(Vol. 4, No. 1 - Spring 2000)
LBUSD Raises the Stakes
on Middle School Reform
The Long Beach Unified School District is building a tailored
assessment system that will drive standards-based reform through the use
of end-of-course tests, comprehensive professional development, and very
high expectations for principals, teachers and students.
By the Focused Reporting Project team
You can take this to the bank: Within the next two years, pilgrims from
school districts across the country will journey to Long Beach Unified,
eager to learn about the district's comprehensive assessment program.
It will become a national model -- the kind of much-talked-about but seldom-realized
accountability mechanism that actually helps teachers and kids, actually
drives reform throughout the school system, actually produces continuous
improvement -- not only in test scores, but in what kids are really learning.
If we seem impressed, we are. On page 11, we describe the
progress of the assessment program in some detail, touching on the nuts
and bolts of performance assessments, portfolios, end-of-course tests, a
new academic profile for students, the upcoming standards-based report card,
and the encouraging high correlation between the SAT-9 and the district's
homegrown, standards-based testing. (But they're not there yet. See
an analysis of LBUSD's 1999 middle school assessment data.)
The emerging assessment system is critically important to the future of
school reform in Long Beach. It's also rather complicated. If you'd like
something simpler, you might try Deputy Superintendent Chris Steinhauser's
test of a good school: Would I want my kid to go here?
Some years ago, when Steinhauser was principal of Signal Hill Elementary,
he began a crusade to turn the failing school around. One of his first tasks
was to convince neighborhood parents to make Signal Hill their school of
choice. "I kept telling them the school was good enough for my kids,
but my kids weren't there. And finally the parents said to me, we want to
see you put your kids in this school." He did, and his faith in his
staff and his plan was rewarded. The school's test scores quadrupled in
just a few years' time.
Last fall, Superintendent Carl Cohn made Steinhauser the district's deputy
superintendent and charged him with a single mission: raise student achievement.
Cohn, of course, had one sharp eye on the State of California's Academic
Performance Index and the state's "promise" that schools failing
to meet the Index's performance targets would be taken over by the state.
Steinhauser was given control of the district's worst-performing elementary,
middle and high schools -- 18 in all. His task was to make sure they never
received the state's academic "death penalty."
A few months later, Steinhauser went to the superintendent and school board
with a radical proposal. He asked permission to reconstitute inner-city
Washington Middle School. Let's change the principal, he said, revamp the
faculty and pour on as many district resources as possible.
"The angle that I took in talking to the board was that we have to
be proactive under the state API system," Steinhauser recalls. "I
said I would rather we do it ourselves and learn from our mistakes than
wait for the state to do it." And Steinhauser said something else.
"I told them we just had to be open and honest with ourselves. I said
to our top leadership, 'Right now I could not send my child to Washington.
And that's unacceptable.'"
Despite some misgivings about damaging its long-standing good relationship
with the district teacher's union, the school board agreed to support Steinhauser's
proposal. A brief but intense storm of protest followed. Washington teachers
and other supporters sharply criticized the district for failing to involve
them in the decision, and several hundred protesters showed up at a board
meeting to vent their anger. But the board stuck with Steinhauser, and the
rebirth of Washington Middle is now well underway.
"Somebody told me not to do this," Steinhauser said recently.
"They told me it was too hard. And it is the most difficult thing I've
ever tried to do. But it's the right thing for kids."
The "Cohn Context"
Chris Steinhauser's "test" of a good school calls to mind a similar
test advocated by Carl Cohn five years ago. He urged principals to visit
teacher classrooms with a basic question in mind: "Would I put my child
or grandchild into this classroom?" Some observers (and we were among
them), thought the superintendent's question was hopelessly naive. For starters,
it assumed that every principal knew a good teacher when he or she saw one,
and it was pretty clear that some of them didn't. Now, as we reflect back,
it strikes us that Cohn's "naive" question is a perfect illustration
of his successful leadership style.
Cohn is not a micro-manager, but a provocateur; not an idealogue but a pragmatist.
As he says in the interview on page 4, "I
help people see issues in larger contexts." And his favorite context
is: "Does it work for kids? And if it doesn't, why are we continuing
to do it?"
The "Cohn Context" runs throughout the stories in this final issue
of Changing Schools in Long Beach, as we offer a summary of the district's
progress on school reform -- with a particular focus on the middle grades
-- from roughly 1995 to the present.
As the stories and the chart
on pages 8-9 make clear, the district's goals for school improvement have
not been reached -- in part because, as the district's understanding of
successful schools deepens, the goals become more ambitious and more challenging
to achieve.
But Long Beach Unified has come a long, long way, and its teachers, principals
and staff have reason to be excited about what is "working for kids"
and what is going to work even better in a few years if the district can
stay the course.
