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Find more Kappan articles in the Speaking with One Voice: A Manifesto for Middle-Grades Reform I. Who Are We, Why Are We Writing This, and for Whom? Consider this: A middle school in the poorest section of its city is affected by local plant closings. The proportion of its students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches rises from 46.5% in 1987 to 61.9% in 1992. At the same time, its average daily attendance rate and standardized test scores steadily improve, while expulsions, suspensions, incidents of violence, and racial tension diminish. And this: A middle school's percentage of low-income students rises over a four-year period from 25% to 29%, while its standardized reading scores increase from a median of 48.8 to 54.6. These two middle-grades schools are not anomalies. Their concrete experiences of academic and behavioral growth are not isolated events. If they were, we would not write this call to action. We speak with one voice, grounded in our collective experience and buttressed by compelling research data that demonstrate such results are attainable. In fact, we believe it is a moral imperative that all schools and school systems achieve similar results. We speak optimistically from the perspectives of four private foundations that support middle-grades initiatives in 19 states and more than 600 schools. Our experience convinces us that sustainable middle-level school reform is achievable. We have seen schools become caring and challenging communities of learners by dint of deep commitment and hard work. We know that many more schools can reach this level of mastery, and we have emerging evidence about the conditions necessary for their success. In this document we
are not going to talk about grade reorganization, because what
makes a difference is what happens in the grades, no matter how
they are configured. We are not going to describe processes, such
as forming houses, teams, and teacher-student advisement. We are
also not going to spend time saying who young adolescents are
and why schools for young adolescents are important, because this
subject has been amply argued and established. We hope this manifesto will serve as a source of energy and inspiration for taking those next steps to create high-performance schools that foster all students' academic achievement and healthy development.
II. What Are the Goals of Middle-Grades Reform? We have witnessed important changes in middle-level schools that attest to their capacity for self-reform. What are the goals of this reform, and what results have we seen so far? High-performing schools for young adolescents are 1) developmentally responsive, 2) academically excellent, and 3) socially equitable. The primary goals of middle-grades school improvement must be to establish and sustain such high-performing schools as the norm, not the exception. 1. High-performing schools for young adolescents are developmentally responsive. They act on the knowledge that the imperatives of early adolescent development are too compelling to be denied. They adapt school practices to this knowledge. As a result of schools' and school districts' middle-level improvement efforts, we have seen pervasive changes in school "climate." Many of the schools are warmer, happier, and more peaceful places for both students and adults, who exhibit greater levels of mutual respect and thoughtfulness. Because educators have grown familiar with the characteristics of early adolescents' social, emotional, and physical development, they have set in place structural changes (houses, teams, advisories) to create small, consistent communities of learning that have personalized the school environment. These changes have enabled schools to become more strategic and agile about student and teacher groupings, thereby reducing the randomness of interpersonal associations that middle-level schools inherited from high schools. These changes have also enabled teachers to become more knowledgeable about their students and to work together to meet their developmental needs. As a result, many of these schools have become safer and more productive. Students report less fear, and teachers and administrators report fewer disciplinary problems, decreased rates of student suspension, and improved attendance, all of which are preconditions for improved academic outcomes. School climate is not a benign issue. These schools have established a safer and healthier environment for emotional and social growth, laying the groundwork for serious academic engagement. In experiencing this level of success, the schools have dispelled -- most importantly for themselves -- the myth that nothing works. 2. High-performing schools for young adolescents are academically excellent. Rather than becoming enmeshed in changing climate and structures, high-performing schools know that these critical components of the reform process enable deeper instructional changes to occur. The schools employ those environmental changes as mechanisms for realiz-ing the ultimate goal of middle-grades reform: enabling young adolescents to achieve at high levels academically while developing well socially, physically, and emotionally. We are frankly concerned that, despite their heavy investment in middle-grades reform, many schools have not progressed beyond the stage of changing climate. We have not seen the widespread dramatic improvement in academic outcomes we had hoped for. A variety of state, national, and international studies in reading, mathematics, and science confirm that the middle grades are characterized by academic stagnation and actual loss among schools serving children in poverty. For several years, large numbers of middle-level schools have been "poised" for reform, but many have not moved off this plateau and taken the critical next step to develop students who perform well academically, with the intellectual wherewithal to improve their life conditions. We know, however, that when schools and school districts take that next step, they succeed. For instance, many schools that have identified reading and math as targeted areas for improvement have experienced substantial