Remarks of Hayes Mizell on September 27, 1998 at a meeting of vertical teams representing urban school systems from Chattanooga, Corpus Christi, Long Beach, Louisville, Minneapolis, and San Diego. The meeting was held on September 27-29 at the Edith Macy Conference Center in Briarcliff Manor, NY. The meeting was convened by the Program for Student Achievement at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. Mizell is Director of the Program.

Hiking the Rocky Trail of Reform

Perhaps like my family, you went hiking this summer. Or if you have hiked at any time you may have noticed a certain phenomenon of this activity. People hike to renew their contact with nature and enjoy sights and sounds that differ from those they experience in everyday life. Most people choose to hike where there is nice scenery: woods, lakes, meadows, or mountain vistas. Yet, most hiking trails are not smooth paths; they may consist of loose stones, or be filled with exposed and tangled tree roots, or there may be a small stream or even trees right in the middle of the trail. No matter how beautiful the scenery is, hikers know they have to pay attention to the trail. If they don't look where they are going they may slip or trip and fall.

In fact, hikers often spend so much time looking down at the trail, being careful where they place their feet, that they pause frequently not only to catch their breath but to see how far they have come, to enjoy the scenery, and to gauge how far they have yet to go.

Like hikers, the teachers and administrators of your school systems, as well as those of us at the Foundation, have been spending a lot of time looking down at the trail. We have been very conscious of our footing, perhaps too conscious of it; sometimes we have been more cautious than we should have been. This meeting is an opportunity for us to pause on the trail, to assess how far we have come, to think about the trail ahead of us, and to make plans for reaching our destination. We hope you will use this opportunity to enjoy the comradeship of your fellow hikers and the scenery represented by the progress you have made to date.

Where are we? In truth, we are scattered all along the trail, some way ahead of others one day, only to fall behind and yield the lead the next.

Because the Foundation is the sponsor of this hike, I am going to take the liberty of making some very general assessments about the progress we have made and how far we have yet to go.

Progress: "Performance Is Important"

I think we can safely say that you have begun to shift the focus of middle level schools in your communities. You have delineated what students should know and be able to do, either by the end of the eighth grade or at each of the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade levels, and are using these standards to focus the attention of teachers, administrators, students, and families on learning.

Because you have either adopted performance standards, or are in the process of doing so, you are stimulating more conversation about the level of performance students must demonstrate as evidence they meet your academic standards. It has taken longer than we had hoped for you to develop and begin to use content and performance standards, but they are beginning to take hold in more schools and classrooms.

Through your various initiatives for student accountability you are sending new messages to students and their families:

"Performance is important."

"We believe you can meet the standards we have set and we expect you to work hard to meet them."

"There are consequences if you do not take these standards seriously."

For both the senders and the receivers, these messages are hard. They communicate new expectations and if they are to mean anything then your school systems and schools must have the resolve to live with the consequences. When significant proportions of your students do not perform at standard, it is not only a problem for them and their families, it is also a problem for the teachers and administrators who are responsible for educating these students. Teachers and administrators, as well as students, must be accountable for student performance, and they too must be subject to consequences.

Teachers and administrators, as well as students,
must be accountable for student performance,
and they too must be subject to consequences.

Your school systems and schools have also made progress in devoting greater attention to students whose poor levels of previous preparation, whose lack of motivation or school skills, whose personal problems, or a combination of these, has caused them not to meet your academic expectations. You are providing more second chance opportunities than ever before and are more concerned with students not just acquiring additional seat time but actually demonstrating that they have attained the skills and knowledge embodied in your standards.

It is important to continue providing and mending these safety nets, but it is also important to evaluate them carefully. If during the next several years there is not convincing evidence that they are benefiting students academically then you will need to develop more effective approaches.

Staff development is more responsive to teachers' needs
and more focused on developing principal leadership

Your school systems are also beginning to improve staff development. Increasingly, the staff development you provide is more standards-based, more responsive to teachers' real needs, and closer to the daily lives of schools and classrooms. But there is still a long, long way to go. You still know very little about whether and how teachers really benefit from staff development, about whether they effectively apply the new behaviors, knowledge, and skills you only hope they learn from it, and about whether the hundreds of thousands of dollars you spend on staff development results in more students performing at standard. Until you understand much, much more about the value and effects of your staff development, it will only be, at best, a shot in the dark.

It is also no small accomplishment that your school systems have begun to emphasize the role of principals in organizing and leading their schools to help students perform at standard. Again, there is more work to do, but there are greater numbers of principals who understand standards, who know what teachers must do to bring these standards to life in their classrooms, and who are willing to restructure their schools to increase teacher and student learning. The fact is that standards-based instruction and learning will not occur without principals who give more attention to improving teaching than to their more traditional management tasks. For this to happen, school systems will not only have to communicate this expectation to principals, and assess their performance accordingly, but reduce the bureaucratic burdens that currently cause principals to spend more time in their offices than in their classrooms.

You have every reason to feel good about the progress your school systems and schools have made, but of course I don't want you to feel too good about it. Until there is more convincing evidence, and I don't just mean test scores, that significantly greater proportions of students are performing at standard, we can find little comfort about progress on the input side of the ledger. There is not only more work to do, but more of the right work to do. You have to keep focused, you have to think harder, not about planning and implementing activities, but about executing reforms that are most likely to make the greatest difference in student learning.

