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A Kappan Special Report Middle-Grades ReformBy John Norton and Anne C. Lewis
This special report includes the following sections: Important Developments in Middle-Grades
Reform |
By John Norton
THANKS in part to a decade of determined advocacy, fueled by funders such as the Carnegie Corporation, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, middle-grades reform has moved near the top of the national education agenda. The reform movement gained momentum with the release of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which found, according to Edward Silver, "a pervasive and intolerable mediocrity in mathematics teaching in the middle grades." TIMSS helped trigger federal initiatives aimed at prodding states and school systems into a thorough reexamination of the nation's approach to educating young adolescents. In mid-1999, the U.S. Department of Education awarded multimillion-dollar contracts to seven organizations to conduct research and develop models of comprehensive school reform for middle and high schools.
In a remarkably short time, a number of reports and initiatives have begun to home in on changing the experiences for students between the elementary and the high school years. In June 1997, a diverse group of foundation officers, association executives, and middle-grades researchers met to seek a compatible advocacy agenda. They agreed to organize an unprecedented collaborative network focused exclusively on raising the achievement of all students in the middle grades. After three years of conversation and joint action, the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform has become an influential voice in middle-grades policy, advocating a three-tiered approach that envisions high-performing schools with middle grades that are academically rigorous, developmentally responsive, and socially equitable. (See "A Vision and Beyond.")
A Balancing Act
After years of bickering about the relative merits of developmental support and academic rigor in the middle grades, a growing number of middle-grades interest groups are finding some common ground in the notion of balancing "high support" and "high standards." Of course, such groups as the National Middle School Association and such standards advocates as the Education Trust continue to argue about the best structures and approaches to achieve that balance. But few influential groups would disagree with M. Hayes Mizell, director of the Program for Student Achievement at the Clark Foundation, that "these roles of middle schools are complementary and interdependent, not in opposition to one another."
Turning Points. The 1989 report of the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, Turning Points, provoked a long period of collective soul-searching about the risks facing 10- to 14-year-olds and how well the nation was meeting the needs of these young people. The report found a mismatch between middle-grades structure and curriculum and the social, emotional, physical, and intellectual needs of young teens. It also challenged the assumption that middle school students are not capable of complex, critical thinking. Looking back today, it's apparent that Turning Points' message about social and emotional support had a far greater impact on educators than its corresponding message about the need to strengthen the academic core of middle schools. (See "Turning Points 2000 and the Future of Middle-Grades Reform: An Interview with Anthony Jackson.")
Coordinated by Boston's Center for Collaborative Education, Turning Points is a national design for middle school change that promises to address the critical issues identified by the Carnegie Council in a comprehensive way. Dan French, the director of the center, says that the Turning Points design, which has been added to the pantheon of New American Schools models, draws on the experiences of schools that attempted to implement the Turning Points principles in the 1990s. Each Turning Points middle school commits to a multi-year, systemic change process that engages teachers and principals in collaborative work in six areas: improving learning, teaching, and assessment for all students; building leadership capacity and a professional collaborative culture; engaging in data-based inquiry and decision making; creating a school culture to support high achievement and personal development; networking with like-minded schools; and developing district capacity to support school change.
Talent Development Schools. In a similar effort, the Talent Development Schools program at Johns Hopkins University moved ahead with plans to disseminate a middle school model that is based in part on the program's work in five high-poverty Philadelphia middle schools. It is designed to "transform high-poverty urban middle schools into strong learning institutions that reliably provide every student with a standards-based education and every teacher with the training, support, and materials she/he needs to deliver it."
Middle-grades reform, southern style. Drawing on lessons learned from its nationally recognized High Schools That Work reform initiative, the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Education Board issued a series of four influential reports on the state of middle-grades education in the South during 1997-99. These policy papers, which helped SREB secure one of the first of the federal research and development contracts for middle school reform, identified a set of issues that are national in scope. In its June 1999 final report, Leading the Way: State Actions to Improve Student Achievement in the Middle Grades, SREB zeroed in on weak content standards, low levels of expected performance, poorly aligned state assessments, inadequate data-reporting systems, porous teacher credentialing laws, inadequate content preparation for middle-grades teachers, unfocused professional development programs, poor district hiring practices, and the underfunding of middle-grades education in state school finance formulas.
Literacy first. After a decade or more of declining interest in reading instruction in middle schools, literacy issues are making a comeback -- often as a by-product of state accountability and assessment programs. In reforming school districts from Long Beach, California, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, school faculties are coming to the conclusion that they can no longer overlook the literacy problems of incoming sixth- and seventh-graders. A new interest in the specific techniques that will help older nonreaders succeed in breaking the literacy code and grappling successfully with academic text is leading to more professional development programs focused on reading, a renewed interest in hiring middle school reading teachers, more focus on reading in the content areas, and policy actions in some states that require or encourage reforms focused on literacy. In Alabama, for example, a statewide reading initiative, supported by public and private funds, is retraining hundreds of middle school teachers, using strategies that combine elements of traditional reading instruction and whole-language techniques.
Weaving a web of reform. MiddleWeb, the nation's first comprehensive website dedicated exclusively to middle-grades reform, went online in June 1996. Supported by the Clark Foundation, MiddleWeb includes more than 700 web pages and 10,000 links to middle-grades research, reporting, curriculum and assessment resources, and related material. The four-year-old website also posts weekly diaries by middle-grades teachers and principals and distributes weekly lists of middle-grades news stories found in U.S. newspapers, along with resources of particular interest to middle-grades educators and advocates. In the late summer of 2000, MiddleWeb will begin a listserv devoted to discussions of middle-grades reform, featuring a core group of 30 teachers and principals but open to all interested participants.
Professional development. Three years ago, the National Staff Development Council turned its spotlight on middle schools with its Results-Based Staff Development for the Middle Grades Initiative. In the spring of 1999, the NSDC, with the participation of national content-area and secondary school groups, released the results of a two-year study of staff development programs that have produced measurable learning gains. What Works in the Middle: Results-Based Staff Development identified 26 programs in English, math, science, social studies, and interdisciplinary studies that NSDC executive director Dennis Sparks said "deepen teachers' understanding of the content they teach and expand their set of instructional skills."
For example, NSDC pointed to one math staff development program used in three schools in the Houston area that roughly doubled the percentage of students who passed Texas' statewide assessment. Another math program was linked to a nearly 20% increase in students scoring at the national average or better on annual tests in Lowell, Massachusetts. "When a program's goals included increasing student achievement, the program did just that," said project director Joellen Killion.
Leadership. When principals improve their performance, the effects on a school's culture, structure, and instructional programs are multiplied many times over, according to the National Association of Secondary School Principals in its description of a new leadership development program, Principals Make a Difference in Standards-Based Reform. Developed over a three-year period, with support from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, Principals Make a Difference grows out of a program for 37 middle school principals in Corpus Christi, Texas, and Louisville, Kentucky.
The external evaluation of the program by University of Arizona researchers Donald Clark and Sally Clark provides a rich set of data about the predicament of middle-grades principals engaged in standards-based reform. Among their findings, the evaluators concluded that principals who participated in the Clark-sponsored program were successful "in establishing relationships that led to new skills and understandings, to new professional competencies, and [to] the development of programs that have the potential to help young adolescents achieve at much higher levels."
State task forces. The formation of high-level state task forces -- often organized by governors -- offers more evidence of the growing momentum for middle-grades reform. More than a dozen states have already released or plan to release reports on the quality of middle-grades education. The issues defined for the South Carolina Middle Grades Task Force by Gov. Jim Hodges mirror the concerns of most state leaders: "quality teacher training and professional development, academic rigor in curriculum and instruction, effective organization of middle-grade schools, parent involvement, and prevention of risk-taking behaviors."
Most state reports include lengthy discussions of problems in the training, licensing, mentoring, and ongoing professional development of middle-grades teachers. The issues that states are exploring are reflected in the data published by Education Week in its Quality Counts 2000 report on teacher quality.
The national weekly found that only nine states require middle school teacher candidates to pass subject-area tests. Only 17 states expect all middle school teachers of academic subjects to obtain secondary licenses. Nineteen states require all prospective middle school teachers to complete coursework concentrations in the subjects they plan to teach. The majority of states still allow middle-grades teachers to teach with some type of "elementary" credential that, Education Week notes, does not "require that teachers prepare to teach a single discipline in great depth." In actual practice, Education Week notes, the status of teacher credentialing in the middle grades makes use of "the same loopholes available for high school teachers, when qualified candidates can't be found."
Critical Voices
Without question, the national "buzz" about middle-grades reform has reached a crescendo in the last several years and is now being heard not only by educators and reform-minded organizations but by parents and policy makers at state and local levels. Serious efforts to improve the lives and academic achievement of 11- to 14-year-olds have intensified significantly, and many longtime advocates for middle-grades students are optimistic that the promise of the middle school model can finally be realized.
Others are more skeptical. Ruth Mitchell, a senior researcher at the Education Trust and author of Learning in Overdrive and other books about standards-based reform, offers a differing opinion:
I think we should abandon the whole middle school concept. Middle schools are a disaster. They slow down the intellectual progress that kids make in elementary school, and they effectively preclude readiness for college for many minority kids. There are lots of reasons, but two major ones are a mistaken belief that early adolescents can't learn because of hormonal changes and the number of middle school teachers who teach with elementary licenses and lack the qualifications to teach the subject matter to students at this level.
Mitchell's point of view is echoed in debates in Cincinnati, Minneapolis, suburban Maryland, and other places where school boards are taking a critical look at the effectiveness of middle schools. Middle-grades advocates like Sue Swaim, executive director of the National Middle School Association, contend that the issue "is not the name over the school door and grade configuration, but what is going on that is appropriate for learning at this developmental stage." And reformers like the Clark Foundation's Mizell refuse to "get hung up on grade structure." The debate, Mizell says, "needs to shift from a fixation on format to a conversation about what we want students to know and be able to do at the end of each grade."
