Guiding Questions
for Middle Grades Reform

Remarks of Hayes Mizell at a meeting convened by the Los Angeles Unified School District on January 16, 2003. Approximately 125 educators – local district superintendents, directors of instruction, middle school directors of school services, central office staff – participated. Mizell is Director of the Program for Student Achievement at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.

(Mizell's remarks have been edited for presentation here.)

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During the past ten years, there has been increasing attention to how middle level education should change to raise levels of student performance. One indicator of this growing interest is the name of a relatively new organization, The National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform. Its name is significant because the Forum boldly proclaims it is concerned with more than just marshalling support for the middle grades. The words "accelerate" and "reform" are not found together in the name of any other national education organization.

The National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform is but one voice in a deafening chorus demanding that schools dramatically raise levels of student performance. One consequence is that there are now a host of state accountability and assessment systems designed to achieve that result.

These initiatives are sometimes clumsy and heavy-handed. Their quality and results are uneven, but their collective message is that school reform is no longer an option. Schools have been slow to respond, many going through the palsied motions of compliance, others with a death grip on denial. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before a single state's accountability system emerged to shape federal education policy, having ridden in on the coattails of a governor's successful candidacy for president.

NCLB presents practical dilemmas for schools

The No Child Left Behind Act has established as a national goal that all students will perform at the proficient level by the end of the eighth grade in 2014. The NCLB is not flawless legislation, and it is possible to deconstruct and parse it into impotency; indeed, that process is underway in many quarters. The real tragedy, however, is not the complexity or ambiguity of the law's provisions but that it has taken so long — and required the power of the federal government — to do what school systems should have embraced long ago:

• No tolerance for persistently low-performing schools

• Highly qualified teachers for every student, and

• Compelling evidence that in successive grades all students are performing at increasingly higher levels.

No matter what one thinks of the law, school systems and schools are now faced with the practical dilemma of not only achieving the NCLB's long term goal of all students performing proficiently by 2014 but, in the near term, demonstrating that they are making adequate yearly progress towards it.

Many school systems will respond as they always have, leaving it to individual schools to succeed or fail. Other school systems will accept their leadership responsibilities and partner with schools to provide the direction and support schools need to demonstrate improved levels of performance across all demographic groups of students.

Even if school system leaders respond positively, how should they begin? Each school system is different. Each school is different. There is no one approach to reform that is appropriate for the diverse geographical, demographic, cultural, economic, and political contexts that shape the schools of this country. This is as true for the middle level as it for elementary and secondary schools.

Schools must avoid panic-driven quick fixes

Even school systems and schools that want to respond positively to the NCLB's challenges may resort to the tried, if not true, approach of looking for a methodology that will conveniently and quickly boost student performance. There is no shortage of such potential remedies, particularly if one succumbs to the siren songs of vendors and consultants who are capitalizing on educators' anxieties about complying with NCLB mandates. But this panic-driven approach to reform is not in the best interests of educators or students, and the results are likely to be disappointing or fleeting.

There are more helpful tools and strategies than ever before that can support substantive school reform, but choosing from among these requires time, thought, and a critical perspective.

Two hours of searching the Internet will yield a treasure trove of these resources. But as tempting as it may be to believe, or hope, that a particular technique will transform a low-performing or a mediocre-performing school into a high-performing one, the reality is that school reform that yields significant, sustainable improvements in student performance is long, hard work.

Effective reform requires a practical philosophical framework, a thoughtful theory of change, strategies tightly linked to achieving specific results, clear communication, politically savvy development of support, dogged application over time, frequent assessment of outcomes, critical reflection and analysis, and periodic refinements. This is a lot to expect of overburdened school system and school leaders, but their pursuit of short cuts is one reason that in the past so many "reforms" have been marginal and the results ephemeral.

Middle schools have a history of faulty reform

Middle level education has often been the victim of this phenomenon of leaping before looking. In years past, many education decisionmakers authorized and supported the creation of middle schools not because they really understood their purpose or what it would take to operate them successfully, but because they were responding to the recommendations of middle school advocates.

In many cases, these schools did not live up to the expectations of either the advocates or the decisionmakers. One result is that a few prominent school systems are now shifting from schools with six-through-eighth grade structures to schools that include kindergarten through eighth grade. In these cases, education decisionmakers argue that "middle schools don't work" when what they should say is "middle schools don't work the way we choose to operate and support them."

No reform, and recall that middle schools themselves were once a "reform," is self-implementing. Any decision to redesign schools requires commitment, knowledge, skill, and hard work. Middle level educators should keep that in mind when they consider how to enable all students to perform at the proficient level.

