Middle Schools the Next Front in Reform Battle

With California’s youngest students showing progress, state officials and education experts say the state’s middle schools, which have stagnated, need to be the next focus of school reform.

The need for change is evident in this year’s Stanford 9 scores. Results for primary school students showed significant gains, whereas scores in the middle grades only inched up.

The so-so performance at many middle schools is sad testament to the fact that thousands of adolescents across California can barely read or write.

Middle schools have missed out on many of the key reforms designed to reverse the decline in California’s public schools.

That may be about to change. The state Department of Education plans in September to issue its first round of suggestions in more than a decade for lifting middle school achievement. The report will call for stepped-up teacher training, smaller classes, wiser use of classroom computers, longer school days and a longer school year.

In recent years, the state has put significant new money into the lower grades to restore an emphasis on phonics and math fundamentals and, particularly, to reduce class sizes in kindergarten through third grade. But in middle schools, classes of 35 to 42 students are common in many districts.

A campaign to improve the educational experience in these grades, sandwiched between elementary and high school, is long overdue, many educators say.

“We have, in the state of California, neglected middle school kids,” said Irvin Howard, a professor of education at Cal State San Bernardino and president of the California League of Middle Schools.

Any effort to reform middle schools, however, faces serious obstacles.

Qualified teachers and classroom space already are in perilously short supply. As a result, it would be tough to reduce middle school class sizes statewide. Moreover, educators disagree wildly on how best to reach adolescent students.

Raising the stakes, these under-prepared middle schoolers will be among the first to face a key component of the state’s fledgling accountability movement: the new exam that students entering high school this year will eventually need to pass to secure diplomas. The exit exam will be taken first by the Class of 2004, this fall’s incoming freshmen.

“These kids went through some years when the state was in the worst financial shape,” said state Sen. Dede Alpert (D-Coronado), head of the legislative body’s education committee. “And now we’re saying, ‘Guess what: You guys are going to be the first ones to take the high school exit exam.’ No doubt they’re going to need extra support.”

Although officials at all levels agree that there is a problem, it remains to be seen whether California can muster the political will to open a new front in its four-year battle to improve schools.

The state is flush with cash, but its legislative mandate to reduce class sizes in primary grades and in some high school subjects--and the resulting depletion of teachers and space--could stifle any drive to bring similar programs to middle schools.

“We are a little wiser as time has gone by in recognizing the unintended consequences of class size reduction,” said Scott Plotkin, chief consultant to the state Senate Education Committee. “That’s one lesson we’ve learned and don’t want to repeat.”

A spokesman for Gov. Gray Davis’ administration declined to comment, noting that the governor’s top education aides had not yet seen the middle school proposal prepared by the Education Department, which reports to Delaine Eastin, state superintendent of public instruction.

Poor Reading Skills the Top Obstacle

Signs of the challenges facing middle school reformers abound at Bret Harte Preparatory Middle School in South-Central Los Angeles. The school draws from a low-income Latino and African American community. Before they set foot on campus, many students have never read an entire book, according to Principal Catherine Sumpter.

Still, she was devastated by her students’ test results. Despite an intensive campaign to beef up literacy skills and enlist parents to support the effort at home, reading scores remained flat. Only 15% of the students scored at or above the 50th percentile, the national average.

Sumpter was not the only disheartened middle school administrator. Up and down the state, principals and teachers have expressed dismay about the shaky performance of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students on the Stanford 9, a basic skills exam that measures student and school performance against a national sample.

For many principals, boosting achievement on the Stanford 9 now looms as the chief preoccupation--a reality that could imperil efforts to seek a higher academic plane for middle schools.

At Washington Middle School in La Habra, reading scores slipped from 1999 levels; only 38% to 43% of students scored at or above the national average. Math scores were a mixed bag, with seventh-graders’ results tumbling, sixth-graders’ flat and eighth-graders’ rising by four percentage points. The brightest spot was the 54% of pupils in eighth grade scoring at or above the national average in math.

Gary Mantey, the principal, is well aware that test scores are the only measure being used by the state to rank schools and to sort out who will be rewarded or punished. Though torn, he said, he has urged teachers “to put our emphasis where the grade is going to be”--on the test rather than on the state’s more rigorous standards.

Statewide, the test scores of middle school students have risen modestly since 1998 in reading, language skills (grammar, punctuation and other mechanics of writing), spelling and mathematics. But testing experts say such incremental gains often can be explained by familiarity with the test and test preparation exercises.

Sonia Hernandez, deputy superintendent for curriculum and instruction at the state Department of Education, expressed concern about “flatlined” reading scores and so-so math performance in the 2000 scores for the middle grades.

Middle school students get only passable marks in the basic arithmetic featured on the Stanford 9, she noted, a situation that bodes poorly for results on the more challenging high school exit exam, with its heavy dose of algebra. (Also troubling: Math scores this year fell off sharply in seventh grade from sixth.)

“It’s not enough for what’s coming,” she said. “This is where the big gains need to be made.”

The state now calls for students to complete algebra by the end of middle school. Under old practices, one-quarter or more of all students did not take algebra at all.

The algebra change caught many middle schools short-handed. Davis approved extra funds last year for training middle school instructors to teach algebra, but the state has a long way to go.

Like other states, California has a dearth of teachers who adequately understand the subjects they end up teaching, especially math.

But, unlike many other states, California does not require a middle-grade certificate for teachers wanting to work in these grades. Teachers licensed for elementary schools--with no background in early adolescent development or middle-grade instructional strategy--can find themselves ill equipped to deal with classrooms of young people starting to wear cynicism as a badge of honor.

“Elementary teachers don’t have enough content knowledge,” said Ruth Mitchell, principal partner at the Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington that promotes high academic standards in schools. “You need to know much more about how to interest kids in learning and to keep their minds very, very busy.”

Long Beach Unified School District will spend $900,000 in foundation money over the next two years, primarily on extra literacy training for science, history and other teachers. The goal is to train instructors to spot students having trouble reading and understanding subject material.

Twenty-four Long Beach campuses with middle-school grades are in the throes of reform, and “we’ve seen some success, particularly with math at sixth and eighth grades,” said Chris Eftychiou, a district spokesman. Middle grades last year had their highest attendance rate since 1980--and the best rate among the district’s three levels.

The Long Beach emphasis on teachers’ mastery of subject material conflicts with a deeply rooted assumption of many middle school teachers and principals that these children are so distracted by hormones that they can’t cope with academics. The best a middle school can do, this thinking goes, is to keep the students safe and busy with after-school activities.

That couldn’t be farther from the truth, maintained Hayes Mizell, director of student achievement at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, a New York group that is funding standards-based middle school reform efforts in Long Beach, San Diego and Corpus Christi, Texas.

“Kids at this age want to be challenged and engaged,” Mizell said.

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Richard O’Reilly, Times director of computer analysis, and data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this story.