gains in achievement test scores in these areas. Others that have focused on parent participation have had similar success. Schools that have emphasized contacting parents about homework, student performance, and problems and that have emphasized providing information about health and social services have increased parent participation. These initiatives have strengthened the webs of support and encouragement for students' increased academic achievement. Middle-grades reform efforts have necessarily focused heavily on developmental responsiveness and the accompanying changes in school climate and organization. But middle-level reform is not a series of disconnected projects involving scheduling, teaming, or advisories. While we believe that schools must continue to press for changes in school climate and organization, school practitioners and policy makers must follow through by focusing increased attention on curriculum, instruction, and assessment so that young adolescents meet high standards of academic performance. 3. High-performing schools for young adolescents seek social equity. A belief that disadvantaged students can perform at high levels and a commitment to making that happen are fundamental to the pursuit of school improvement. We have seen schools break the powerful grip that poverty and race exert on academic performance. The changes they institute in the school environment and their focus on increased academic achievement help make that high performance a reality. If some schools can accomplish this success, others can as well. While we acknowledge the extent of their struggle, their successes demonstrate that difficulty is no longer an acceptable excuse. Too many students are leaving the middle grades underachieving intellectually, deficient in basic academic and critical reasoning skills, and lacking the strong sense of social and ethical obligation essential to their own growth, let alone to a viable democracy. High-performing middle-grades schools must strive to educate all children. They must work intensively to overcome systematic variation in outcomes due to race and class. The failure rate of poor students is simply unacceptable. An expectation of middle-grades reform must be that all students have available to them the high quality of schooling that only a few now have. III. The Necessary Elements of Reform School improvement cannot be achieved on the run, distractedly, shallowly, or piecemeal. The most viable changes are driven by values of excellence and equity and depend upon a large investment of time, focus, and intensity. Our observations about what works in achieving sustainable middle-grades school improvement can easily be misused. For example, we have seen school districts acknowledge rhetorically that when teachers have time to reflect on their classroom practice and to learn from one another, they become better teachers. However, we have not seen enough districts act on their rhetoric; day-to-day schedules remain essentially unchanged, without significantly more time for either teacher or student learning. So we repeat: vision, time, focus, and intensity are essential to school reform. Without them, we will have only superficial slogans and check lists. With them, employing the following 10 strategies, we can achieve genuinely improved schools. 1. Professional development. In the initiatives supported by the four foundations, successful professional development has created a structure to support adults' development, which is key to school-based change. Effective professional development has been intensive, of high quality, and ongoing. It has focused on deepening specific knowledge rather than offering an assortment of disconnected workshops. It has given the time necessary for planning, travel to exemplary schools, study groups, peer observation, expert demonstrations, and both personal and teacher-to-teacher reflection. Most of all, it has helped teachers form a clearer vision of what effective teaching means. However, too much professional development is structural, focusing on creating a warm, friendly place; it does not get at learning. Both the quality of student work and teachers' expectations of their students are too low; cause and effect become close to indistinguishable in this vicious circle. Content-rich professional development must become an intensive strategy to break this cycle. High-quality staff development is not a luxury, to be offered only if Title I or foundation funds are available to support it. Effective staff development is an essential element of school reform, and school districts will have to devote more local resources to a broad spectrum of such staff development if they are to achieve and sustain improved student outcomes. 2. Technical assistance. Technical assistance has been consistent, marked by high levels of expertise in school improvement and substantive areas. Consultants have served as colleagues, critics, and consciences for superintendents, principals, teachers, school-improvement teams, and districtwide and state coordinators of middle-grades improvement. Again, technical assistance in substantive areas is essential to help raise schools to the next level of performance: enhanced student achievement. 3. Coordination. Districtwide coordinators have provided vision and day-to-day know-how to their colleagues in many schools and communities. They have provided the glue that holds the school-improvement enterprise together, despite budget cuts, demographic shifts, and superintendents' comings and goings. In the most successful districtwide middle-level efforts, there is someone who serves, in effect, as "Mr. or Ms. Middle-Grades Reform," someone with both the commitment and the skill to serve as leader, facilitator, manager, strategic planner, entrepreneur, and substantive expert. This coordinator, whether a superintendent, a deputy or assistant superintendent, a principal on leave, or a highly respected teacher reassigned to the position, has emerged as the essential element for district-level middle-grades reform. When middle-level improvement begins at the individual school site, we find the same dynamic: where school improvement takes hold, someone