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A Middle School Treads the Fault Line of Change

Type: Example from Schools Author(s): Kathleen Cushman Source: Performance. No. 14, January 1995.

Lincoln Middle School
1501 California Avenue
Santa Monica, California 90403
(310) 393-9227

Ilene Straus, Principal
1,050 students grades 6-8
51 teachers, 25 other staff
37% minority students
27 languages spoken in homes
13% limited-English-proficiency
Neighborhood greater L.A. school
Member of California's 1274 Restructuring Schools Network

This diverse urban middle school reorganized to give kids more personal attention, then focused curriculum more deeply on a few essential questions.

A massive earthquake shook the foundations of Lincoln Middle School in the early hours of January 17, 1994, ripping beams from ceilings and wreaking havoc in its halls and classrooms. In the weeks and months of emergency double sessions that followed, the students and teachers of this greater Los Angeles neighborhood school had to pick their way across planked walkways and through the mud and rain, to classes held in temporary bungalows.

But they were no strangers to the perils, pains, and promises of reconstruction in the pursuit of an education. For the past several years, this school has experienced an even greater shift - not on the Richter scale, but in the familiar ground of teaching and learning. Shaken by the challenges of the middle school reform movement and the Coalition of Essential Schools, Lincoln's staff has reexamined virtually every assumption it once held fast. And as teachers reshaped their school's practices, Lincoln has not only survived but grown stronger from the stresses and opportunities of restructuring.

Building Capacity

A 1980s statewide push to make middle schools more responsive to the developmental needs of young adolescents sparked Lincoln's early focus on creating a more personal learning environment. Then in 1990, observes principal Ilene Straus, "Essential School ideas - particularly the notion that 'Less Is More' - moved us to deepen what went on in the classroom across the board." As they explored new instructional approaches (from writing across the curriculum to cooperative learning strategies), teachers shared them with colleagues in a whole-school push to build the staff's capabilities.

The school has now restructured into grade-level, color-coded "core" teams of 100 to 175 students, led by three or four teachers who know them well and tailor instruction to their needs. Long schedule blocks encourage the integration of subjects like English and history, science and history, or mathematics and science. And the more personal approach has fostered a climate in which kids and teachers both take students' work habits more seriously.

"Ten years ago, typically only the high-achieving students would come prepared to class," says Jim Pitcher, who has taught at Lincoln since 1961. "The others? If they didn't disrupt the class, they would just get a 0 on their homework and nothing much else happened."

Now, 95 percent of students do their homework "every single day in every single period," Straus says, or they attend a Guided Study period that very afternoon to complete it. "There's a sense of business about what happens in class," she observes. "Yet at the same time it's much more active. The teachers are no longer standing in front of neat rows and talking . Kids initiate more work."

Jim Pitcher concurs. "The number of students who will take an active part in their own learning has grown much larger,"The weaker students still have difficulty, but because we're teaching differently they are getting much more of an education than they once did."

Grade-Level Questions

In Roe Johnston's sixth-grade science class, 35 kids are taking turns presenting simple machines they have constructed to show how ancient civilizations solved problems arising from their geographical locations. Along with humanities teacher Kris Haenschke and the rest of the sixth-grade team, he has focused the work around the question," Whose water is it, anyway?" In their parched and vulnerable desert landscape, these students have found ways to relate irrigation systems in Mesopotamia, for example, to the problems of greater Los Angeles. They follow the same strand in other classes: calculating the mathematics of low-flow shower heads, studying the body's need for water, exploring how geography shapes culture.

Such "essential questions" also link student work across each grade level. "What makes a life worthwhile?" is blazoned on the wall in Jeanne Davenport's seventh-grade English class, where students read biographies and Shakespeare sonnets, interview authors and immigrants, and continually connect in writing their own experiences to the world of literature and culture. Student writing covers the walls. The year will concludes with an "exit interview" where community members join in a review of what kids have found out.

Eighth graders center their work around the question, "What is a good citizen?" Each researches a community problem, then writes a proposal to alleviate it and works to help carry out the plan. Other Lincoln customs also support a strong sense of responsibility: Students are trained as peer mediators to resolve conflicts. A core team of teachers follows and advises every student. Kids keep the same counselor for three years.

"They put a lot of emphasis here on helping you succeed," Miguel Velasquez allows from his perch on the asphalt playground where kids of all colors toss balls and banter. Miguel is a "pretty average" seventh-grade student, he says. "But I am working harder; I am doing more. They give you a lot of challenges, but they help you meet them." Two eighth-grade girls who call themselves "high achievers" agree. "It helps to have someone care," says Erica Glaub.

Honors Across the Board

The statistics seem to concur. When Lincoln students go on to Santa Monica's only high school, in recent years their writing places them disproportionately into honors classes, teachers observe. And though California's standardized testing scene has been in chaos lately, student scores have improved no matter how you look at them. "Nine years ago Lincoln students scored in the 60th to 70th percentile on most standardized test measures," says Ilene Straus. "Now it's in the 80s and 90s. Teachers are doing all their planning together, and we are norming consistent standards of assessment. We emphasize writing across the entire curriculum. And it helps that we're aligning with California's new frameworks and assessment."

Santa Monica is known for its commitment to the arts; fully a third of these students enroll in a choral and instrumental program that has won widespread praise. The arts also serve as a powerful magnet drawing diverse groups together; a music assembly that packs the auditorium looks like a promotional event for a multicultural program.

With a 13 percent student turnover rate, Lincoln no longer rests on the stability of suburbia. Instead, despite adverse circumstances that would have thrown many institutions into disarray, this school has developed a new kind of unity, founded on a more inclusive style of teaching and learning. Some administrators now teach in the classroom. A collaborative system of decision-making is in its early stages. Parents come regularly to workshops, in Spanish and English, on issues of early adolescence. Community mentors work with at-risk students. The actual earthquake, it seems, is now mere metaphor. Daily, Lincoln walks the fault line of change.

Measuring Improvement: An Eight-Year Study

California Achievement Program (CAP) test results. Between 1985 and 1992, scaled scores for Lincoln students increased between 20 and 40 points in all four subject areas tested (reading, mathematics, social studies, and science.

Golden State Algebra Exam (GSE). From 1990 to 1993, the percentage of Lincoln students who scored in the Honors and High Honors range on this exam rose consistently, from 39 percent in 1990 to 54 percent in 1991, 83 percent in 1992, and 81 percent in 1993.

California Learning Assessment System (CLAS). This performance-based test of reading, writing, and mathematics skills was first administered throughout the state in 1993 as a baseline measure and given in 1994 to all students, though scores were not in at this writing. Of Lincoln's 1993 eighth graders:

• 68 percent received the highest rubric scores of 6, 5, 4 on normed writing tests, compared to 42 percent statewide.
• 53 percent received rubric scores of 6, 5, or 4 on normed reading tests, compared to 39 percent statewide
• 23 percent received rubric scores of 6, 5, or 4 on normed mathematics tests, compared to 11 percent statewide.

This resource last updated: June 05, 2002

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