Some observers of and participants in middle-grades reform also worry that the new found momentum for change is threatened by the high-stakes accountability systems now in place in virtually every state. As sanctions associated with these systems kick in and as schools and students are penalized for their failure to achieve, a backlash is developing that includes some parents, teacher organizations, and child advocacy groups -- a backlash that could reduce the pressure for more academic rigor and achievement-oriented reforms such as standards-based instruction.
Finally, some reformers frankly wonder whether middle-grades educators and the school bureaucracies they answer to have the energy and the will to pull off the comprehensive changes they believe will be needed to ensure academic success for all students -- in particular, for students in inner-city and rural schools who have traditionally been underserved.
Battle-scarred after more than a decade of advocating for middle-grades reform, Mizell pulled few punches during a presentation at the December 1999 annual conference of the National Staff Development Council. Appearing on a panel titled "What Key Reformers Have Learned About Reform," he observed: "The capacity among teachers and administrators to do what we are now saying is important, to cause all students to perform at significantly higher levels, simply does not currently exist among most educators. This capacity will not exist unless states, school systems, and schools act intentionally to develop it."
By Anne C. Lewis and John Norton
THE LEADERS of the middle school movement in this country made a sharp midcourse correction three years ago. In June 1997, more than a dozen association leaders, researchers, and foundation officials came together to consider a draft "vision statement" about the middle grades that had been developed by project officers at major foundations with programs addressing early adolescence. The foundation officers had been conversing over the course of several years at meetings convened by the Boston-based Education Development Center (EDC). The bare bones of their vision appeared in an article in the March 1997 Kappan.1
Some traditional "orthodoxies" about middle schools were on the table at the June meeting. One issue bringing the group together was a concern that -- intentionally or not -- the middle school movement had produced far too many schools that were attending to organizational issues and the developmental needs of young adolescents but neglecting academic issues. M. Hayes Mizell of the Clark Foundation stressed that the goals were not mutually exclusive. "I'm not sure how you can help all students achieve high standards," he said, "if middle-grades schools are not learning communities that support the healthy development of adults and students alike."
The group fleshed out the earlier vision statement and agreed to work together to promote its key messages. (See "The Vision.") The reformers also decided to collaborate more effectively. To further that goal, leaders from four organizations concerned with middle schools (the National Middle School Association, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the National Staff Development Council) have appeared together at their respective annual meetings to stimulate discussion of the vision statement.
To sustain their efforts, participants at the June 1997 meeting decided to organize a National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform and to invite other prominent middle-grades reformers to join the network. The Forum has since grown to include about 50 members who meet twice a year and stay in weekly contact through a listserv and a National Forum website (http://www.edc.org/FSC/MGF). In 1999, after a national search and a series of school visits, the Forum identified four promising "Schools to Watch" that Forum researchers believe have the capacity to fulfill the Forum's vision. (See "Schools to Watch.") "This is one of the few places in the foundation arena where people are working collaboratively on the same effort," notes Nancy Ames, vice president and director of the Center for Family, School, and Community at EDC.
One sign of the Forum's growing influence was its involvement in organizing Secretary of Education Richard Riley's February 2000 satellite town meeting that explored "Powerful Middle Schools." The Forum was also invited by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) to help plan a July 2000 conference on curriculum, instruction, and assessment in the middle grades that is to be held in Washington, D.C. Ames described four essential questions that conference participants (national, state, and local policy makers; practitioners; and researchers) will be asked to examine:
1. Where are we now with respect to rigorous standards and high levels of achievement for middle-grades students? How are middle-grades students performing? What factors facilitate or impede their progress?
2. What curriculum, instruction, assessment, and environmental factors support the literacy development of middle-grades students?
3. What curriculum, instruction, assessment, and environmental factors support the mathematics learning and achievement of middle-grades students?
4. What kinds of professional development and organizational support improve teaching and learning in language arts and mathematics?
The decision to bring together policy makers, practitioners, and researchers for a national discussion of middle-grades issues addresses a special concern of Forum organizer Leah Meyer Austin, program director of Education, Youth, and Higher Education programs at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. "We have to address the alignment of reform policies all along the continuum, from local to state levels," she said. In Michigan, where Kellogg has invested heavily in alignment initiatives, Austin says that "a large and growing alliance of higher education institutions, schools, districts, and state associations is building networks of improving schools that are working together to achieve better academic and developmental outcomes for the state's most disadvantaged middle-grades students." Similar alignment efforts are being pursued in the states in the Southeast, under the leadership of the Foundation for the MidSouth (supported by Kellogg) and the Southern Regional Education Board (supported by Clark).
To further the conversation about reform in the South, the National Forum is supporting the development of a Southern Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, funded jointly by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Clark Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation through a two-year $900,000 grant to EDC. The Southern Forum is bringing together leaders from 10 southern states to work on reform messages aimed at state policy makers and local educators. "This is the kind of collaboration we need to be promoting across the nation," says Austin.
The National Forum's Vision Statement
According to Ames, the creation of the National Forum and its three-part vision statement came about because academic goals were "the missing link" in the middle school movement. The Clark Foundation's Mizell believes that earlier efforts to describe an appropriate academic focus for the middle grades fell short, in part because they failed to embrace emerging academic standards.
In the early 1990s, a special task force of the National Middle School Association (NMSA) spent months developing a statement on the middle school curriculum, which it termed the "neglected element in the middle school movement." The statement represented a view of the middle school curriculum that was generally more academically rigorous than the view that then prevailed. However, at a hearing on the proposed statement during the NMSA annual meeting in San Antonio in 1992, the framers admitted that they had not paid much attention to the literature on academic standards (even though the math standards had been released three years earlier and work was under way to develop standards for other core subjects).
The National Forum's statement, says Ames, balances three concerns shared by the Forum's membership: academic excellence, developmental responsiveness, and social equity. When Forum members first began walking their audiences through the new vision statement, they used a triangle to illustrate the equal weight of all three. Now, says Ames, "we see the statement as three interlocking circles because we realize that each is part of the other."
By Anne C. Lewis
THERE IS much talk about middle-grades reform, but what does it actually look like? Since the mid-1990s, spurred by state and district accountability measures, a central goal for middle-grades reform has been higher achievement by all students. Before the adoption of a new vision for middle schools, several foundations had already begun intensive reform efforts, often focused on schools serving large percentages of low-income students. Of the four foundations that originally led in this effort, two still invest in networks committed to the funders' particular approach to middle-grades reform.
The W. K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan, through its Middle Start Initiative, is building school, district, and state capacities for reform in Michigan, as well as collaborating in the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform and its duplication in the South. The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation of New York City, also a supporter of the National Forum, is funding standards-based reform efforts in three urban districts in three states (the foundation ended support for three other urban districts because of competing priorities in those districts). The Kellogg Middle Start network began in 1993; the current standards-based Clark effort began in 1994, building on a previous five-year program to reform urban middle grades. Clark has announced it will phase out its middle-grades programs in late 2003.
The two other foundations that signed the vision statement in the March 1997 Kappan are no longer as active in middle-grades reform. After publishing Turning Points, the Carnegie Corporation sought to enact its agenda through grants to selected states, believing that state policy making and networks were the best tools for reforms. That program gradually turned toward efforts at whole-school reform and ended in the summer of 1999. In the meantime, the Lilly Endowment decided to limit its funding to higher education and to efforts within its home state of Indiana.
Below, I describe the efforts of the Kellogg and Clark foundations. The discussion of the Kellogg Middle Start Initiative relies on quantitative and qualitative research results to present the progress of the initiative locally and at the state level. The discussion of the Clark effort draws from a narrative document of that foundation's program for standards-based reform in urban districts.
The middle schools profiled below were not chosen for being exemplary. They were chosen because they illustrate the process and the lessons learned from these efforts to move schools toward a new vision for middle-grades education.
Michigan's Middle Start Initiative
When Kellogg Foundation officials approved early adolescence as an area for funding in 1993, most of their work at the time focused on youth-serving organizations. Program officer Leah Austin, given the task of figuring out what the new initiative would look like, crisscrossed the state of Michigan, talking to people and visiting programs. She concluded that, whatever the foundation did, it needed to be based in the schools. Youth development work is important, she says, "but if you look at outcome data, there is a direct relationship between what happens to young people in schools and their life chances."
This was the genesis for the Middle Start Initiative, which can be thought of as a series of concentric circles. At the core of the project is a group of low-income schools that received a heavy investment of funding; next is a ring of schools that received more modest support, targeted at reading and mathematics improvement; subsequent rings are made up of schools with less involvement; and, finally, there are the efforts to build support for middle school reform at the state level and among the general public. The forces holding these circles in place are excellent data collection and good use of the data.
The base is a self-study developed by the Center for Prevention Research and Development at the University of Illinois. Initially, this was primarily the work of Robert Felner, now at the University of Rhode Island. The current survey represents the work of Steven Mertens, Nancy Flowers, and Peter Mulhall. Schools have participated in the extensive self-study three times since 1994. The first self-study set the baseline and was summarized in the March 1997 Kappan. The second, two years later, has been analyzed and reported on by the researchers,2 and preliminary analyses are now available from the third. From these surveys, participating schools learn of progress on teaching and learning practices, the school environment, staff attitudes, professional development, and student outcomes. In the aggregate, the reports provide a statewide picture of middle school reform. (The results for individual schools are private.)