takes leadership, whether a principal or a chair of the school-improvement team. 4. Networks. School, district, and state leaders have formed the core of increasingly vibrant local, state, and national networks focused on middle-level improvement initiatives. These self-governing networks of professionals are part of the infrastructure contributing to the sustainability of reform initiatives. When they are effective, they build a natural constituency for reform, reduce isolation, provide peer support, develop leadership skills, stimulate public awareness, advocate for policy changes, establish continuity in the face of turnover, and become professional communities supporting a culture of change. They help solve real problems, such as scheduling gridlocks, space utilization dilemmas, and team-building tensions, clearing the way to address more intransigent barriers, such as the scarcity of time and money, the absence or loss of district and state political support, and the gradual erosion of focus on mutually held goals. They form linkages to and among district, state, and national reform efforts that have the potential to become movements. In particularly active districts, intradistrict school leadership teams and principals meet regularly -- as often as monthly -- to share lessons of successes and failures and to hold themselves mutually accountable for advancing middle-level reform in their schools. By means of these various networks, ideas are diffused among the participants in the various school-reform initiatives. Through their activities, the networks concentrate on "how we do things," a concentration that reinforces the regularity and legitimacy of school change. The schools have needed professional development for individual growth, technical assistance and coordination for organizational change, and networks of colleagues to sustain and press for further gains. Professional development, technical assistance, coordination, and networks press educators to reflect more rigorously on their practice by analyzing the outcomes of their work. 5. Data-driven decision making. To be productively reflective and analytical, schools must have access to facts -- to data -- that illustrate the extent to which reform strategies are actually being implemented and the extent to which implemented reform strategies lead to desired outcomes. Schools need to move beyond brainstorming in a vacuum; it will never be as productive as assessing the impact of current practice and setting next steps based upon verified outcomes. The collection, analysis, and utilization of data, both quantitative and qualitative, are at the heart of professionalism. When schools embrace data-based decision making as a school-improvement tool, they make measurable progress in attaining their objectives. They are able to plan next steps in such critical areas as creating small communities for learning, strengthening the core academic program, and reconnecting schools and communities based upon verified performance. We are concerned, however, that we have not seen enough instances of educators' grappling courageously or inventively with school-generated evaluation data in order to identify areas for more extensive and intensive school reform. The words "evidence" and "results" are missing from the vocabulary of too many middle-level schools and school districts. We are also concerned that state-level accountability systems have the effect, although not the intention, of causing schools to shape their curriculum and instruction for the purpose of improving student scores on the state test. These scores may be proxies for student performance, but they reveal little about what students actually know and can do, and they fail to provide teachers with information to improve their instruction or to respond more effectively to their students' learning needs. While these assessments may be appropriate vehicles for state policy makers to gather broad information about student and school performance and to signal schools and school systems about broad areas of curriculum that should receive attention, in practice they have assumed a disproportionate importance; schools and school systems have become obsessed with "looking good" on the state test, rather than with diagnosing and increasing students' knowledge and skills. 6. Leadership from superintendents. Change can occur within individual schools without central office encouragement, but districtwide change requires central office support. Districts that make progress in middle-level reform are led by superintendents whose vision translates into mobilizing rhetoric and enabling action. Even more important, it is they who revise budgets to make time, talent, and coordination available to the district's middle-level schools. It is they who provide those talented key people with the stature necessary to speak for and be buffers between the schools and the central office. In districts that fail to make progress, it is not unusual to find that a superintendent has made staffing decisions that remove well-trained teachers and principals from well-functioning schools, disrupting or destroying the momentum for improvement. Whether directly or indirectly, the superintendent must be the force that sets and understands the directions that middle-level schools must follow. 