Preparing the ground

Before settling on the most effective approaches to increase levels of student performance, middle grades educators should pause, take a deep breath, and think. They may find it helpful to join with a small group of their colleagues in developing and discussing a set of fundamental guiding questions for middle grades reform. These questions should have less to do with the techniques of implementation than with provoking discussion about a school system's or school's values, priorities, and practices.

Here are some guiding questions middle grades educators might explore.

Question 1: "Who will be the primary beneficiary of the reform?" - This is a serious, even a radical question. It strikes at the heart of schools' priorities and operations. It speaks to who has power and who does not, and who benefits from the use of this power.

At first blush the answer to this question may seem so obvious that it is not worth asking. Many people would quickly say that, of course, middle grades reform should primarily benefit students. However, if this answer is literal rather than rhetorical, it has serious implications. Is the answer merely "students" or "all students"? If all students are the beneficiaries, then their educational interests must be primary, and the convenience of adults must be secondary.

All principals will have to organize their schools and develop their master schedules solely for the purpose of advancing the learning of all students. Everyl teacher will have to accept assignments to teach all students who can benefit from their instruction, regardless of who the students are or their current levels of performance. All teachers will have to participate in high quality professional development that will improve their instruction. No educator will have the option of picking and choosing what they will do, or choosing to place their interests above the education of their students.

Many middle level schools would argue that they are already student-centered. Some are, but upon close examination one often finds that it is the preferences of educators, not what is necessary to benefit all students, that determine the schools' organization and activities.

Because adults make virtually all the important decisions that affect the education of students, it is too easy to assume that in every case these decisions are intended to benefit the education of all students. But experience indicates this is not always true. The truth is that most school operations and even many reforms are shaped as much by what adults want and do not want as by students' needs. School systems and schools must ensure that the reforms they pursue enhance the performance of all students, and they must have authentic processes in place to test whether their reforms achieve that goal.

Question 2: "What results should we expect for all middle grades students?" - This is the most important question middle level educators can ask themselves, but it is the one they ask and discuss least frequently. Perhaps they assume they are in agreement, or that the answer is provided by the state's academic standards, or by their school system's promotion policy, or by their school's mission statement. However, most teachers and administrators do not truly "own" these requirements. Seldom is there a living, flesh-and-blood consensus about the demonstrable results schools should help students achieve by the end of the middle grades.

In other words, what exactly are the desired results of students' middle grades education? And how will schools know whether they and their students have attained these results?

When school systems and schools fail to pursue these questions, they default in their professional responsibility to establish clear goals for themselves and their students. School goals must complement those mandated by the state, but they must also be "owned" by the educators who will determine the school's course.

Without a clear consensus on results, reforms of school systems and schools will be unfocused, or the school systems and schools will adopt a reductionist reform agenda aimed only at increasing test scores. If students are really at the center of middle level education, then their schools are obliged to be clear about the results schools will help all students achieve.

Question 3: "What are the most effective ways to organize schools to help all students achieve the results we are seeking?" - In schools serving young adolescents, educators often feel they have to genuflect before the holy trinity of middle level schooling: teams, advisories, and interdisciplinary curricula. Often they don't know why these elements are essential in a "true" middle school, only that professional norms dictate them.

Unfortunately, many of the features said to define middle schools have earned a bad reputation, either because schools have implemented them in name only, or because educators have not intentionally used them to accelerate students' academic and personal growth and development.

Teaming, for example, can be an important structure that enables teachers to address their students' learning styles and needs more effectively. Teams can become small learning communities — not only for students but also for the professional development of teachers. Because teachers on teams do not work in isolation, teams can foster mutual accountability.

The potential of teams is almost boundless. Teachers can work together to examine and analyze student work. Teachers can collaborate to share their knowledge and insights about teaching strategies that are most effective with individual students. When teams are organized around learning styles or curricular interests, rather than age groups, there is greater opportunity to focus on student performance and less risk that students will be limited by age expectations.

When teaming is coupled with looping, the potential benefits for students and teachers are even greater. Looping teams can provide the structure and stability so many students in the middle grades need. Looping teams do not have the luxury of merely passing on low-performing students to teachers in the next grade. Looping increases teachers' internal accountability as they live with the results of their teaching for two or three years.

The same caution applies to advisories and interdisciplinary curricula. Surely there are some schools where advisories help educators respond to students' developmental needs. And there must be schools where interdisciplinary curricula are rigorous. Like teams, these innovations may have potential to directly impact student performance. Like teams, they often dissolve into pale, impotent imitations of middle level practices that truly benefit students and advance their learning.

