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Leadership > The Change Process
Three Views of Lincoln
Table of Contents:
Introduction
We made our sixth and final visit
to Lincoln High School as part of
the School Change Study during the
week of March 21-25, 1994. Lincoln
is a middle-sized high school, located
in the south central region of the
country, with about twelve hundred
students. About 75 percent of the
students are white, 25 percent are
black, and 40 percent come from
low-income families.
Having visited the school twice a year for the past three years, we were familiar with the many ambitious and far-reaching changes that Lincoln had undertaken since it joined the Coalition of Essential Schools in 1988 and committed itself to whole-school change according to the nine Common Principles (see Appendix B for a listing of the Principles). Some of these changes included implementing site-based decision making, portfolios, and other authentic assessments; mainstreaming the special education students; and restructuring the schedule so that the majority of students in the school spent much of their day in interdisciplinary teams of about one hundred students and four or five teachers.
Like the other schools in its state, Lincoln was greatly affected by the State School Improvement Act
(SSIA), enacted in 1990, which fundamentally changed the state's entire educational system.1 Lincoln staff were pushed to change instruction in order to prepare students for the SSIA tests, with their open-ended questions and scoring "threshold" a school must meet in order to avoid being considered "in crisis." Lincoln's teachers were also affected by SSIA's mandating of portfolios in English and math.
Lincoln committed itself to even more intensive, rapid, whole-school reform than it had previously, when it was among the first schools selected to participate in the Coalition's Fifty Schools Project in 1993.2 [Return to Table of Contents]
Focusing the Snapshot
As we do each time we visit a school as part of the School Change Study, we produced a "snapshot" of the school based on our observations in classrooms and our conversations with people in the school community. For this final visit to Lincoln, we decided to take the snapshot using three different lenses. Each lens takes in only what we have seen or heard but focuses on one of the following central aspects of the school experience: authentic work, decency, or commitment. After looking at Lincoln through these lenses, we present questions that suggest ways of reflecting on the snapshot as a whole. As we leave Lincoln, we wonder which of these three aspects could become the hallmark of Lincoln High School in the year 2004.
[Return to Table of Contents]
The First Lens: What Is Authentic Work?
Most students claim their parents
have straightforward expectations
of schooling; as one student said,
"They want me to do well, get good
grades, and learn as much as I can." Often parents' goals are expressed
as the absence of mischief--stay
out of trouble, don't cut class,
no phone calls at home from unhappy
teachers--rather than the presence
of particular habits of mind or
intellectual dispositions. At one
team meeting, for instance, a parent
turned to one teacher and said,
"My son's passing your class. Why
are you here?"
A few parents, especially the PTA activists, however, share SSIA's vision of active learning, performance-based assessment, cumulative portfolios, and the like. They are pained when their child has to endure a class where the overhead projector is the center of attention. They love projects of the kind which required building a container to protect an egg dropped from thirty feet. Even the mom whose pillow was ripped apart to make a better cushion appreciated the project. She knew that her son frequently resists unfamiliar tasks and would only admit his pleasure after the unusual undertaking was over.
The attempt to involve parents has met with mixed results. A half-dozen energetic mothers have tried to get other parents involved. They made available chances to volunteer as an aide with a team or individual teacher. Two parents did volunteer, and one was so terrified of her task of entering grades on the computer that she hesitated to come back. An open house in the West End, where many of Lincoln's black students live, attracted only one mother. Another form of participation requiring less exertion is signing a weekly progress report. Bill Gordon offered his physics students extra credit if they returned signed reports. He told them they at least had to take the progress report home, although he could not enforce their compliance. At first, half of the reports came back signed, but within a month the rate fell to 10 percent.
[Return to Table of Contents]
The Search for Authentic Work in the Public Safety Magnet
In the absence of consistent parental push, the burden on the school's magnet public safety program increases, but consistency there is not yet high. Instructional styles vary from one specialty to the next. Resources and community partnerships range widely, with law enforcement, the most popular of the three areas, bolstered by paid internships with the city's police department. As part of the internship, students ride with officers for eight hours a week and wear uniforms, which, one boy said, "catches a lot of attention and respect" from other students. The three twelve-week rotations by freshmen to introduce them to the magnet differ in quality, and there are also considerable differences in how extensively the public safety teachers reach out to the rest of the faculty to create interdisciplinary units. Yet even fewer academic teachers have gone the other way and initiated contact with the public safety teachers in order to link curricula.
For one science teacher who did try to make a connection, the big surprise was how often students left his real-world examples in the classroom. He described their response when he had them check the thermal resistance of a plate:
I can say, "OK, you're going
to add to your basement, and
you need to know the resistance
of the material you'll use." They can hear that, but what
they think is, "Man, I don't
want to bother now," or "That's
ten years away; I'm in tenth
grade and it's time to play." They do the lab and earn the
points, but I'm not sure they
take it out of here. When they
leave, they're thinking about
playing ball or hanging out
with their friends. It's like
school stays in the classroom.
