From their perspectives, standards mean more difficult concepts to understand and more work. This is why it is so important for your school systems to communicate clearly the purpose and importance of standards, and to find as many ways as possible to drive home these messages again and again. Standards are necessary because parents have a right to know what the school system wants teachers to teach, and what it wants students to know and be able to do. In very practical ways, standards provide parents and the community a big tool for accountability.

School systems that are serious about standards will give priority to making standards practical. They will seek out and create opportunities to bring standards and their advantages to the attention of parents and the community. They will do it not once but again and again and again. They will create venues where teachers can demonstrate, to other teachers as well as to parents, how they are helping students meet standards. They will do it not once but again and again and again. And if school systems are really serious about standards, they will emphasize the importance of students applying what they know and can do, through in-school performance tasks and at home and in the community.

We cannot rely on standards to reform middle schools

Clearly, your school systems have a lot of work to do to implement standards and to enable students to meet them. Standards, however, are only one piece of the systemic reform puzzle. All of us face the challenge of using standards to advance reform, but not relying on standards to reform middle schools. Standards cannot reform middle schools. Standards cannot cause students to perform at higher levels. Everything depends on how school systems and middle schools use standards and the context of standards implementation. Standards as a quick fix will change nothing. Emphasizing standards implementation this year and the implementation of something else next year will do more harm than good. Standards implementation without significant changes in teacher practice will not increase student learning.

Standards cannot cause students to perform at
higher levels. Everything depends on how school systems and middle schools use standards and the context of standards implementation.

You will not, in other words, be implementing standards in a vacuum. There will be district and school contexts that will shape the standards implementation process. One would hope that these contexts are more positive in your school systems than in many others. After all, each school system represented here is on record as committing itself to systemic, standards-based reform at the middle level. Your superintendents and school boards have told us that they will foster and support this reform at the central office and in individual schools. Assuming that all your school systems have told us is correct, then the context for standards implementation in your districts is much more favorable than in many others. Nevertheless, there are perennial issues that challenge all school systems, and you must address them if your schools are to have any hope of using standards to raise levels of student performance.

Create schools where standards have a chance to make a difference

One of these contextual issues is the quality of individual schools. Do not expect standards to reform a school. In fact, standards will probably have little effect in low-performing schools. Note that I did not say "schools with low-performing students;" I said "low-performing schools." You know these schools. The principals are ineffective as educators, though they may be acceptable as building managers. The faculties are complacent and satisfied, or if not satisfied, they are unwilling to make changes to relieve their dissatisfaction. They keep waiting for someone else to take the initiative, and then complain when that initiative requires something of them.

These schools expect little of students, and they fulfill these expectations by providing the students with little effective teaching, little high content curriculum, and little reason to believe that students' lives can or will change. Year after year, student performance at these schools lags, but the schools blame the students or their families or their communities. The word "accountability" has lost all meaning at these schools.

You know these schools. The principals are ineffective as educators, though they may be acceptable as building managers. The faculties are complacent and satisfied, or unwilling to make changes to relieve the dissatisfaction.

If there are schools like this in your districts, and if you are expecting standards implementation to improve student performance at these schools, I think you will be very disappointed. If your school boards and superintendent are really serious about standards, they will act to create school contexts in which standards and students can succeed. If this means changing the principal, then change the principal. If it means reconstituting the school with a new administration and new faculty, then shut the school down and start all over. If it means turning the school over to the faculty who really want to reform and hold themselves accountable, then do it.

For too long, there has been too much coaxing and cajoling of these persistently low-performing schools, and students have paid a heavy price. Middle school reform means making hard decisions and taking hard knocks to increase student learning. This is necessary to create school contexts in which standards can work.

Grapple with how to make standards (and schools) come alive

Even if your schools are able to provide school contexts that are friendly to standards implementation, not much is likely to happen unless the principals and school leadership teams understand the purpose of standards and how to lead and support their implementation. Standards must become a priority, but they will not be a priority for teachers unless they are a priority with principals and school leadership teams.

These people need the same hands-on experience with standards as many of you have had, and opportunities to grapple with how to make standards come alive for their teachers and students. This means training, leadership development, and making standards implementation a criterion for evaluating the performance of administrators and school leadership teams. Standards will not work as an add-on to school leadership; they must be integral to school leadership.