"We were lucky that a large number of schools bought into the self-study idea," says Austin. "The data allow us to compare different subgroups of schools, such as urban, rural, or Upper Peninsula. That has been the power that helped keep the initiative going." The schools were informed at the outset that only high-poverty schools would receive foundation funding. But in the first round, an array of 224 schools, not all high-poverty schools, participated in the staff survey. (Of these, 101 also used a student survey.) There has been some attrition in participation rates since the first survey, according to Mulhall, but the research analyses are still quite representative, including 155 schools that have continued to conduct the staff surveys. (Seventy-nine also continued the student surveys.)
In addition, the Academy for Educational Development (AED) has documented the Middle Start Initiative since 1994, using site interviews and observations, reviews of annual reports, and interviews at regional and networking conferences.3 The AED has provided technical assistance to and conducted more intensive studies of the 12 Comprehensive School Improvement grantees, which received the largest grants -- up to $150,000 each. Planning and enhancement grants of $9,000 each had gone to 28 schools at the beginning. An additional 19 schools received focused grants (for reading and math improvement) of up to $10,000 each.
From these two research sources comes a picture of middle schools that demonstrates that reform "is not a matter of rocket science," according to Mulhall. "If schools do certain things, they will improve over time."
Those "certain things," tracked by the Center for Prevention Research and Development, generally include six areas: small communities for learning; authentic teaching and learning practices; parent contact and involvement; school environment; staff readiness, decision making, and efficacy; and professional development. The researchers also collected data on barriers to implementation and on student outcomes. The findings are summarized below.
Small communities for learning. Common team planning time is essential to interdisciplinary teaming (a pillar of middle school practices). This is time set aside especially for team discussions; it is not simply the practice of using teachers' individual planning time to meet as a team. The researchers defined a "high level" of common planning time as a minimum of four 30-minute meetings per week.
The number of schools that met the criterion for a high level of common planning time in all middle grades nearly doubled from 13 to 25 in the period between the first two surveys. The number of schools using teaming in all middle grades increased from 52 to 78, and the number of schools piloting teams increased from one to 15. The increase in common planning time occurred mostly in schools receiving grant support and in nonurban schools. However, almost 40% of the schools with some level of interdisciplinary teaming had begun to use this strategy before the grant program; these tended to be schools with lower percentages of at-risk students.
Teacher-led advisory programs, stressed in Turning Points, were found in only 39% of the 155 middle schools in the 1996 survey, up only slightly from 32% in the 1994 survey. Such advisories are more likely to be found in schools with high levels of common planning time and fewer at-risk students. While schools choose their priorities, those that start with interdisciplinary teaming "tend to have more success (with issues such as integrated curriculum and heterogeneous grouping) because they have built an infrastructure with learning that can then support the demands of other work," the Illinois researchers report. (Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this section are from the Illinois study.) "Teaming structures enable the deeper issues to manifest because the school has already addressed the common issues of teachers working and planning together, establishing small communities for learning, and addressing individual student needs."
Authentic teaching and learning practices. The team practices most often found in the middle schools that participated in the survey tended to be in four areas: curriculum coordination, coordination of student assignments, parent contact and involvement, and contact with other building resource staff. Over two years, the Middle Start schools showed some improvement in all these areas, except parent contact and involvement. Schools that received grants moved ahead faster. As for specific classroom practices, the Middle Start schools did not change much overall, and the specific practices -- e.g., small-group instruction, integration and interdisciplinary practices, community-based learning, mathematical reasoning -- were used only several times a month on average. However, the lowest-income grant-receiving schools made "significant gains in authentic teaching and learning practices."
Parent contact and involvement. Over the two-year interval between surveys, teacher contacts with parents to provide them with information about four areas of concern -- student performance problems, homework, parent involvement, and health and social services -- showed a modest increase. In none of these four areas, however, did contact with parents occur more often than quarterly. (The most frequent contacts related to student performance in grant-receiving schools.) Low-income schools tended to have more parent contacts that were designed to give families information about parent involvement or to give information about or referrals for health and social services.
School environment. There was no change over the two years in the ratings teachers gave to their working conditions or to the school climate in general. On average, teachers felt they received recognition for their accomplishments, were committed to their work, and understood what was expected of them. Schools reported slightly less disruption from students. In both surveys, students were most positive about "the clarity of behavioral expectations and rules" and least positive about their level of involvement in decision making. The presence of interdisciplinary teaming made no difference in the ratings on school climate. There was also no change in student expectations over the two years. Students were more positive about such long-range goals as going to college than about such intermediate ones as doing better in the next school year. However, students felt more pressured in terms of their academic performance, social lives, and personal safety.
Staff readiness, decision making, and efficacy. Teacher attitudes about accepted middle-grades practices were more strongly held in the schools that received grant funds, and their strength increased during the two years. The most favored practices include small-group instruction, reading skill development, and integration across the curriculum. Teachers in grant-receiving schools were less satisfied than teachers in other schools regarding student behavior and parent/community support. The researchers explain that schools in the Middle Start Initiative "have probably set the most comprehensive improvement goals . . . [and] their buildings are in a state of change which often causes stress and dissatisfaction."
Professional development. Professional development was not frequent in any of the schools and tended to be in the form of workshops provided through the school district or exchanges of resources/lesson plans with other teachers in the school. Grant-receiving schools did these things more often. Despite the networking that was available through the Middle Start Initiative, the least-used professional development activities were visits to other schools or teacher exchanges with other schools. Teachers in the grant schools showed increased desire for professional development; in nongrant schools, this desire decreased. Teachers particularly wanted professional development in the areas of involving the community in education, interdisciplinary teaming, and working with families to involve them in education.
Barriers to implementation. Only those schools that have started implementing change can know what the barriers are. But the perceptions of schools in the Middle Start Initiative did not change over two years. The top two concerns remained the lack of materials and resources necessary for adequate implementation and parents' lack of concern regarding their children's education.
Student outcomes. Students reported slightly higher levels of self-esteem and academic efficacy in the second survey. Self-esteem was higher in the highest-poverty schools (as was the level of student behavior problems). Students reported a decreasing level of adjustment with each grade level. "The pattern that emerges is that, as students move from sixth grade to seventh grade to eighth grade, their pattern of adjustment becomes worse (i.e., their depression level increases, their self-esteem decreases, their behavior problems increase, and their academic efficacy decreases)," the researchers report. "The formation of these attitudes can have a dramatic effect on their successes as they move on to high school and beyond. For this very reason, the work of the Middle Start Initiative is critical in order to successfully attend to the needs of these students at this time of rapid change."
We recall that the National Forum's vision statement focused on the three "interlocking circles" of academic excellence, developmental responsiveness, and social equity. How successful has the Middle Start Initiative been in advancing these goals? As a group, the Middle Start schools improved academically in reading and math between 1994-95 and 1996-97. Schools not in the grant program had higher scores on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, but the schools that received grants made the largest gains -- up 10% in reading and up 6% in math. The largest gains were among the lowest-income schools. In addition, schools with teaming in all grades that also had high levels of common planning time showed the greatest improvement in MEAP scores.
In the opinion of the researchers, Middle Start schools have shown progress in becoming more developmentally responsive because of their increased use of interdisciplinary teaming and an integrated curriculum. The improvements in student achievement scores and socio/emotional adjustment together indicate progress in the area of academic achievement.
It is with the third circle of reform -- social equity -- that the initiative has been less successful. Low-income schools have not progressed as much in the areas discussed above, and they reported a number of signs of a lack of social equity:
Springfield Middle School
At one end of an airy, double room, youngsters lounge on rugs, chairs, and couches as close as possible to their two teachers and their classroom aide, listening to one another's "thank yous" and "concerns." "Thank you, Stacey, for helping me open my locker." "Thank you for giving us an extra day to do our report." "Someone's teasing me on the bus." When they wish, the students share something, and then they listen to a student government report. The students are relaxed, respectful, and, judging by the student work crowding the walls, very busy.
This is the multi-age classroom at Springfield Middle School, a school serving grades 4 through 8. The multi-age classroom is designed for new fourth-graders and for some of last year's fourth-graders "who, we decided, were not yet ready for rotation to several teachers in the fifth grade," says teacher Jennifer Stark. "It has worked out beautifully."
Down the hall, three seventh-grade teachers use their team's common planning time to discuss how to stretch resources. With too few copies of a short book one of them is using in reading, they decide to audiotape it, each teacher acting a role. They are also beginning to talk about next year, when they will be an eighth-grade team. These teachers have chosen to "loop," staying with their students for a two-year stretch. In order to prepare students for the more intensive work in high school, the teachers are working out plans to schedule some subjects in blocks. They decide to consult with the high school teachers who are using block scheduling.
In his science class, veteran teacher Brett Sellers is using his planning period to work on schedules for the upcoming student-led conferences with parents. Sellers brought this idea back from a National Middle School Association conference. "I always hated meetings like that," he says, "but this time we toured a good middle school and decided what we needed most was more parent involvement." He credits the strategy not only with increasing parent involvement (about 95% of his parents now attend the conferences), but also with making students more accountable for their learning. Before the school held conferences, "parents would get conflicting stories from their children about what they were doing in school compared to what their report cards said. Now students are more responsible and accountable for their learning. The conferences give students an opportunity to tell their parents, 'These are the things I've already decided to change.' They start looking carefully at what they want to put in their portfolios to share."
When Nancy Fenton arrived as principal at Springfield Middle School in 1992, it was stuck in traditional ways of doing things. The teachers would probably never have suggested any of the creative ideas now flourishing in the school. Fenton, however, had tasted innovation and flexibility at her previous school, a unique building that housed only the sixth grades in nearby Lakeview. "It sets you back when you come into a traditional middle school with Carnegie units and all that," she said. Fenton came to the school with ideas, and she found a mentor in a Battle Creek colleague, Steve Hoelscher, then principal of Southwestern Junior High School. Now coordinator of the Michigan Middle Start Partnership, Hoelscher was also an innovative principal. For example, he had introduced a "no fail" policy, requiring students to keep working to bring up low-quality work to passing level; only extra projects would earn a student an "A."