Many public safety teachers see student
motivation and interest as the irreducible
precondition of the magnet's success.
They want students with academic
ability, good attendance, and a
work ethic. They take the position,
"Don't dump on us. We can't take
a psychotic and make him a police
officer." Occasionally, counselors
are criticized for routing apathetic
students to public safety courses.
Teachers don't mind adolescents' emotional neediness ("I usually
get calls every night: 'My boyfriend
left,' 'I'm worried about college,' 'I'm partying too much'") as much
as they begrudge indifference. For
instance, Andy Anastasi said, "I
set out this year, like last year,
thinking these young people wanted
to be firefighters, but I have quite
a few who are just here for the
ride." He encouraged the motivated
students to take course work at
the city's community college, where
two of his juniors earned A's in
fire suppression. He coaxed two
other kids to a regional fire-science
fair, and he took ten more to see
the excellent fire department of
a large city nearby. Andy is grateful
that his city's fire department's
cadet program for early adolescents
sparked enough interest last year
to bring four gung-ho freshmen to
Lincoln, but Andy yearns for more
aggressive recruitment. Recognizing
it will take much more to get out
the word, he has made shirts with
Fire Science stenciled on
the back. He needs new equipment--burn
pits, extinguishers, ladders--but
above all he wants more motivated
kids.
[Return to Table of Contents]
Students' Reactions to the Expectations of the SSIA Tests
As public safety teachers seek authentic work, the SSIA tests demand it. The importance of the spring 1994 tests was no secret. Teachers knew it was crucial to improve Lincoln's scores so the state would not categorize them as "in crisis." They reviewed sample open-ended response questions and coached kids to write detailed answers whenever possible. The school gave bonus points applicable to final exams for "distinguished" and "proficient" work (the two top achievement levels) and Lincoln paid seven thousand of its own dollars so that all students, not just the seniors, could take the tests. The staff hoped that practice and familiarity would build motivation and competence.
Although most kids took the week-long testing seriously, the novelty of the open-ended questions surprised many students. The unfamiliar topics in the questions puzzled some kids accustomed to test items closely matching what they had covered in class. Questions about the orbits of two planets and the number of blocks in a pyramid startled one bright junior girl, who said, "That's stuff I'd never seen. How am I supposed to do good when I've never had it?" A senior in public safety felt disadvantaged on an item about New York City in the nineteenth century, because he had taken social studies as a junior. One girl froze when she saw a math problem about a robot. "Oh my gosh, what's that?" she thought. Students tended to see what reformers celebrate as "real-life" problems as remote, strange, and unfair puzzles to solve. The tests they are now required to take sometimes seem as contrived as the old, traditional exams reformers deplore as artificial.
Moreover, the format of the test items worried some students, especially those who felt the writing demanded they fill the page, even if they finished after a few sentences. One boy who had no idea why apples are red knew his teacher did not want to see blank space, so he said, "I made up some stuff." A junior who earns good grades found that her biology teacher's practice essay question made her nervous because it was a long and multistep problem, one she had not had in previous classes (her own conversation is usually one-sentence answers to questions). A full week of testing in two-hour blocks each day exhausted some kids; they said their performance faltered later in the week.
[Return to Table of Contents] Students' Notions of Learning
The students' reluctance to cheer SSIA's open-ended questions reflects many students' underlying notions of learning. Over and over again they claim that the keys to success at Lincoln are doing the work, staying out of trouble, and not falling behind. Their goal is to reduce, not heighten, complexity and uncertainty. Theirs is a blue-collar view of work--a predictable day's pay for a day's time--more than an entrepreneur's notion of work--exceptional rewards for unusual achievement. Some students who do have a work ethic prefer traditional notions of learning. A sophomore who complained about learning more punctuation in typing class than in English typifies the kids who compartmentalize subjects and want English teachers to stick to vocabulary words and grammar. The "I need a book" view of a real course is another common attitude, as is the misinterpretation of the Coalition's "less is more" Principle as "you learn but don't do a lot of work."
For some students, the work ethic is constrained by primitive notions of important techniques or simple procedures. Mr. Thornton described his students' reactions to the writing process:
"What's a rough draft, Mr. Thornton?" They thought it was an outline
done in pencil, scribbled;
the final would be done real
pretty, in ink. So I had to
explain rough drafts. It blew
their minds when I said the
rough draft starts with the
outline, converting it to sentences
and paragraphs, putting an
introduction and a conclusion
with it, and then it's still
rough. It hasn't even been
checked for mechanics.