There is no shortage of experience and information about how to structure middle schools to create learning environments that promote these kinds of relationships.

There is another contextual issue we should also keep in mind. What kind of educational environment is most likely to foster learning among young adolescents and enhance the implementation of standards? It is no secret that everyone learns better when there is a strong personal relationship between teacher and learner. This is particularly true of young adolescents who hunger for consistent, positive relationships with caring adults. This has been a long-standing theme of the middle school movement and experts in youth development.

There is no shortage of experience and information about how to structure middle level schools to create learning environments that promote these kinds of relationships. We know how to do it. We know that in schools where productive relationships between individual adults and students develop over time, students are more open to learning, and adults are more knowledgeable about barriers to student learning and what motivates students to learn.

Yet, in spite of what we know is good for students, there are still too many middle level schools that do not structure themselves to foster these relationships. Teams, true teams that match several teachers with the same students for the entire school day, can create strong teacher-student relationships, but many schools lack these kinds of teams. It is even more rare for a team of teachers to remain with the same group of students for each of their three years in middle school, even though this would forge even stronger bonds.

And in some of your districts, there are schools that are much too large for students to develop sustained relationships with teachers, even though a good deal is known about how to sub-divide middle schools into more manageable and productive units that create community between students and teachers.

I question whether in these contexts standards will be as effective as in schools that put into practice what we know about productive learning environments for young adolescents. Let us not take an almost perverse pride in schools that, because of size or class schedule, are almost dysfunctional for learning. This is a contextual issue your schools can do something about, and they should. Otherwise, no one should be surprised when standards implementation does not yield the results we seek.

Listen to teachers' genuine concerns about standards

There is an even more difficult issue that clouds the potential of standards implementation. We may simply fail to listen and address teachers' genuine concerns about standards. For example, there are teachers who believe that standards have no relevance to them and their students because many students are performing at very low levels.

These teachers do not believe that their students can meet the standards. Even worse, the teachers feel they lack the skills to help students become proficient in the basic skills they did not master at previous grade levels, and thereby move their students towards meeting standards. It would be easy to ignore or dismiss these concerns, but it would be a mistake to do so. These teachers are acknowledging their limitations, and while we might interpret this admission as just another indicator of resistance to change, we would do better to treat it as a cry for help.

As we know, all teachers are not creative, self-directed heroes. Many of them are merely trying to stay afloat in a storm-tossed sea of shifting demands and exhausting daily pressures. Each day, they confront stark realities hard for most of us to appreciate. Into their insular and complex world, we are now introducing standards. I urge you to listen to these teachers' concerns, take them seriously, and address them. If you do not, you risk breeding overt resistance and backlash.

Each day, teachers confront stark realities hard for
most of us to appreciate. Into their insular and complex world, we are now introducing standards.

The fact is that many teachers are now confronting major issues of instruction for which they have no answers and receive little or no assistance. From their perspective, standards are just one more in a long line of admonitions about what they should do, unaccompanied by practical support in how to do it. If you do not identify these teachers and provide the support they need, standards will be dead on arrival at their classroom doors.

There is a related contextual issue that all of us may be responsible for creating at this very moment. I sometimes wonder whether we are becoming so caught up in the technology of standards implementation that it is making the movement for standards-based reform exclusive rather than inclusive. Already there is an emerging standards discipline with its own rules, jargon, and experts. I do not say this critically; these phenomena are part of any movement that is serious and methodical. It means, however, that you have to work very hard at making standards understandable to ordinary people, by which I mean teachers, students, and parents.

Find the help you need to make standards understandable

Unfortunately, educators are among the people least likely to succeed in making standards understandable. You need a lot of help, perhaps from a sympathetic and supportive parent who works for a local public relations firm, or a volunteer from the editorial board of the local newspaper, or perhaps from a politically savvy staff person of a local non-profit organization.