The two principals had already worked on joint grant proposals when the Kellogg Foundation announced the Middle Start Initiative. This program gave Fenton a chance to support the student-centered ideas being planted at Springfield. With 50% of its enrollment from low-income families, her school was eligible for and received a comprehensive improvement grant of $150,000.
"The grant was a shot in the arm," Fenton says. "It said: 'We believe in you.' And that was very important for my teachers." For the most part, the grant money has bought time for planning and professional development, with each successive experience building on the previous ones until the teachers feel they are becoming experts in middle school reform themselves.
First, though, time was given over to developing a philosophy for what the school wanted to accomplish. "Instruction is not everything," Fenton notes. "We had a number of pieces to put together, and we now have a much better feeling about what we are doing for children." The baseline data from the self-study, required of all grant-receiving schools in the Middle Start Initiative, guided Fenton and the faculty on professional development needs. Results of the student survey "spurred some of the things we wanted to get moving." For example, some teachers were reluctant to use cooperative learning. But when the student survey showed that those who had participated in cooperative learning in earlier grades wanted to continue, the teachers felt that they had to adopt the practice.
Most of the Middle Start investment has gone for professional development. All instructional teams work together for a week each summer to integrate their curriculum. In addition, in 1999 the entire faculty received professional development in literacy. Fenton's teachers have opportunities to attend state and national conferences, visit other schools, and find new ways to push reforms at Springfield Middle School. Sellers and some other teachers took on the organizing of the student-led conferencing. Special education teacher Kim Roy became interested in the "critical friends" strategy used by the Coalition of Essential Schools. She now organizes teacher study groups at Springfield. Teachers interested in cross-age grouping visited schools that were using this strategy. The ideas these and other teachers bring back to Springfield have formed the basis for twice-monthly after-school professional development sessions that involve the entire faculty.
Using data from the self-study, the Springfield faculty decided that the school was "spinning its wheels on a lot of affective learning and that what was needed was an academic goal for every team," Fenton says. Therefore, the teams set about analyzing data from the Michigan Educational Assessment Program and targeted the work of each grade-level and cross-grade team on improving certain MEAP scores.
One role for the Middle Start Initiative is network building. For example, the Southwest Michigan Network, based at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, is open to all middle schools in Battle Creek and 20 other area districts. Fenton meets monthly with other principals, and the network arranges joint professional development and school visits.
While Springfield Middle School considers itself a work in progress, using data from the Middle Start Initiative and the district to keep its momentum going, it also serves as a model for the rest of the district. The middle grades in Battle Creek are in flux: four junior high schools (grades 7-9) are slated to become middle schools, and Springfield is preparing to change to a grade 6-8 structure. In the 1997-98 school year, according to Fenton, two of the junior highs began using teams, and in 1998-99, another school followed suit.
To help the school provide a developmentally supportive environment for the broad age span of children it serves, Springfield took advantage of the skills and commitment of a volunteer who asked if he could help out on gang prevention. That volunteer, Henry Turner, has now become a "community coordinator." Turner teaches a social skills class and conflict resolution, conducts after-school sports activities, and holds an open gym at the school two nights a week. Turner even goes to students' homes to pick up those who haven't made it to school, says Fenton. Originally financed through Title I funds and the Middle Start Initiative, Turner's salary as a community coordinator is now paid by the district, and all junior high schools in the district have added their own community coordinators.
Test scores at Springfield Middle School are gradually increasing, but the teachers have had to reach out to the neighboring elementary school to coordinate the curriculum because the state testing program gives fourth-graders a battery of tests at midyear, just a few months after they enter Springfield (the district completed a core curriculum alignment in the 1998-99 school year). By the eighth grade, 85% of Springfield's students are proficient in writing, which has been a special emphasis at the school for the past few years. However, few are proficient in science.
Being part of the Middle Start Initiative has allowed Springfield Middle School to say "yes" to its teachers. Perhaps that could have been done without the money, Fenton says, but then teachers would not have had the time to work together, to observe innovations in place elsewhere, and to take leadership roles through being a part of a state and national movement toward middle-grades reform. Fenton has moved on to become state coordinator for the Coalition of Essential Schools, but Sellers believes that the Middle Start Initiative is firmly entrenched at Springfield. "It gave us a vision. And then it helped us educate ourselves about it," he says.
A Movement Toward Reform
In evaluating the Middle Start Initiative, the Academy for Educational Development made use of its experience in providing technical assistance to the schools that were engaged in comprehensive improvement. AED also used information from surveys of such stakeholders as state legislators, state organization leaders, higher education leaders, and other educators.
The initial efforts of the schools that received substantial funding through Middle Start were shallow, according to AED, but typical of the process of reform. Actions were uncoordinated and overly focused on reorganization. Staff participation was uneven.
A second stage of reform brought about schoolwide participation, influenced both by the use of the school improvement self-study and by greater use of teaming. Because schools were unfamiliar with analyzing data, they began to call on technical assistance to a greater degree, and so outside consultants became important in helping schools develop action plans for professional development, reorganization, school climate, and other areas. At first, the technical partners worked with administrators and teacher leaders, but their plans often went awry because of the turnover in school leadership. This led to greater schoolwide participation and greater dependence on the outside partners. But it also led to the development of more expertise within the staff.
By the end of the 1997-98 school year, 10 of the 12 Middle Start sites that were engaged in comprehensive school improvement had begun to refine their reform efforts. They were following comprehensive plans; integrating various dimensions of comprehensive change (curriculum, instruction, student assessment, professional development, program evaluation, school organization, school climate, communications, family involvement, and school/community partnerships); and aligning their work with district guidelines. About half of the schools were doing an excellent job on one or more of these three aspects of change.
AED's statewide stakeholder surveys found that in Michigan discussion of middle-grades education had increased, as had controversy. In fact, the growing interest had created "a movement toward a middle-grades education agenda," at least with regard to school organization and structure. Middle Start was acknowledged as a catalyst, motivating stakeholders to deal with such specific topics about young adolescents as civility in and outside of schools, how middle-grades education should be unique, the role of parents, and standards and assessments for the middle grades.
The AED study found more attention was paid to the unmet needs of early adolescents, to professional development tailored for teachers and administrators in the schools, and to the need for specialized teacher preparation for the middle grades. But the study also found some concern about how well the reforms would prepare students for high school. Indeed, compared to three previous years, those interviewed tended to be more convinced that middle-grades students could achieve more academically.
The belief among stakeholders that a middle school movement was building in Michigan proved correct. At a time when the Kellogg Foundation was easing back on its grantmaking and the Middle Start Initiative was put on hold, other events built on the start the Kellogg program had made. The state department of education selected the Middle Start Initiative as a partner for its Comprehensive School Improvement program, a federal reform initiative. Of the 75 grants awarded under this program, 21 went to schools that were part of the Middle Start Initiative.
Not only is state funding now secure, says Kellogg's Leah Austin, but higher education institutions are now working together to push middle-grades reform. Every school that is part of the network is close to a participating campus. Kellogg funds are focusing on a public agenda, and the foundation is selecting communities willing to do a self-study on the status of early adolescents and the resources available for them. "Many of the students we care about most are not going to achieve at high levels unless the school has the support of families and communities," Austin says.
What is most gratifying about the work that has gone into the initiative, according to Austin, "is that we now have a partnership that sustains the work. It includes the very groups that will make a difference -- university centers, the Coalition for Essential Schools, the state education department, the associations -- all working together in a highly organized fashion."
Standards-Based Reform in Urban Middle Grades
In 1989 the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation of New York City began a five-year investment in five cities to improve the preparation of urban middle-grade students for all options they might pursue in high school, especially college-preparatory courses. Led by project officer M. Hayes Mizell, the initiative asked the districts to set high content, high expectations, and high levels of support for their students. Only two districts -- Louisville and San Diego -- made any progress.
In 1994, aware that the middle schools were still the "last, best chance" for a student population becoming ever more at risk of losing its chances for a secure future, the Clark Foundation launched a new initiative. This time, there were six participating districts, and they pledged to implement standards-based reforms in the middle grades -- a much more focused approach. The districts promised that certain percentages of students would be prepared for challenging content in high school and that the standards would be communicated clearly to students, parents, and the community.
Three districts -- Corpus Christi, San Diego, and Long Beach -- remain in the project. Funding for Chattanooga and Minneapolis was phased out early, and Louisville's work ends in the 1999-2000 school year. Education Matters, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is providing ethnographic evaluation of the project, and Policy Studies Associates of Washington, D.C., has administered reading and mathematics tests based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to a sample of students in each district. The 1998 data showed that three of the districts had smaller percentages of students in the "below basic" category of achievement than the national NAEP sample, even though these districts have higher minority and low-income populations than the national sample.
For example, 40% of San Diego eighth-graders were "below basic" in math, compared to 43% of the national NAEP sample. San Diego's percentage of low-income students is 60%, compared to 33% in the NAEP cohort; 28% of San Diego's students are identified as "limited English proficient," compared to 4% of the NAEP sample. Similarly, in Corpus Christi, where 52% of the students are from low-income families, just 34% of the eighth-graders were "below basic" in math, compared to 47% of the total Texas NAEP sample and 43% of the national NAEP sample. On the other hand, all four of the districts still active in the Clark program in 1998 fell short of national NAEP averages for students reaching "proficient" or "advanced" levels.
The following account offers a picture of middle-grades reform that is very different from the one in Michigan. It is adapted from the final chapter of Figuring It Out: Standards-Based Reform in Urban Middle Grades, a narrative report of the first two years of the new Clark Foundation initiative.4
I visited classrooms and interviewed teachers and the principal in one school in each of the six original districts over a period of 18 months. The schools were "focus" schools, those receiving extra attention because of their low academic performance. The Clark report also includes interviews with district personnel and a survey of teachers in each focus school, designed and analyzed by Barnett Berry, associate director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future.