One only has to look at the plans for Washington Middle School to appreciate
the strides the district has made in knowledge, skills and attitude. The
Washington experiment underscores the commitment of district leaders to
support educators who believe they have it in their power to help kids reach
high standards. And it also highlights another message, aimed at those who
are willing to accept the same tired excuses for student failure. "You
can run, but you cannot hide."
What's happening at Washington
Chris Steinhauser makes few apologies for the district's unilateral decision
to "reinvent" Washington Middle School. "The biggest criticism
I have taken for the changes at Washington is that I didn't ask the teachers
if this is what they wanted to do," he says. "But if I had gone
to the table and described what needed to happen, they would have said no."
Although Franklin had slightly lower state scores, Steinhauser says that
when he went to Washington for a visit, "I saw a greater need there.
I heard over and over, 'these kids are doing the best they can; this is
all they can do." And I said, 'No, this is not acceptable.' They have
some of the best kids I have ever met. They're polite, and they're eager
to learn. The teachers believed they were doing the best they could to help
them. But the standard needed to be elevated drastically."
Steinhauser says what the district has done "is set the parameters.
What they do within the parameters is totally up to the principal and faculty."
Among the "parameters" are a longer school day and a longer school
year. Teachers must meet on a regular basis once a week and they cannot
earn extra money by teaching during their conference period "because
if you do, you can't meet together."
In return, the district has already begun heaping resources on the school.
The building is being renovated; new technology is being added, and district
experts visit the school regularly to coach and mentor teachers. "We're
also going to bring music, art and accelerated programs back to the campus,"
he says. "Those kids are leaving that area and going to other schools.
I said this needs to be a school where parents want to be."
Washington's current teaching staff was invited to re-interview for teaching
jobs in the new school. Applicants went through a rigorous selection process
designed by new principal Toni Issa-Lahera (whose instructional leadership
skills are uniformly praised throughout the district). The actual selection
of staff was left to a committee that included both union and district representatives.
Candidates were required, among other things, to view a classroom videotape
and suggest strategies to meet the diverse needs of the students portrayed.
In the end, 19 of the 25 resident teachers who reapplied were asked to return.
This summer Washington's reconstituted staff will spend 10 days in intensive
professional development, Steinhauser says, "doing curriculum mapping,
setting expectations, and all those other things that make a difference."
The teachers will have an unprecedented 20 days for professional development
during the year, and three days for parent meetings. Issa-Lahera will get
extra administrative help so she can concentrate on instructional improvement.
"We're going to change the entire culture there," Steinhauser
says.
Because of the massive intervention required, the district has decided to
reconstitute only one middle school at a time. But other low-performing
schools are not being ignored. They are receiving extra help -- and extra
scrutiny -- and if they fail to improve, it's clear that reconstitution
is also in their future.
"I can't be in this job accepting my check if I don't help make each
of these schools a place I would send my child to," Steinhauser says.
"And I have total faith that that's going to happen."
[Read Chris Steinhauser's comments about LBUSD's
approach to low-performing schools.]
Progress Toward LBUSD's
Student Achievement Goals:
1999 Middle School Assessment Data
[SOURCE: Excerpted from an independent analysis by Policy Studies Associates,
Inc. of Washington, D.C. for the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.]
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LBUSD has set a high standard for its students' achievement. The district
holds all students, including LEP and special education students, to the
same high standard.
Based on the assessments conducted in 1999, student achievement data in
Long Beach indicate that most middle schools face significant challenges.
A large majority of the district's middle-school students fall short of
ambitious, locally set proficiency targets. The SAT-9 recorded below-average
scores in core content areas. Score averages on the district's writing assessments
were low in all but one school.
While district and school averages are low on the tests administered, there
are schools in which large proportions of students achieve the district
targets and where overall scores are relatively high. Scores at six schools
were consistently high, regardless of the test or the content area: Newcomb,
Bancroft, Hughes, Stanford, Cubberly, and Rogers. Four of these schools
(Bancroft, Hughes, Rogers, and Stanford) serve 45 percent concentrations
of high-poverty students; Cubberly, Hughes, and Stanford serve groups with
more than 30 percent LEP students.
SAT-9 -- In 1999, the average achievement of LBUSD students was in
the lower 40th percentile ranges in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade mathematics
and language. School-level scores across the district are slightly higher
in mathematics and language than in reading. Importantly, the scores of
groups as they move between grades six and seven, and seven and eight, increased
in all subjects and grades between 1998 and 1999.
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) -- Policy Studies
Associates, Inc. administered tests based on the NAEP to a sample of eighth-graders
from Long Beach middle schools in 1998 and 1999. Long Beach middle schools
are successfully helping approximately half of their students meet NAEP's
Basic level of proficiency in both reading in mathematics, despite the large
number of poor and limited English proficient students in the district.
The challenge for the district remains in helping even more students meet
Basic levels of proficiency and in helping larger numbers of students reach
the Proficient level and above.
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