When teaming, advisories, interdisciplinary curricula and other standard features of middle schools fail to produce results, the problem is not a lack of information. All one needs to know about how to make these strategies function effectively can be found on the Internet, or in books written by practitioners, or in the expertise of successful principals and teachers who have become consultants.

System and school administrators may legitimately claim that they cannot attend to the quality of these popular middle level processes because they are burdened by too many other demands. If that is truly the case, and the goal is student results, then school leaders have to decide which structures and processes are worth the investment of time and resources. They have to be coldly realistic about their own commitment and the commitment of their faculties to make these techniques pay off for students. Otherwise, their schools will simply go through the motions of reform, and the only result will be embittered teachers who become convinced that no reform can live up to its promise.

Question 4: "What must we do to ensure that all students learn deeply and value their ability to demonstrate what they know?" - Many middle level educators are rightly concerned that state assessments are excessively shaping their schools' curricula. As country folks like to say, this is "chickens come home to roost." It is one consequence of school systems' and schools' lack of clarity about the results they want students to achieve.

Inadequate attention to student results, combined with poor oversight and support of teachers, has caused states — and now the federal government — to mandate rigorous assessments in an effort to focus curriculum and instruction. This trend will not abate until the general public and policymakers believe that students are pursuing and achieving district and school goals that meet or exceed those set by the states or the federal government. Educators will have to demonstrate levels of professionalism that go beyond paint-by-the-numbers approaches to administration and teaching — approaches that, at the root, are bureaucratic and formulaic and usually ineffective.

Such deviations from the mannered norms of public education may be necessary if middle level schools are going to intensify teaching and learning and produce students who comprehend more deeply and can demonstrate what they know more proficiently.

Currently, schools are trying to shoehorn standard upon standard into limited time — time made even more finite by students' learning challenges. Under these circumstances, it is very difficult for students to deeply comprehend concepts and demonstrate at a high level the application of their understanding.

School systems and schools must struggle with the task of identifying what is most important for students to know and do, and then focus their energies and resources towards those ends. Families do not send their young adolescents to school expecting them to learn everything, or even to learn everything it is desirable to learn. They do expect the public schools to enable their children to learn and apply what is most important.

Given what we know about the development of young adolescents and how they learn, it is no wonder that this method of assessment is alien, and perhaps alienating. Is this really the best way to communicate to students that it is important for them to be able to demonstrate their mastery of deep learning? Is this likely to cause them to value authentic performance as the best means to assess what a person knows and can do? Is it even the best way for school systems and schools to understand, deeply understand, what students know and are able to do?

The state tests will not go away, but that does not relieve school systems and schools of the obligation to develop and use other means of assessment to communicate more powerfully to students that, in the real world, authentic performance counts.

Question 5: "How will we advance the affective development of young adolescents as a strategy to support their academic development?" - For many years, middle level practitioners have debated whether their schools should devote greater attention to students' academic development or their affective development. One camp believes that given the challenges young adolescents experience, schools should focus on their social and emotional development. The other camp argues that what is really important is what students know and can do. Unfortunately, these opposing views create a dichotomy that undermines the efforts of middle level schools to help students perform at the proficient level.

This does not mean, however, that schools should turn a blind eye to the reality of students' social and emotional needs. Most young adolescents will not be able to succeed academically if they are troubled, depressed, distracted by their vulnerability, or if they are not secure in their sense of self.

Conversely, no matter how healthy students may be, if they are not succeeding academically their failure will ultimately erode their feelings of confidence and self-worth and, in many cases, result in negative behaviors. Students who are happier perform better academically; students who perform better academically are happier. Students' affective and academic development are opposite sides of the same coin. One challenge middle level schools face is how to keep these two dimensions of education in balance while recognizing that student performance is the bottom line.

There are middle schools that do this well, and there is much to learn from them. At their best, these schools do not compartmentalize their attention to students' academic and affective needs. They do not address these needs separately at different times during the school day. Instead, these schools accept the obligation to blend students' affective and academic development.

When, for example, teachers use cooperative groups effectively (which is frequently not the case), the result can be students who interact more productively with their peers while also developing academic proficiencies. When schools engage all students in a school-wide movement to eliminate bullying, it can increase their confidence in their ability to change their own community for the better. It can also create more safe space for learning. Whatever the method, schools that make wise and strategic uses of affective strategies to strengthen students' academic development will experience greater success than schools that fail to do so.

Question 6: "What knowledge and skills must our teachers and administrators have and apply to help all students achieve the results we are seeking?" - It is now apparent that many middle level teachers and administrators do not currently know enough to enable all their students to become proficient by 2014. There are several dimensions to this problem.