The survey revealed some obvious and some not-so-obvious findings for teaching and learning in these schools. New teachers who graduate from strong, innovative preparation programs and very experienced teachers are more likely than others to want additional professional development. Simply put: the more teachers know, the more they want to know. Teachers also showed some confusion about what standards-based teaching entails, and little of their time was spent working together. Most important to current debate about teacher quality, those teaching out of field were less likely to believe that their students could meet high standards than were teachers who were academically prepared for their assignments.
What Standards-Based Reforms Need
Just the mention of urban middle schools conjures up an image of places where most of us would rather not be. Unsettling, wearing on the psyche, frustrating, with a scarcity of joy and a surplus of problems, often in bleak surroundings -- these are the perceptions of schools filled with some of the neediest youngsters in our country. We miss so much by thinking this way.
It is akin to picturing the Great American Desert -- a vast expanse that stretches almost from the northern border to the southern border -- as a barren basin of sameness. Arid, welcoming only to marginal life forms, a sort of hopeless piece of land -- this is what many people think of desert country. Yet traveling from one side of this desert to the other, one finds more than flat plains for hundreds of hot miles. The roads go up and down over a dozen mountain ranges, each unique beneath a veneer of sandy soil and scrubby trees. The mountains teem with life, adapted to the winds and temperatures and arid conditions. No one description can fit so various an area.
Certainly, the schools portrayed in this report exhibit all the difficulties we associate with urban schools, but there is no more sameness here than in the desert landscape. Each district, even each school, is unique, and each has adjusted to its circumstances in its own way. These schools teem with ideas, astonishingly good teaching, and youngsters filled with hope.
The teachers, schools, and students crave to be better. All are making efforts to adapt, survive, and even thrive, and the teachers are organizing their values and resources around new definitions of what it means to teach students whose complex needs challenge them every day. In some schools, the effort is producing profound changes in teachers' thinking and in how they carry out instruction. In others, the rhetoric of standards-based reform is faultless, but the instruction barely shows any difference. In either situation, many teachers have not even bought into the rhetoric. Why, while facing similar situations, are teachers responding so differently?
Part of the answer lies in the various ways districts help teachers change and adapt. Ultimately, however, the answer is in the will of the teachers themselves.
The District Role
One significant factor related to teachers' responses is creative, stable, and intelligent leadership. This means more than selecting the right people to be principals, other administrators, or even teacher leaders within schools. Good leadership shakes the cobwebs out of bureaucratic thinking. It focuses everyone on student performance and pushes for substance and integrity in what people talk about and in the decisions they make. Standards-based reforms cannot dodge the leadership issue, even when the problem is not incompetence but merely lackluster performance.
Stability in leadership has helped Long Beach move ahead steadily, while other districts have been beset by frequent changes at the top, by mergers, and by pressure to change the bureaucracy to keep pace with the changing demographics of the students. Carl Cohn, the superintendent in Long Beach, has an uncanny ability to choose good leaders and support them. His leadership development efforts allow people to function in a thoughtful, collaborative, and purposeful organization. Not every meeting can be productive -- that would be unheard-of in any bureaucracy -- but the processes of planning, of bringing the best knowledge to the table, and of organizing the work to be done stay focused on students and teachers. Moreover, members of this leadership team share mutual respect. Through many interviews, I heard no fault-finding or complaints. In fact, I heard one comment that tells all: "This is the healthiest place I have ever worked."
The emphasis on supporting personal growth among leaders ripples down through area offices to curriculum experts, who, in turn, expect to find leadership among principals and teachers. There are no absolutes in this business of running schools. Not every principal will be terrific, and not every teacher will be energized. But when people are given responsibility and support, they are more willing to be held accountable. Cohn carefully selects promising future leaders from district classrooms and makes them part of the management team. On occasion, he searches outside the district for the best people for critical areas. Experienced or not, the leaders in Long Beach accept their role as learners.
Consistent leadership at the top helps the district survive in a state where inconsistency in policies is rampant. Moreover, those in the district office listen to teachers, recognize when they are creating overload, and are willing to make adjustments.
All central office leadership teams would like to work this well. Is it Cohn's charisma? Is it cohesiveness and stability at the top? Is it a traditional ethic of hard work throughout the district? Is it a well-educated pool of teachers who stay in the district long enough to become leaders? Probably all these factors play a role. But standards-based reforms are likely to succeed in Long Beach mostly because teachers know that the district leadership team is absolutely serious about the reforms, learns from mistakes, and searches for the best professional development.
This last element -- high-quality professional development -- is another crucial factor in making standards-based reform a reality for teachers. All districts recognize that teachers need opportunities to learn content and to practice new strategies that can transform what and how students learn. Teachers can't simply tack standards onto what they ordinarily do and expect students, especially low-performing students, to perform well on more demanding district and state accountability measures. One teacher leader criticized those "experts" who reassure teachers that they need make only minor adjustments to their instruction to become standards-based teachers. "This is a process of transformation," she said. "Increments won't work."
Accustomed as they are to designing their own professional development, urban districts sometimes founder when school-based decision making takes control of professional development and the budgets for it. Some districts have used this decentralization as an excuse to avoid revising their professional development programs. They wring their hands over the possibility of fractured professional development options, a grab bag of whatever appeals to individual teachers. However, in the past, district-designed professional development has often been unfocused and subject to fads as well.
In most of the Clark sites, the districts are revamping their professional development, keeping it focused on standards and making it school-based in some instances. Staff development days that "belong" to the district are usually standards-oriented. Several districts raise interest in classroom-based changes through one-day conferences at which the "faculty" are local teachers and administrators. (This approach stimulates the development of networks within the districts.)
If outside consultants are carefully chosen, they, too, can become part of the district's overall plan for standards-based reforms. Content-based institutes in Long Beach and the long association of San Diego teachers with experts in portfolio assessment are good examples. In one instance, the consultant for a district irritated a group of teachers with harsh criticism of their work, but a team of teachers in one school began using the ideas they learned from the consultant to examine student work. The irritating grain of sand turned into a pearl. The team broke new ground, stimulating discussions by teachers throughout the district on how to go about launching standards-based instruction.
In fact, those districts that are honing teachers' ability to look at student work and decide how well it meets performance standards are engaging in professional development that will make a difference. In California, the "program quality review" that each school must undergo every three years is an opportunity for self-assessment and for evaluating student work over a year's time. When combined with a district's emphasis on standards-based reform, such self-assessment can be a powerful tool for change.
However, if consultants help teachers only with process (teaching strategies) rather than integrating process and content, or if the consultants' expertise is not related to content, then the district's message to teachers about standards becomes mixed and muted.
The research literature is quite clear about high-quality professional development. It focuses on student performance, makes expertise and resources available, is consistent over time, encourages teachers to experiment and reflect, and is designed to address the needs of teachers within their own schools. Where district policies support such professional development, standards-based reforms have an excellent chance of "going to scale."
Often, reform-minded teachers find support for themselves outside of their own schools. Districts can extend professional development through networks, electronic and otherwise, that help teachers learn from one another and conduct collaborative research. For example, Louisville developed subject-matter alliances for middle school teachers who had been stimulated to take part by an opportunity for them to share ideas at a summer institute.
The teacher survey for this Clark study reveals that many teachers do not yet feel pulled into the reforms and that they object to unclear signals from the district. These are the teachers who are usually absent from professional development activities. Counteracting their negativity, however, is the tendency among newer teachers and those who have kept up with professional activities to buy into the reforms and to want strong professional development. Districts need to keep supporting the more receptive teachers with high-quality professional development experiences, and principals need to encourage those willing to support reforms to take on leadership roles. Principals in Long Beach and San Diego are helping to build a learning community, one teacher at a time, through insisting that evaluations and professional development plans be tied to standards-based teaching.
A third district influence on teachers that can foster change is a consistent message about the importance of standards-based reforms. Professional development is a major part of this effort, but a district also needs to choose textbooks that support standards, to create alliances with higher education institutions and their teacher preparation programs, and to welcome integration with community support efforts that will help young adolescents academically.
The district cannot, in good conscience, insist that students meet higher standards unless it also recognizes that some schools and teachers need more support than others. If districts want all students to meet standards, then they need to make opportunities more equal, and the greatest equalizer is a sufficient pool of experienced, competent teachers at every school. For example, Long Beach admitted that overstressed, low-income middle schools suffer from a lack of experienced teachers, so the district has assigned four highly qualified teacher/coaches to work four days a week at one large and needy school.
Finally, districts need to provide teachers with clear, standards-based assessment policies. Assessment has always been at the heart of teachers' work as they decide what students should learn and whether they have learned it. Standards-based reforms seek to end the haphazard way this process occurs so that all students have a chance to be taught well and assessed fairly. All of the Clark districts have been pushed along on this issue by statewide testing programs -- the SAT-9 in California, the Minnesota Basic Standards Test, Tennessee's TerraNova standardized test, the Kentucky Instructional Results Information System (KIRIS) and its reincarnation in 1999, and the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS).
Yet surveys of and conversations with teachers reveal a great deal of frustration over the emphasis on preparing for these state tests. In their view, it is a Catch-22 situation. They deplore the time taken away from regular teaching, but state accountability policies force them to drill students for the annual testing period. This is a crucial issue in the middle grades because test results for individual students often become the major factor in such high-stakes decisions as retention, summer school, or placement in an alternative high school.
Does this represent standards-based reform? It is a stretch to consider the time taken by state tests as a helpful supplement to standards-based teaching. The testing programs are necessary for public accounting, but the work of teachers cannot stop there. The results of a sampling of students in the Clark districts who were given NAEP-based reading and mathematics test items revealed that students did rather well on basic-level items. But they fell far short when it came to higher-level skills.