Some remaining barriers to reform are deeply embedded

There are many barriers you have to eliminate or get over. Some of these barriers are deeply imbedded in the psychology, culture, and practice of your school systems and schools. For example, if you honestly look at who and what is the direct object of your attention and energy, I think you will conclude that student learning suffers. Yes, you provide students with transportation, safe and comfortable learning environments, a wide variety of instructional media, meals, health and social services, co-curricular activities that promote their development, and adult supervisors and teachers who meet certain qualifications.

Providing this infrastructure necessarily consumes a great deal of your energy, but I think you will acknowledge that in the pie chart of schooling the adult and bureaucratic interactions occupy more space than interactions between adults and students devoted directly to student learning. The fact is that each day your school board members, superintendents, central office administrators and staff, and principals make important decisions about how they will use the money, time, opportunities, and priorities over which they have direct control. Unless you consciously reallocate much more of these resources to increasing directly the learning of teachers and students and devote much less to maintaining the existing structure, operations, and cultures of school systems and schools, you will not see significant increases in student performance.

Students understand quite well who should not be leading a classroom or a school, and you too know who these people are, but it is the students, not you, who each year suffer these people's ineffectiveness.

I implore you to be less tolerant and less timid. For reasons that are quite understandable because, after all, they have everything to do with maintaining your livelihoods, you defer more often than you should to adult rules, regulations, procedures, and prerogatives that undercut other efforts you are making to increase student learning. You take too few risks on behalf of students.

Students understand quite well who should not be leading a classroom or a school, and you too know who these people are, but it is the students, not you, who each year suffer these people's ineffectiveness. I don't care about their tenure. I don't care about their race. I don't care who their relatives are. I care that so long as these people are in their current positions students will not perform at the levels of which they are capable. This will only change if you act.

Move more of your attention to the building and classroom

While you must continue to make the systemic changes necessary to advance and support standards-based learning, most of your attention now needs to be at the building and classroom levels. There are big gaps there. You need to know where they are and address them. However, I doubt that any of your school systems has a way to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the extent to which each school and each classroom within it is using standards and seeking to enable students to perform at standard. This is the equivalent to a sports league where each team, and even each player, may or may not be playing well, but all the league commissioner knows is that some teams win more games than others.

Unless your school systems are clear about what standards implementation should look like at the building and classroom levels, and unless you can assess and report the extent to which each school and each teacher is using standards to increase student learning, standards implementation will mean little more than casting bread upon waters. I look forward to the day when your school systems are able to report -- simply, understandably, and honestly -- to your boards of education and to the Foundation the extent to which schools and teachers are using standards effectively. Until you are able to do that, you will not have the information you need to strengthen the teams and their players.

Beyond standards: Getting to the real core of learning

Improving their performance will mean going beyond standards development and dissemination to the real core of learning, (1) the quality of teachers' assignments, (2) the quality of students' work, and (3) the quality of teachers' assessments of student performance. Standards posted in classrooms won't increase student learning, nor even will assignments keyed to specific standards.

To date you have been cutting through the epidermis, dermis, and subcutaneous tissue of standards-based reform; now you are hitting the muscle, torn but flexed to resist your incursions. This will not change unless you develop and execute building-level strategies that increase expectations for teachers' learning and cause teachers to collaborate to improve their assignments and assessments, and the quality of students' work.

I do not underestimate the difficulty of this cultural and operational shift at the building level. This is why school reform, not just instructional reform, is necessary. Schools have to take the initiative to create the structures and processes that make it possible for teachers to engage every day in learning how to improve their practice. This is not an option. School boards and superintendents and central office administrators must be firm that this reform will occur and provide schools with the leadership, support, and flexibility to achieve it.

Schools have to take the initiative to create the structures and processes that make it possible for teachers to engage every day in learning how to improve their practice. This is not an option.

Each of you has pledged that by June 2001 a specific proportion of students completing the eighth grade will perform at standard. The students who entered your sixth grades this year do not know that you have set this goal for them and for yourselves. They merely assume that their schools and teachers will help them learn what they need to complete the eighth grade performing at levels that will serve them well in the future.

Students are betting their lives

Your students are betting their lives that you will do whatever is necessary to make it possible for them to succeed in the future. They don't know about and they don't care about existing paradigms, your personal or professional relationships, or whatever it is that keeps you from taking actions that will help them perform at standard. They can only trust that you will act courageously and effectively on their behalf.

We share their trust. We marvel at the dedication and energy you bring to your task. We wonder how you get out of bed every day and how you balance the demands of your professional and personal lives. We hope that our partnership with you in this endeavor is more support than it is burden. If at any point this is not the case please tell us.

In a few days we will begin again our hike on this rocky trail, watching our footing as we take one step after another. For now, however, we can learn a lot from each other. Those in front can tell those behind where the dangers are, and which path to take when the trail diverges. Those behind can tell those in front to accelerate their pace because we are beginning to bunch up on the trail. We have a long way to go. It is dusk and soon night will fall.

Thank you.

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