7. State-level leadership. Likewise, state-level reform requires that a key person in the state education agency legitimize local reform efforts while helping to eliminate policy barriers to school improvement. Just the establishment of a middle-grades office at the state level has energized reform at the local level in some states. Only with key leadership from the state can middle-level educators envision and implement comprehensive state policies that lead ultimately to students' high academic achievement and healthy development. At the state level, we have seen some promising changes in policies that either eliminate barriers to or create supports for excellent middle-level schooling. Some districts and states have established or revised curriculum frameworks for the middle level. Some -- but still too few -- have established a middle-grades administrative unit in the state education agency to help support and sustain districts engaged in middle-grades improvement. Many states have developed comprehensive policy statements on middle-grades education and have established or revised assessment procedures for school accreditation. Several have established or revised teacher certification requirements for the middle grades. In a few, in place of considerable incoherence, standards for teacher education, teacher licensure, and school accreditation are more aligned with one another. For the most part, however, few states have crafted a coherent plan to ensure that all young adolescents attend schools that are structured, staffed, and equipped to foster their success. States must now define a coherent vision of what policies are needed at the state, district, and school levels to achieve a high-performing system that helps develop high-performing students. 8. Improved teacher preparation. The failure of most state and district efforts to affect college and university teacher preparation programs has weakened reform efforts. Unless these programs are significantly improved, they will continue to turn out teachers who are unfamiliar with effective approaches to promoting young adolescents' social, emotional, physical, and intellectual growth. In some states and districts, funds are not expended to reeducate unprepared new teachers. They come to teaching at the middle level unprepared, they stay unprepared, or they leave in cynicism or despair. In districts that expend funds and time for intensive staff development to reeducate the products of inadequate teacher preparation programs, these resources are unavailable for other pressing school-improvement needs. 9. Well-informed public constituencies. We have seen well-informed public constituencies make it too politically costly for superintendents and school boards to contravene successful changes, and we have seen parents force a new tax referendum and campaign for its passage. A well-informed public is the schools' most powerful ally, but not many school districts engage their communities in setting, supporting, or even understanding schools' goals for students and students' responsibilities in meeting them. Three almost universal failures deprive schools of the political support they could command from a well-informed public. The first is the failure to ground middle-level reform in a broad range of demonstrable results. The second is the failure to communicate ways in which such results are achieved. The third is the failure to engage in dialogue with the communities of which schools are an integral part. The public must help set and deeply understand the goals of middle-level schooling if hard-won changes are to be sustained. 10. Comprehensiveness. Wherever one starts in middle-level school reform, whether at the state, district, or individual school level, over time it becomes necessary either to ground state efforts in the day-to-day work of individual schools or to build the collective voice of individual schools so that state policy becomes more conducive to effective middle-level education. For sustained, systemic reform, it becomes necessary, serially and simultaneously, to work "top-down" and "bottom-up." Professional development, technical assistance, coordination, networks, data-driven decision making, leadership from superintendents, state-level leadership, improved teacher preparation, well-informed public constituencies, comprehensiveness -- these contributors to middle-level school reform constitute an interdependent, complex set of practices that cannot be separated into disconnected check lists and followed by rote. School reform is not for the literal, the timid, or the undecided. To be successful, it must be rooted in powerfully held, shared values that define and determine the entire school-improvement enterprise, its desired outcomes, and its resulting policies and practices. These values -- embracing developmental responsiveness, academic excellence, and social equity -- are deceptively simple to summarize by echoing the golden rule: educate others' children as we would have others educate ours. IV. What Are the Barriers? The absence of any of these elements necessary for middle-level school improvement presents a barrier to comprehensive and sustainable reform. In addition, a number of other barriers can impede the progress of otherwise well-designed reform efforts. 1. Loss of intensity and focus has been the single greatest barrier to comprehensive and sustained middle-grades reform. The presence of an initial capital investment, backed by the credibility of a respected foundation and the attentiveness of an engaged program officer, concentrates the attention of a school, a school district, and even a state, but only for a limited amount of time. Too often, when the foundation leaves, the program dies because intensity and focus are lost. Processes become detached from intent. In an almost Pavlovian response, schools and districts turn to the next stimulus, just as they left other initiatives behind to respond to the stimulus of the foundation's grant. Lacking focus and intensity over time, school reform does not take hold. 2. Frequent turnover in leadership, especially at the superintendent level, has seriously disrupted middle-grades initiatives. Unless a mid-level central office person has managed to survive from administration to administration, districts have suffered a hemorrhagic depletion of systemic and institutional memory and purpose. Similarly, individual schools have been buffeted by turnover in the principalship and the loss of key teacher leaders. Without steady leadership support, even the most successful reform efforts wither and die. 3. Too few superintendents and school boards have a philosophical or operational understanding of the middle level and why reform is necessary. Instead, they adopt a "one-size-fits-all" approach to K-12 school leadership. They do not know the appropriate goals and roles for middle-level schools, and therefore these schools can be ignored, staffed inappropriately, or virtually dismantled with impunity. The middle level is too often a stepchild of school systems. School boards and superintendents tend to react fearfully to communities' concerns about discipline and control, rather than with a coherent agenda that helps the public understand the significance of the middle grades. The failure of school board members to understand and support middle-level schools is exacerbated by changes in priorities from one administration to the next and by elections that change the dynamics and commitments of the boards themselves. 