State policies often create the problems. Consider that California adopted its statewide test, the SAT-9, before it had set standards in the subjects to be tested. Or that the TAAS is referenced only to the criteria developed in Texas, a rather insular way of deciding if students are meeting high standards. Even though test-makers claim their products reflect higher standards, districts still have to match their own standards with cluster objectives from the tests in order to show teachers that standards-based teaching can address the skills and knowledge covered in the state tests.
Other districts, however, recognize that performance assessments in the classroom must be linked to standards in some way. A state test is only a snapshot of a student's knowledge. A district's aim under standards-based reform should be to set high goals and make sure that all students meet them.
Therefore, the districts that are helping teachers develop performance assessments -- a task that requires teachers to know how to evaluate their students' work -- are pushing teachers beyond the influence of state testing programs and toward the district's concepts of standards. For example, Louisville began by trying to use a cadre of teachers (two from each middle school) as experts on developing classroom-based performance assessments. This was the only way to truly meet the standards set for Kentucky's students, district officials decided. From this start, the district moved to districtwide professional development, focused on performance levels and assessments. The assessment plans in Long Beach and San Diego make similar use of teacher-developed performance assessments and common scoring practices as tools for changing expectations and practice.
As long as state accountability policies seem to conflict with teachers' judgments, the tension between testing and classroom practice will continue to vex those who want to see standards-based reforms take hold. Informed and competent district leadership is needed to help teachers see beyond a single test and toward high standards of performance for every student. A corollary challenge is to convince parents and the general public to accept that local reporting on standards-based achievement is as important as state test results.
In the Schools
The literature on school reform often refers to the need to change a school's "culture." When visiting the Clark schools and talking with teachers and principals, it became obvious to me that there are really two cultures within most schools when there should be only one.
There is the professional culture, the one that reflects a teacher's preparation, experience, exposure to information about teaching, expectations for students, and the nature of accountability. This is the overt culture that is visible to students and parents.
The other culture is personal. It is the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that teachers exhibit in their relationships with one another and with students. It shows up in teachers' attitudes about the capabilities of their students, in their sense of responsibility for all students within their school community, in their willingness to be honest and cooperative with other teachers, and in the way they mesh their personal beliefs with teacher union priorities. For some teachers working under some contracts, anything extra required of them is a union matter; for others, time is a professional commodity. This personal culture reveals itself in ways that people outside the school may never see: how teachers deal with such details of everyday existence as the death of a colleague or a colleague's spouse, or how the number of years until retirement can affect a teacher's willingness to change practice, or whether a teacher acquiesces to traditional authority within a school and plays a passive role.
Thomas Sergiovanni, a researcher who writes frequently about building community within schools, points out that there is a tendency to view schools as formal organizations only. Life in an organization and life in a community are very different, he notes, and he prefers to view schools as communities.
The Clark schools that have succeeded in building a community around professionalism -- those schools that bring the two cultures together -- are the most capable of making the changes necessary for standards-based reforms. People's personal beliefs and behavior must match their professional commitment. At Noe Middle School in Louisville, for example, teachers took the development of the school's improvement plans seriously and used the process to set both school and personal goals. They now work together to monitor and plan progress for every student in a school with a mixture of magnet and neighborhood students, as well as the largest language-minority enrollment in any Kentucky middle school. Like the central office in Long Beach, this is a "healthy" context for teachers and students.
Marshall Middle School
When Janet Underwood, an eighth-grade science teacher at Marshall Middle School in Long Beach, moved from fifth grade into the middle grades, she was given 19 booklets on science subjects and was told to "teach whatever I wanted to." This was a year before Long Beach began to develop standards across the district, and luckily for Underwood, she now knows exactly what her students are expected to learn and can participate in a variety of professional development opportunities to help her teach the standards. Always eager to learn more, Underwood now makes sure that whatever she signs up for addresses content standards.
Long Beach built its standards emphasis from scratch. All curriculum experts had been eliminated from the district during a previous administration, and schools had drifted in idiosyncratic directions. Carl Cohn, the current superintendent, appointed people to lead in core subjects with the understanding that they would establish content and performance standards in their areas. Then he hired an assessment expert with a background in research. The content-area coordinators put together committees of teachers, university faculty members, business leaders, and parents to develop the standards. All teachers had opportunities to offer feedback on the standards and on the scoring of performance assessments.
Focused professional development followed. The range of support for Underwood's teaching is impressive. She had mentor teachers when she began in the middle grades. She attended all-day, one- or two-week sessions with content experts, usually from higher education. There are workshops on standards and performance assessments. The district's well-crafted assessment system includes an open-ended science performance task (e.g., students watch a video of a candle fluttering in the wind, then must explain the processes they observe). In school and in sessions with other science teachers, Underwood learned how to develop performance assessments and create rubrics for student work. Like all the middle school teachers in the district, she attended a multiple-session workshop on literacy in the middle grades.
Before the standards-based reforms in Long Beach, expectations for students were much lower, according to Underwood. Grading policies were subjective, and teachers often gave students grades they didn't deserve because they felt that the students had made an effort. "Now, expectations for all students are the same, and even some of the highly gifted students are struggling to meet the standards," she says. She also believes that the content and performance standards are more "real world" and help students make connections between school and their lives. But they are not "watered down," and they maintain the academic language.
Eighth-grade team member Trish Coitner is equally enthusiastic about content standards for history. The district's standards, based largely on the California frameworks, "help us get an amazing amount of information unjumbled. The fluff is gone from my teaching. I haven't eliminated my favorite units, but I keep them focused on the task." Coitner's teaching was also deepened by intensive work with other teachers at a National Faculty institute on migration and trade diasporas, taught to the district's standards by faculty members from four area university campuses. (The Atlanta-based National Faculty brings together university scholars and K-12 teachers to explore content in history, science, and other disciplines.) Another group of social studies teachers, who had taken part in an institute on Southeast Asia, collaborated to obtain funds from the Asian Society to write curricula for all teachers on the topic. This project was particularly helpful for Long Beach, which enrolls the highest percentage of Southeast Asian students in the country.
Penny O'Toole, the principal at Marshall, is a traditional educator who uses the district's standards as a way to integrate several priorities at the school. Because of her background as a reading specialist, when she became principal in 1997, O'Toole realized that her students would not perform well under the new district standards unless their reading improved. When the school chose a focus for its "program quality review," it selected the reading program, especially a district content standard in language arts that requires students to use a variety of reading strategies. Throughout the review year, teachers analyzed student work in relation to this standard.
The standards-based literacy goal affected reading and writing across the curriculum at Marshall. The school used a reading demonstration grant to obtain professional development in reciprocal teaching, it added extra reading classes, and it created smaller reading classes for students whose proficiency in English was limited. Teachers up for evaluation must now include one reading objective, no matter what their subject.
The district's professional development for O'Toole and other principals makes use of strategies that move the administrators from "supervising teaching to supervising learning." For example, the middle-grades principals spend a half day every month learning how to identify classrooms with a rich literacy environment. This is a challenge at Marshall, where about 40% of the students have limited English skills and a majority are from low-income families. Yet Marshall's teachers and O'Toole have raised the school's achievement and come together on its goals. Once beset by high teacher turnover and an inability to attract experienced teachers because of its reputation as a low-performing school, Marshall now has a waiting list of teacher applicants.
These changes happened in stages. A former principal started by asking teachers to collect examples of student work to discuss in department meetings. But it was obvious that teachers needed a better grounding in the content standards. Key teachers attended the content-based institutes.
When the school's focus turned to literacy, the teachers were already grounded in the content standards and could integrate literacy standards into their instruction. O'Toole was then able to help them connect their quality review focus to the preparation needed for the state's administration of the SAT-9. Instead of seeing the state test as an added burden, Marshall's teachers were able to relate their instruction on standards to the content on the SAT-9.
The state test is just one piece of the assessment system in Long Beach. The district is working toward its own performance-based assessments, aided by common scoring guides in use across the district. A math portfolio, begun in the 1998-99 school year, is the first stage of encouraging classroom-based performance assessments. Other core subjects will be added. Eventually, according to Lynn Winters, assistant superintendent for assessment and research, the district hopes it will not have to administer a separate testing program. An administrator could pull portfolio work, graded under common scoring, and be able to determine whether the teaching and learning are meeting standards.
At first, most teachers at Marshall adopted standards-based instruction warily or not at all, according to Howard Fineman, the vice principal of the school. A former history teacher at Marshall, Fineman said that many teachers expected the emphasis on standards to be gone in a few years. It was considered just another example of the pendulum swing in school fads, he recalls. But by discussing student work together and matching it to the standards, "teachers realized that they could be teaching more and doing it better," he says. They also saw a change in the attitudes of students because there are no more secrets. "Students know where you want them to go, and they respect you for that and respect what they are learning," he said. Department meetings are now largely taken up by discussions of student work, and teachers are beginning another stage of development: evaluating one another's work honestly.
As Fineman walked through classrooms with me, the students were able to tell him what standards they were working on, what they were learning, and why. That alone convinces him that "the students and teachers here are a giant leap beyond where they were just a few years ago."
Becoming a Learning Community
Even when cohesion and focus exist within a middle school, deep-seated habits related to the middle school organization -- and the dominance of expediency over concern for content -- can create barriers. Tom Carnes' situation at Pershing Middle School in San Diego is a case in point. Drawn to transfer to the school because he could become chair of the history department, he found it a hollow assignment. Of the 12 teachers at the school with history classes, only one other than Carnes is a full-time history teacher. Other history assignments are filled by sixth-grade core teachers (doubling up with language arts) or other teachers with only one or two history classes. Carnes himself has five preparations a day.