The important thing is to recognize the skills you need but do not have to make standards implementation succeed, and develop alliances that can bring those skills to your school system. If you do not do this, you risk alienating the very constituencies you must cultivate, including your own teachers, to make standards work. You will unintentionally exclude the people you most need to include in standards implementation. An even greater danger is that if you cannot clearly explain in practical terms the necessity of standards and how real teachers and real students will use them in real classrooms, other people will explain them in their own ways, for their own purposes. Either teachers and parents will understand standards as you interpret them, or they will understand them as interpreted by others.

You are right, of course, to draw upon the expertise of people who have more experience than you in developing and implementing standards, and assessing students' performance in relation to them. That is the reason for this conference. It is good that you want to learn as much as you can and develop and implement standards as effectively as possible. But I caution you not to make this an endless quest for "the answer." The technologies of standards implementation -- rubrics, portfolios, benchmarks, authentic assessments, and even content and performance standards themselves -- can become so complex that mastering them becomes the end rather than the means.

Students will not perform at higher levels because your school system's rubrics are better than another school system's rubrics. They may perform at higher levels because both teachers and students understand the rubrics and their purpose, and because they consistently use them to improve student performance. If teachers, all teachers, are not actively using the technologies of standards implementation, the time they spent learning the technologies will have been wasted. Make sure your teachers understand these technologies and how to use them to increase student learning, but above all, make sure they are using the technologies to enhance student performance.

Agonize over the quality of your staff development

Implicit in what I have said is the big contextual issue of staff development. I urge you all to re-examine and agonize over how well your central offices and schools are using staff development resources. They are precious but often wasted. If your staff development is mostly about consciousness raising, exposure, inspiration, and transmitting information or points of view, go back to the drawing board. This staff development will not change teachers' attitudes or practice. Your school systems are committed to enabling a specific proportion of this year's third graders to meet your standards by the time they leave the eighth grade in 2001. If you and your teachers do not know what that proportion is, what that target is, I urge you to find out.

It is not likely that your school systems will hit the target, that the designated proportion of students will meet the eighth grade standards in 2001, unless teachers improve their instructional skills. They will not teach differently or better unless your staff development focuses on strengthening their skills as teachers. Exposure to new teaching methodologies will not suffice. What teachers want and what they need is direct support in learning and using standards-based instruction in difficult classroom contexts. Most staff development falls far short of meeting this need.

Don't lose sight of basic skills

Finally, keep in mind the basic skills context. People expect schools to teach students how to read and comprehend, and to write and spell and to use correct grammar and punctuation. They expect schools to teach students how to add and subtract and multiply and divide, both fractions and whole numbers. The public does not hold these expectations only for elementary schools, but for all levels of schooling. If your standards do not take these expectations into account and honor them, it is understandable that people will question the value of standards.

The term "standards-based reform" does not mean that standards are the be all and end all of reform, but that the purpose of reform is to help students meet standards.

Yes, there is a dilemma in reconciling attention to basic skills with attention to high content that calls for the application of these skills. It is difficult to do both, but it is not impossible. So as you develop strategies and tactics for standards implementation, do not forget the context of the public's expectation that at all grade levels schools will teach and students will learn basic skills.

Some of you may be thinking that I have cited a partial list of reasons not to bother with standards at all. To the contrary, I believe that standards provide a means to focus instruction, help teachers think more deeply and critically about what they are teaching and what students are learning, and spur students to higher levels of performance. In the context of stable and supportive school systems and effective and caring schools, standards can leverage better teaching and more learning.

Standards cannot, however, carry the whole load of reform. Keep in mind that the term "standards-based reform" does not mean that standards are the be all and end all of reform, but rather that the purpose of reform is to help students meet standards. Other reforms must occur because they are necessary in and of themselves, and because standards will not succeed without them.

I know most of you understand this and it is why you are among the best people in the nation to lead systemic, standards-based reform at the middle level. You are the best because more than most educators, you know how difficult and complex the task is, but you are committed to mobilizing school system, school, and community resources to enable middle school students to meet your standards. You sense, as I do, that now perhaps more than ever before, we are close to focusing on the real issues of teaching and learning that can change students' lives.

You know where the pitfalls are, but you also know where the bridges are; you even know how to build bridges of your own. You know what you must do to create the contexts in which standards-based reform can succeed. It is an honor to be your partner in this great adventure and I look forward to laboring with you as we push ahead. Thank you.

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