4. Political animosities present unscalable barricades. The school board and the superintendent cannot be at war with each other. The union, the school board, and the superintendent cannot be locked in confrontational, destructive postures. Even relatively civil bureaucracies too often have a limited view of how to create a high-performance system that produces and supports successful middle-level schools; central offices with dysfunctional relationships cannot give productive thought or leadership to serving students. Unless the capacities, structures, and relationships of these various authorities are changed, middle-level reform -- or any other kind, for that matter -- cannot be achieved. 5. Because of their failure to become integrated with other large-scale school reform efforts, middle-level initiatives have lost an opportunity to win political support. For instance, middle-level schools have adopted self-assessment tools that are unfamiliar to most state education agencies, which insist that schools use time-consuming, state-mandated accreditation tools that divert schools from their focus on school reform. In many cases schools and school districts have not seen the connections among these instruments, thereby wasting time on redundant assessments and losing an opportunity to educate their state agencies. Likewise, middle-level reform has existed in a different sphere from the adoption of curricular standards; too often states and districts have failed to use standards to promote a vision of high achievement for all students in the very middle-level schools that embrace this goal. 6. A lack of individual will to persevere despite formidable obstacles has been the most persistent, albeit understandable, barrier to school reform. In the final analysis, institutional and systemic reform must be accomplished not in the abstract but by people -- especially by principals and teachers who work hard and feel unrewarded. Reform requires behavioral change that is extremely difficult for everyone: administrators, teachers, students, and parents. It is hard to commit daily to the strenuous and messy work that institutional and systemic change requires. But if such change is to occur, people must have the will to seek and learn lessons from others' experiences, to read the growing body of research about middle-level schooling and school change, to acknowledge their own shortcomings, to develop bold but realistic reforms they want to implement, and to take the initiative to sell their ideas to schools, school systems, community members, and state policy makers. Most of all, they have to believe school reform is their business if they are to increase the achievement of their students. V. A Call to Action The accomplishments of the two schools cited at the beginning of this joint statement, and of others like them, attest to a level of mastery evident in urban, suburban, and rural schools across the country with which we have had the honor to work. Their triumphs have heartened us all, but there simply are not enough such high-performing middle-level schools to generate widespread reform. If middle-level school reform fails, it will not be because it was misguided. It will be because the effort -- and not just of the schools, districts, and states, but also of the foundations -- was not sufficiently comprehensive, intense, or long-lasting to sustain the schools' focus on creating academically excellent centers of teaching and learning. It has become clear to us as a result of our collective experience with four major middle-level school-reform initiatives that the entire school enterprise must focus intensively on establishing attentive school environments that strive for every child's academic success. It is essential that schools establish a warm, stable environment in which adults and students know one another well and develop regular opportunities to work and play thoughtfully and cooperatively. And it is essential that schools establish organizational structures that foster teachers' reflection and collaborative planning. However, because these changes in interpersonal relationships and structures do not lead automatically to the rigor and zest in teaching and learning that result in higher academic achievement, schools must proceed to establish a specific focus on teachers' and students' knowledge, skills, and habits of mind. We urge school districts not to get bogged down and witness the erosion of their substantial gains. In districts where middle-level schools have moved along the developmental continuum from changing climate and structure toward changing curriculum and instruction, schools should broadcast, celebrate, and earn public support for their substantial gains -- and then move quickly on to focus on students' academic accomplishment. The indicators of schools that are ready to focus on student performance include a well-articulated vision of middle-level schooling, clear goals for what students should know and be able to do, the capacity for self-assessment, an atmosphere of accountability, and access to skilled help with planning, reflection, and practice. We challenge middle-grades educators to grapple with these questions:
Presidential candidates press voters to answer the question "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" We ask schools, including their students, teachers, administrators, and parents, "Are your students performing better than they were three years ago?" If they can answer affirmatively, with convincing evidence, on three dimensions -- developmental responsiveness, academic achievement, and social equity -- they are becoming the high-performing schools we are all striving to attain. |
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