It takes time for newer teachers to develop the skills to manage their classes effectively, and at the same time it is often only through daily interactions with their students that teachers learn how students' characteristics and needs impinge on their learning. Among more experienced teachers, many are struggling with the demands of standards, the increasing numbers of limited English proficient students, the expectation that all teachers will assume some responsibility for improving students' literacy performance, and the larger classes and shrinking support that result from state budget cuts.

State accountability initiatives and the No Child Left Behind Act have increased pressures on teachers to perform at higher levels, but at the same time the level of challenge generated by the contexts in which teachers work has risen exponentially.

To have any hope of enabling all students to perform at proficient and higher levels, school systems and schools will have to take a more serious and targeted approach to professional development. Certainly this requires a greater investment, but the first obligation of school systems and schools is to make more effective use of their current professional development resources.

This means ferreting out isolated, uncoordinated, and ineffective pockets of professional development buried in categorical programs, special projects, and state requirements. It means abandoning professional development that cannot provide evidence of increased learning for educators and students. It means identifying specific content knowledge and instructional and leadership skills that teachers and administrators lack but must master and apply to significantly impact student performance. It requires professional development to become more narrow but much deeper. It means professional development decisions that are driven by gaps in student performance rather than by certification requirements, union contracts or educators' preferences.

In most middle level schools there are beliefs, habits of mind, and practices that get in the way of increasing student performance. Educators would be well rid of them.

In some schools, educators assume that if a student enters the sixth grade reading below grade level by two or more years there is little that can be done. They expect that by the end of the eighth grade, the student will be just as far behind, if not more so. These educators imagine middle school as a place that can only effectively educate students who enter performing at grade level. Even though these educators may know that this concept is wildly unrealistic in today's world, emotionally they are resentful that students do not come prepared to learn at the levels and in the ways their teachers want to teach.

This "we don't teach elementary school" attitude is understandable, but it creates a school climate that is defensive and rigid rather than accepting and innovative. The school's de facto posture is that elementary schools and their students should change to meet the needs of the middle school — not that the middle school must adapt in whatever ways may be necessary to enable students who are behind grade level to make up lost ground. If a school's educators are not willing to give up this mental model, reform will never be anything but veneer that fails to change the substance of the school or the results its students achieve.

We do not have to search far to find other examples of attitudes and practices that aren't worth keeping.

Some schools are not willing to give up their methods of assigning students to classes that provide disproportionate benefits for some at the expense of others. There are schools that are not willing to give up their traditional schedule, length of school day, or their ways of relating (or not relating) to students' families or to community agencies.

Other middle level schools cling to their belief that some students can never go on to post-secondary education and so fail to provide the curricula and support to keep that option open. Central offices of school systems are not willing to give up their habit of producing blizzards of directives and requests that further confuse principals about priorities. There are even school boards that are not willing to give up their practice of treating the middle level as the accordion of the school system, expanding or compressing the grade structure to accommodate enrollment pressures or other interests at the elementary and high school level.

This individual has to get up every morning with the understanding that each day their primary mission is to help schools define, organize, and implement reform, as well as assess its effects. This person cannot, of course, "make" reform happen — only teachers and principals can do that — but he or she can be the catalyst, the motivator, the monitor, the facilitator, the troubleshooter, and the evaluator of reform.

Effectively carrying out these roles requires this individual to have considerable authority. School systems often make the mistake of assigning a central office person to "coordinate" or "direct" middle schools but fail to give them the authority to mobilize the school system's resources for middle grades reform, and to clear central office roadblocks that impede reform.

While strong central office leadership for middle grades reform is essential, it is no substitute for comparable leadership at the school level. There, administrators and teachers should be partners in leading reform. Though reform is everyone's responsibility, it is useful to designate one individual, or a small team, as the school's advocate and conscience for reform. Like their counterpart in the central office, this person or group should systematically provide feedback to the school about the progress, pace, and results of its reforms, and help ensure that it stays on course.

A school system and its schools can chose to configure leadership for reform in many different ways, but they must be make sure that every day the gestalt of middle grades reform is the priority on someone's agenda.

Demanding intellectual work

These eight questions can provide the framework for school systems and schools to consider issues that are central to middle school reform. Focusing on these questions and hammering out honest answers to them is a demanding task.

It is more tempting for middle level educators to follow the same roadmap that led many of their colleagues down the wrong path in the past. Meaningful benefits for all students do not result from educators installing packaged programs or implementing what they do not understand. Middle grades reform is demanding intellectual work, requiring a combination of inquiry, constructivism, courage, and insight into human behavior.

If middle level schools are going to enable all students to perform at the proficient level by the end of the eighth grade in 2014, the educators responsible for student success in these schools will have to confront the tough questions — and resist mightily the temptation to settle for easy answers.

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