What teaching the standards really means: thanks to the IIUSP process, educators at this middle school now understand and teach the standards, leading to large gains in the school's API.

It's teacher appreciation day, and the entire staff has gathered at 7:50 a.m. in the staff lounge to hear a few words from Principal Scott McArthur. Like most teacher staff rooms, this one has a couch, several tables and the teacher mailboxes. On the tables in the center of the room rests an assortment of food designed to cater to everyone's taste.

"I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for the work you have done this year," said McArthur. "We have made good progress this year, and the administrative team wants you to know we appreciate what yon do."

Indeed, many schools had similar celebrations on this day, but few schools are able to claim the success Greenfield Middle School has made on the California state tests. In 1999, when Greenfield Middle School became an Immediate Intervention for Underperforming Schools Program school, its base Academic Performance Index score was 533. Three straight years of positive growth resulted in a 2002 API score of 637, with a state rank of 4 and a similar schools rank of 10.

But the tale of the tape can be deceptive when only a single API number is looked at. School success is best determined when all student groups in a school are measured, and this is where Greenfield Middle School showed its noteworthy achievement. In 1999, the base score for the Hispanic students was 494. By 2001, not only had it risen to 637, but all focus groups exhibited similar gains.

Significant achievement for all students was not always the case at Greenfield Middle School. In 1999, Greenfield Middle School met its overall target API, but it did not meet its target for any subgroup populations. As a result, the school became an IIUSP school and began planning school reform efforts.

The turnaround

Located on the outskirts of Bakersfield, Greenfield Middle School is a suburban school of 942 students (61 percent Hispanic, 16 percent African-American and 17 percent Caucasian). The school has a mobility rate of 20 percent, with 83 percent of the students in the free/reduced lunch program, and a parent education level of 2.10.

As the school looked for direction, Carol Schaefer, the assistant principal of curriculum, led the charge. During the summer of 2001 she attended the "No Excuses, We can teach all students" conference, where she learned about Pat Davenport's eight-step process for successful student achievement.

"I came back to work so challenged, so motivated, so inspired and so passionate about the many ideas. Foremost in my mind was that we had to emphasize high expectations and high standards from all our students. We must set the bar high, and we must accept no excuses for mediocrity," Schaefer said.

She came back to her school to share her vision. She met with the staff; purchased "No Excuses" buttons for teachers, hung banners in classrooms, and had the slogan "Entering the No Excuses Zone" prominently placed on the school's marquee.

Focusing on standards

The tone may have been set, but for the school the work had only begun. The IIUSP process provides a planning year that requires a school to work with an external evaluator to develop a reform plan. Greenfield selected the Kern County Superintendent of Schools office as its external evaluator. The superintendent's office then chose the educational research company DataWorks.

DataWorks looks at all student work, including assignments, tests and homework, and calibrates it to the state standards. According to John Hollingsworth, one of the founders of DataWorks, the company has looked at more than a million pieces of data and has observed 10,000 classrooms.

"What we are finding is that students enter kindergarten doing grade-level work, but each subsequent year the level drops," Hollingsworth said. "By eighth grade, only 30 percent of the work students are asked to do is on grade level, and by high school that number drops to 20 percent."

The DataWorks recommendation for Greenfield Middle School was not unique. The school needed to do a better job of covering and teaching the standards.

The Greenfield Middle School staff underwent a staff development process they refer to as "unwrapping the standards." They were instructed on how to teach the standards, calibrate the standards to each grade level, set up pacing guides in math to calendar the teaching of math standards, and set up benchmarks to determine student learning.

As one teacher said, "First we had to know what the standards were.... As a teacher I had the standards on the shelves but I was not intimately aware of them." Assistant principal Schaefer had the standards copied, enlarged to poster size and laminated so each teacher could display them in the classroom and refer to them as they taught students.

The process was not welcomed by all teachers. To encourage participation, Schaefer and her colleagues began visiting classrooms more frequently. In addition, the teachers were required to turn in lesson plans every Monday. Some teachers at first resented this process as they noticed the increased scrutiny and accountability.

AS one teacher observed, "I think for a hit of years there was a negative tone among the staff, in part because year after year we thought we were working hard and then we would see these horrible test scores. Up to three years ago this was not a place to be ... Then, we got with the program."