It is easy to say that standards-based reform requires the school culture to become that of a learning community. Within schools with large numbers of poor and/or minority students, the difficulty of doing this becomes apparent when one realizes that the professional culture of the school must be strong enough to affect the personal culture, changing teachers' attitudes as well as their work.
To make a school into a learning community, teachers need a school environment in which:
In the Classroom
The adversities experienced by middle-grades teachers in schools with large numbers of minority and/or poor students should not be minimized. Yet standards-based reform offers some hope for ameliorating almost every problem. Principals and teachers report that standards mean students entering the middle grades are better prepared than in the past (in all the Clark districts, the reforms affect all grades). The standards reforms can give students who move from school to school a sense of a common curriculum and common assessment practices. In the past, high levels of student turnover interrupted teachers' control of what happened in their classrooms and undoubtedly made it so difficult to create an environment for learning that many teachers settled for the bare minimum. It may be several years before curriculum and grading policies reflect the districtwide standards in the three Clark districts most involved in standards-based reform, but the framework is in place. No matter how much they move around, students should experience the same curriculum and expectations.
Despite the many ways students benefit from standards-based reforms, the teacher surveys reveal uneven commitment to student success. Why is it that some teachers see how the reforms can help students achieve and enthusiastically try to learn as much as they can, while others don't see it? Why is it that, when professional development opportunities are offered to all teachers, the "usual suspects" are the ones who always show up? Most of the time, the ones who really need to be there are not. Why is it that many teachers with large numbers of failing students are reluctant to analyze their teaching strategies but quick to blame students? Why do some teachers believe that their standards are high enough -- even though their students do poorly on external measures of performance?
Every profession has its stars. However, most professions also require of practitioners a minimum standard of skill and success with clients. Every profession is also undergoing profound change because of the growth of knowledge, the use of technology, or other compelling forces. Similarly, the basic professional obligations of teachers should be to find out what they don't know, to want to improve their practice, and to work with colleagues to achieve greater success for their students. To be blunt, the middle-grades teachers in the Clark districts have no excuse for not being professional. Consider their advantages:
Perhaps the phrase "if they wish" holds more power than any other aspect of school reform at any level. So much rhetoric about the critical importance of teachers' work to standards-based instruction takes the initiative away from teachers. Researchers and reformers prefer to focus on the external barriers that teachers face when the most significant barrier might be the commitment of teachers themselves. Like their students, almost all teachers have the potential to be successful in their classrooms. Standards-based reforms give teachers specific goals, provide them some stability, and bring them extra support. Teachers will always shape instruction as they see fit -- no one is asking for dull conformity. But the message of standards-based reform is that teachers must give all students the best possible opportunities to learn and grow. Of course, that means that teachers, like their students, must thrive as learners. And, again like their students, they will figure out that effort brings success.
The Vision
National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades
Reform © 2000
HIGH-performing schools with middle grades are academically excellent. They challenge all students to use their minds well, providing them with the instruction, assessment, support, and time they need to meet rigorous academic standards. They recognize that early adolescence is characterized by dramatic cognitive growth, which enables students to think in more abstract and complex ways. The curriculum and extracurricular programs in such schools are challenging and engaging, tapping young adolescents' boundless energy, interests, and curiosity. Students learn to understand important concepts, develop essential skills, and apply what they learn to real-world problems. Adults in these schools maintain a rich academic environment by working with colleagues in their schools and communities to deepen their own knowledge and improve their practice.
High-performing schools with middle grades are developmentally responsive. Such schools create small learning communities of adults and students in which stable, close, and mutually respectful relationships support all students' intellectual, ethical, and social growth. They provide comprehensive services to foster healthy physical and emotional development. Students have opportunity for both independent inquiry and learning in cooperation with others. They have time to be reflective and numerous opportunities to make decisions about their learning. Developmentally responsive schools involve families as partners in the education of their children. They welcome families, keep them well informed, help them develop their expectations and skills to support learning, and ensure their participation in decision making. These schools are deeply rooted in their communities. Students have opportunities for active citizenship. They use the community as a classroom, and community members provide resources, connections, and active support.
High-performing schools with middle grades are socially equitable. They seek to keep students' futures open. They have high expectations for all students and are committed to helping each child produce work of high quality. These schools make sure that all students are in academically rigorous classes staffed by experienced and expertly prepared teachers. These teachers acknowledge and honor their students' histories and cultures. They work to educate every child well and to overcome systematic variation in resources and outcomes related to race, class, gender, and ability. They engage their communities in supporting all students' learning and growth.
Schools to Watch
National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades
Reform © 2000
THE SCHOOLS to Watch initiative of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform began its work by developing criteria to judge how well schools meet the vision statement (see "The Vision"). Then members conducted site visits to select several representative schools. By the summer of 1999, the subcommittee of the Forum working on this initiative had chosen two schools: rural Barren County Middle School in Glasgow, Kentucky, and small-city Jefferson Middle School in Champaign, Illinois. In December 1999, the Forum announced its selection of two urban "schools to watch": Thurgood Marshall Middle School in Chicago and the Freeport Intermediate School in Freeport, Texas.5
The Forum found it necessary to extend the search for exemplary middle schools located in large urban areas. At one point, as the group was about to nominate a particular school, members realized that the criteria had neglected one key factor: rate of student suspensions (now added to the original list). "We found an excellent school that met our criteria, but unfortunately it had a high in-school suspension rate, and students were getting no support in the suspension program," explains Joan Lipsitz, an independent consultant working with the Forum and its Schools to Watch initiative, who founded the Center on Early Adolescence at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and later headed a middle school reform initiative for the Lilly Endowment. "We struggled to come up with the criteria, analyzing every available resource but trying to keep the list to what could be observed in a site visit," Lipsitz says. As information about the criteria spreads, the Forum is receiving requests to describe the district context for middle school reform, and researchers are gathering data about the role of districts in their case studies of the Schools to Watch.
Schools to Watch Criteria
Academic excellence. All students are expected to meet academic standards. Teachers supply students with examples of high-quality work that meets a performance standard. Students revise their own work in accordance with feedback until they have met or exceeded the performance standard.
Curriculum, instruction, and assessment are aligned with high standards. They provide a coherent vision for what students should know and be able to do. The curriculum is rigorous and nonrepetitive; it moves forward substantially as students progress through the middle grades. The curriculum emphasizes deep understanding of important concepts, the development of essential skills, and the ability to apply what one has learned to real-world problems. By making connections across the disciplines, the curriculum helps reinforce important concepts.
Instructional strategies include a variety of challenging and engaging activities that are clearly related to the concepts and skills being taught. Teachers use a variety of methods to assess student performance (e.g., exhibitions, projects, and performance tasks) and maintain a collection of student work. Students learn how to assess their own and others' work against the performance standards.
The school provides students time to meet these rigorous academic standards. Flexible scheduling enables students to engage in extended projects, hands-on experiences, and inquiry-based learning. Most class time is devoted to learning and applying knowledge or skills rather than to classroom management and discipline. Students have the supports they need to meet the standards. They have multiple opportunities to succeed and extra help as needed.
The adults in the school have opportunities to plan, select, and engage in professional development that is aligned with nationally recognized standards. They have regular opportunities to work with their colleagues to deepen their knowledge and to improve their practice. They collaborate in making decisions about rigorous curriculum and effective instructional methods. They discuss student work as a means of enhancing their own practice.
Developmental responsiveness. The school creates a personalized environment that supports each student's intellectual, ethical, social, and physical development. The school groups adults and students in small learning communities that are characterized by stable, close, and mutually respectful relationships. The school provides access to comprehensive services to foster healthy physical, social, emotional, and intellectual development. Teachers use a wide variety of instructional strategies to foster curiosity, exploration, creativity, and the development of social skills. The curriculum is both socially significant and relevant to the personal interests of young adolescents. Teachers make connections across disciplines to help reinforce important concepts and address real-world problems.
The school provides multiple opportunities for students to explore a rich variety of topics and interests in order to develop their identities, discover and demonstrate their own competence, and plan for the future. Students have opportunities to exercise their voice -- posing questions, reflecting on experiences, developing rubrics, and participating in decisions.
The school develops alliances with families to enhance and support the well-being of their children. The school involves families as partners, keeping them informed, involving them in their children's learning, and ensuring their participation in decision making. The school provides students with opportunities to develop citizenship skills, uses the community as a classroom, and engages the community in providing resources and support. The school provides age-appropriate cocurricular activities.
Social equity. Faculty and administrators expect high-quality work from all students and are committed to helping each student produce it. Evidence of this commitment includes tutoring, mentoring, special adaptations, and other supports for students. All students have equal access to valued knowledge in all school classes and activities. Students may use various approaches to achieve and to demonstrate their competence and mastery of standards. The school continually adapts its curriculum, instruction, assessment, and scheduling to meet its students' diverse and changing needs.
Students have ongoing opportunities to learn about and appreciate their own and others' cultures. The school values knowledge from the diverse cultures represented in the school and in our nation. Each child's voice is heard, acknowledged, and respected. The school welcomes and encourages the active participation of all its families. The school's reward system demonstrates that it values diversity, civility, service, and democratic citizenship. The faculty is culturally and linguistically diverse. Suspension rates are low and in proportion to the student population.
Organizational structures and processes. A shared vision of what a high-performing school is and does drives every facet of school change. Shared and sustained leadership propels the school forward and preserves its institutional memory and purpose. Someone in the school has the responsibility and authority to hold the school-improvement enterprise together, providing (or helping others to provide) day-to-day know-how, coordination, strategic planning, and communication. The school is a community of practice in which learning, experimentation, and reflection are the norm. Expectations of continuous improvement permeate the school. The school directs sufficient resources to ensuring that teachers have time and opportunities to reflect on their classroom practice and to learn from one another. At school, learning is everyone's job.