Using direct instruction

Knowing the standards so you can properly cover them in the course of a school year is one task; however, teaching the standards so they are the focus of a class lesson is another. DataWorks created an Explicit Direct Instruction model based oil the Madeline Hunter approach. The staff at Greenfield Middle School was in-serviced in this model and is expected to utilize it in the context of their lesson planning.

Schaefer said, "Explicit Direct Instruction is an instructional model for mastery teaching. Regardless of who or what is being taught, all teaching decisions fall into three categories: what content to teach, what learning the student will demonstrate, and what the teacher will do to facilitate that learning.

"When we go into a classroom to observe teachers, we look for these lesson components: a clear objective/grade level standard; specific preview/review; evidence of teacher modeling; a way for teachers to check for student understanding; a guided or independent practice component; periodic review; practice (guided or independent); periodic review; and assessment of student learning."

Differentiation

To those who are set on whole language approaches, the advocacy of "direct instruction" is anathema. Many reform minded schools are working to foster a different approach--differentiation. For John Hollingsworth, the two approaches are not incompatible.

"Look, if the seventh grade language arts standard says all students have to write a summary, then the teacher needs to teach students how to do this, and that is where the 'explicit direct instruction' model can help. Teachers can still differentiate by varying the expectations or requirements for this assignment based on student abilities, hut teachers need to address and teach the standards with their kids. They cannot ignore standards just because they have kids below grade level, because if they do, kids will never be exposed to grade-level content."

A distinctive look

At Greenfield Middle School, the teaching of standards has a distinctive look. In Mrs. Welch; sixth grade class, for example, after reading a literature passage, the teacher looked at the standard of the day that was posted on her board and then asked the students, "What do you drink the author's purpose is for writing this story?"

In an eighth-grade science class, students were all conducting an investigation using owl pellets. On the board the standard was posted: "Focus on Physical Science: Investigate and Experiment." Mrs. Brandon, the teacher, was quick to point out exactly what the students that day were doing and how it was standards-related.

"The standard we are working on today is 'construct appropriate graphs from data and develop quantitative statements about the relationships between variables.' Today we are focusing on 'quantitative' statements in the standards. Kids are dissecting, analyzing and counting," she said.

What teaching the standards means

Teaching the standards means many different things in California schools. In Greenfield Middle School, it is about making sure teachers know the standard, that they are covering the standards at every grade level, referring to diem often, using the language of the standards, and providing lessons that specifically cover the content and skills embedded in the standards.

As one teacher said of the change, "In most looms standards are posted so they are visible. We did not really talk to kids about them very much before, but when we began to post the standards we could refer to them and talk about them. As we teach we try harder to touch on as many standards as we can, and the new textbooks make it easier to do this."

While Greenfield Middle School's targeted instruction on the standards may sound familiar to reforming schools, becoming standardized is a constant struggle. And for Carol Schaefer there is still work to do. "We still need to work on checking for understanding and differentiated instruction," she said.

Lessons learned

If you are a school administrator, ask yourself a few questions. Do your teachers really know what the standards mean and what they imply a teacher should cover? Do the students know what they are supposed to learn and the expectations for the class? Do your teachers teach directly to the standards or do they only touch on them as they teach the traditional curriculum they are most comfortable with? Do you have a way of monitoring whether your teachers are covering the standards--and, most importantly, do you know how to respond to teachers when they complain the standards require a student expectation that may be far above the level of their class?

For all the schools in California looking to improve their API, the lesson from Greenfield seems to be two-fold: pay attention to the language of the standards and what they ask students to know and do, and make sure at each grade level your students are taught the standards they are expected to learn.

Schaefer says Greenfield Middle School has made progress in tackling these issues, and at the moment, she has the API scores to prove it.

Research for this article was sponsored by the Central Valley Educational Research Consortium, a research affiliate of the Joint Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership and the CSU Freno, Kremen School of Education. Visit http://www.csufresno.edu/cverc/ to download previous research. Members of CVERC participating in this study include Sharon Brown-Welty, Walt Buster, Colleen Torgerson, Susan Schlievert, Victor Olivares, Norma Delgado, Sally Tannenbaum, Pauline Sahakian, Wendy Costa, Cheryl Hickey, James Bushman and Greg Goodman.

James Bushman is a learning director at Clovis High School in the Clovis Unified School District. Greg S. Goodman works as a school psychologist in the Clovis Unified School District. Goodman; most recent books include "Reducing Hate Crimes and Violence Among American Youth" (Lang, 2002) and "Critical Multicultural Conversations" (Hampton Press, 2003).