The school devotes resources to content-rich professional development, which is connected to reaching and sustaining the school vision. Professional development is intensive, of high quality, and ongoing. The school draws upon others' experience, research, and wisdom; it enters into relationships such as networks and community partnerships that benefit students' and teachers' development and learning.
The school holds itself accountable for its students' success rather than blaming others for shortcomings. The school collects, analyzes, and uses data as a basis for making decisions. The school grapples with school-generated evaluation data to identify areas for more extensive and intensive improvement. It delineates benchmarks and insists upon evidence and results. The school intentionally and explicitly reconsiders its vision and practices when data call them into question. Key people possess and cultivate the collective will to persevere and overcome barriers, believing it is their business to produce increased achievement and enhanced development for all students.
The school works with colleges and universities to recruit, prepare, and mentor novice and experienced teachers. It insists on having teachers who promote young adolescents' intellectual, social, emotional, physical, and ethical growth. It recruits a faculty that is culturally and linguistically diverse. The school includes families and community members in the process of charting the school's path toward high performance. The school informs families and community members about its goals for students and about students' responsibility for meeting them. It engages all stakeholders in ongoing and reflective conversation, consensus building, and decision making about governance to promote school improvement.
By John Norton
IN 1989, the aptly named Turning Points report issued by the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development sparked a national discussion about "one of the most fascinating and complex transitions in the lifespan." The influential report's holistic approach included an examination of the role of middle-grades education in the healthy intellectual and personal growth of young adolescents. The Council's concluding report, Great Transitions: Preparing Adolescents for a New Century, was published in 1998 in conjunction with an announcement from the Carnegie Corporation that it would turn its attention to other pressing issues, including the reform of teacher education.
This fall, Teachers College Press will publish Turning Points 2000: Educating Adolescents for the 21st Century, co-authored by Anthony Jackson, a former Carnegie program officer who oversaw much of the work of the Council on Adolescent Development, and Gayle Davis, a faculty member at the University of Maryland and former project director of the Middle Grade School-State Policy Initiative.
Jackson, now an executive with the Disney Foundation, talked about the rationale behind Turning Points 2000 and reflected on the likely future of foundation support for middle school improvement now that the Carnegie Corporation has decided to shift its attention to other priorities and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation recently announced that it will phase out its Program for Student Achievement, which has focused entirely on middle-grades reform.
Norton: What will Turning Points 2000 tell us about the issues of adolescence that we would not learn from rereading the original Turning Points report?
Jackson: Several years ago, Gayle and I thought it would be very wise to prepare a sequel -- a more fleshed-out version of the original Turning Points report, based on the experiences of the last 10 years, including both the experiences of the Carnegie initiative and the results of other foundation-sponsored initiatives and other middle-grades reform work. We are also basing the book on a very comprehensive review of research that has been conducted since the publication of the original book -- research that relates to each of the components of the Turning Points model. The book will be a much more detailed analysis of the Turning Points model of middle school reform, based on the practical experiences of those who have been trying to implement that model and other middle-grades reforms over the last decade.
The book is being directed solely toward school implementation issues. There will be some overlap with earlier reports on state policy, but this one is going to be drawn much more from the experience of middle school practitioners and of those observing their work. Turning Points was a very good outline of the kind of changes that needed to happen, and it was highly catalytic in raising consciousness about the needs of young adolescents and the need for reform in middle-grades schools. But as a blueprint for reform, it lacked the kind of detail that folks needed as they really got into the practical work of changing schools. We hope we have put together a more detailed and sophisticated analysis of what it takes to make middle-grades reform happen in a way that produces high achievement for all young adolescents.
Norton: How would you describe the audience for Turning Points 2000?
Jackson: Our main concern is that it be written for and accessible to practitioners in schools who actually want to change their schools in a systematic way. So I guess the first audience is middle-grades educators, with a ripple effect that goes out from there to include people at the district level and people who are interested in setting effective guidelines. We hope it will also be of interest to scholars and other researchers. We intend it too for policy makers who are looking for a vision of reform -- who want to anchor policy in a clear understanding of what a good middle school really looks like and what it takes to make it happen.
My own view of a lot of policy work is that what is often missing is a clear sense of exactly the kind of school we need and what it takes to create one. We are focusing on the mechanics of school reform at the grassroots level, but we think the book should have information for study and for policy as well as for practical implementation.
Norton: As you look back at the impact of the first Turning Points report and the ways in which the principles and recommendations played out in the context of the school reform movement, what do you see?
Jackson: Historically, there has been an overemphasis on the structural and organizational kinds of changes and a lack of emphasis on changes in teaching practice and the actual work of creating and implementing more powerful forms of assessment, instruction, and curriculum. That's one of the key things we've learned: structural changes are important and necessary, but they are not sufficient. The hardest work in middle-grades reform is figuring out what exactly -- with regard to instruction and professional development -- is going to produce the kind of high achievement we want to see in students. And then figuring out how the necessary changes in those areas can be coupled with and supported by organizational changes.
You can't take half measures in changing a school. You have to address all the key elements of middle-grades reform -- from curriculum to organization to relationships with parents and with the community. Perhaps you can't address them all at once, but if you're going to have lasting, stable reform, eventually you have to address them all. Each school is a system, and if you attack only certain elements of that system, the rest of the system will pull those elements back toward the status quo. Things will regress toward the mean. Over time, the school will naturally try to preserve itself in its traditional form. So the need for comprehensive, ongoing reform is critical.
Norton: Why do you think so many middle schools have paid more attention to the Turning Points message about support for the healthy development of adolescents and less attention to the message about the need to challenge adolescents intellectually?
Jackson: From the standpoint of educators in the middle grades, the first issues they confront each fall have to do with the emotional and social needs of adolescents -- and with trying to help them through this turbulent period. But I think what we have learned as a middle-grades community is that, although those issues are important and you need to focus on them, if they are the main thrust of your attention, you will be way short of what needs to happen to enable students to make a complete transition into older adolescence.
The transition through adolescence is not purely an emotional one; it's as much, even more, an intellectual journey. And that is a key transition that we have not focused on enough in the past. Adolescence is a period of enormous intellectual opportunity, and youngsters really need to have the kind of stimulating education that will allow them to develop their minds, which in turn will have a tremendous effect on their capacity to negotiate the emotional and interpersonal aspects of their development. So the emphasis on the developmental needs of adolescents is not misplaced, but it has perhaps been overemphasized. Now, we need to bring our efforts back into balance with a corresponding focus on intellectual development. I think that's the lesson we're learning now, and that's what we're trying to point out.
My sense is that there is an undercurrent in the middle-grades community that recognizes this need for balance and the critical importance of intellectual as well as social and emotional growth. Intellectual growth is one of the touchstones of the second wave of middle-grades reform.
I'm actually pretty optimistic that we can pull together these different strands of what we've learned from experience and research and offer a much more targeted and balanced approach to high-quality middle-grades education.
Norton: Where is philanthropy headed with regard to middle school reform?
Jackson: That's an interesting question. I think that one of the things the philanthropies that have been involved in middle-grades work have learned is that such work takes a very comprehensive, systematic, and long-term effort. We've all learned that you can do pieces of that systematic effort and achieve some success, but the real success comes from staying with a comprehensive approach. I think there's a new realization among foundations that whole-school reform is a long-term proposition that requires pretty intensive work in most schools. So those that are not willing to make that kind of investment may not find it worth doing.
Foundations have their own form of attention spans. So it isn't an unreasonable thing to see a board of directors, after 10 years of devoting resources to a particular area, begin to want to put resources elsewhere. If some foundations that have traditionally given support decide they have to go in another direction, I hope at least that those entering the field -- both foundations and education reform groups -- will learn from prior experience and will know from the outset how to focus their grantmaking. I think a key word here is "intensive." All of us can learn that it is perhaps better to define whom we will work with more narrowly -- to work with fewer districts and schools so that they can accomplish something in a reasonable amount of time and get results for students.
More to the point, the goal of all philanthropies should be to create some examples or models that can be taken up by the systems themselves as you're working with them. Obviously, you can't support reform efforts around the country indefinitely -- there will never be enough philanthropic funds for that. Foundation funds have to be catalytic dollars. I guess I hope that the philanthropies that invest in this work will all learn from our experiences and have a more targeted and intensive agenda. That's the only way to get results.
Norton: During the 1990s, many foundations "ran their own experiments" when it came to supporting school reform -- developing their own principles and then funding grantees who were willing to provide "clinical trials." Do you see that continuing?
Jackson: There is another route that philanthropies can take. That would be to invest in organizations that are themselves able to mount the kind of intensive effort that is needed. For example, the Center for Collaborative Education in Boston is developing a Turning Points model for the New American Schools. One way a philanthropy might want to go is to invest in such an organization, which has the staff, the know-how, the products, and the capability to make comprehensive reform happen in a broad number of cities and schools. The same thing might be said for the Talent Development Schools model that Douglas Maclver is working with at Johns Hopkins University. And I think there will be other models developed from some of the funds the federal government is allocating for comprehensive school reform. So it may be that philanthropies want to get away from direct investments in districts and move toward investing in organizations that are geared toward supporting comprehensive reform.
In a sense, it's kind of a logical progression. You might consider the work that Carnegie, Clark, Lilly, Kellogg, and other foundations have done as "spadework" that has generated a lot of examples, a lot of experience. We're now in a kind of second stage of middle-grades reform, where we are beginning to home in on those things that really make a difference -- learning from our experience -- and beginning to recognize the kinds of organizations that are in the best position to carry this work forward.
We hope that Turning Points 2000 will be of some value to philanthropies as they consider what the grantees they support need to do to make improved achievement a reality for middle-grades students over the long term. In a sense, we hope that it will provide a kind of reality check about what is really required to get the kind of outcomes for kids that will justify the dollars invested.
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