Mr. Warner invites his chemistry students
to try the unknown, but it is a
struggle: "When I come up with a
creative lab--real science, a true
investigation--they don't want to
fight through their ignorance to
do it. They won't say, "OK, I don't
know how to use a burette, but I'll
learn so I can do this experiment." Hence his frustration when he and
his teammates discussed which students
to invite to attend the Coalition's
Fall Forum:
Ms. Hiebert: If you've already talked to Dora,
maybe you should pick her.
Mr. Warner:
I'm not sure she feels I made
a commitment. Also, she's talked
with me about transferring
to Butler, so...
Mr. Houser (alarmed):
Why?
Mr. Warner (imitating Dora's voice):
"Because it's a rigorous program--it's
challenging."...Didn't you
know Lincoln's not challenging?
Ms. Vickers:
She should talk to Bethany.
She left Butler. She hated
it, said she was bored.
Mr. Houser:
We can't afford to lose kids
like her.
Ms. Vickers:
No, we can't.
Ms. Hiebert:
Well, she just broke up with
her boyfriend here. She thinks
the boys are cuter there.
Mr. Warner:
They deceive themselves into
believing the grass is greener
there.
[Return to Table of Contents] The Second Lens: The Struggle for Decency
The attitudes and behavior of both
teachers and students have an impact
on the tone of decency and trust
in the school. Currently, the Lincoln
school community is clearly struggling
to maintain a positive atmosphere
for learning.
[Return to Table of Contents]
How Teachers Treat One Another
There is tremendous variation from team to team in the way people treat one another. Some treat their special education teachers as clerks, others make them full partners. One team plays with time in order to lighten their own teaching load by 20 percent, whereas other teams feel exhausted by their efforts to create worthwhile projects. One team celebrates the achievements of its blind student; another team is sure that if a student reads on a third-grade level, it is impossible to raise that level significantly. Students wonder about possible disadvantages of the teams they are on. One girl expressed her resentment of her teachers' absences for travel: "They ought to worry about us too, you know--our education. How are we supposed to learn anything if they're always gone?" A classmate wondered if there was too much willingness to try new ideas: "Someone could walk in here and say, 'Hey, let's do a six-hour block,' and she'd go for it."
Some teachers dismiss site-based decision making, another type of teamwork, as a sham which rubber-stamps what administrators and a few wily teachers want. They believe that the choices have already been made and that democratic trappings mask an authoritarian regime. Others are more indifferent than angry. They have chosen to spend their late afternoons on planning and class preparation; for them a two-hour meeting seems wholly unrelated to the demands of everyday life with students.
The ways teachers act in meetings surprise their colleagues. One women misrepresented the range of opinion at her table when it was time to share and summarize the discussion of a master schedule with two-hour blocks. The next day, several teachers from that table visited the principal to set the story straight. One man at the same meeting hemmed and hawed because he wanted to please both the principal and the die-hard traditionalists. Another man in his department resented the administrators' participation in the discussion. "You aren't teachers. You don't have to do this," he stammered, wringing his hands and pointing at their table. Many teachers were taken aback when the oldest team in the school announced they were delighted with their own creative schedule and claimed it was too late in the year to monkey with the master schedule. "You send them out for all that training, then you ask us to do something new which they don't want to try, even though they were on the committee that developed the idea."
[Return to Table of Contents]
Problems with Students' Attitudes and Behavior
Students, also, suffer from skepticism and indifference. One area in which they express these attitudes is the SSIA testing. The chair of one department heard several students call the exam "stupid," which in her opinion translated to "I'm too lazy to bother." A week after the assessment, one of her students asked her, "Why are we still doing open-ended questions? The test is over." The reaction to the SSIA tests mirrors the weak academic work ethic pervading the school; as one student said, "Just give me my credits and let me out the door."
Ms. Vickers scolded students who came to class without their folder three months after that expectation had been laid out. One boy told her, "You ought to be glad we bring anything here--we don't take anything anywhere else." She began to bring the folders herself to sell to the students. "I practically run a bookstore some days," she commented, but she's not sure whether to give without charge a folder to students who wear gold chains, yet say they cannot afford to pay. Teachers continue to seek new ways to reach unmotivated and disaffected kids, and the school welcomes grants, pilot projects, local university faculty, and the Coalition to provide opportunities for teachers to enhance their skills. The school prides itself on its visibility and reputation for innovativeness; scores of visitors come each year. But as one administrator admitted, the immediate problems Lincoln's students bring with them, especially the extra burdens that the minority and poor kids bring, can defeat or limit the best efforts of well-intentioned reform. It is possible for good teachers to try all the pedagogical and curricular notions held up as best practice, and still fall short in the face of the overwhelming woes engulfing a student.
So it is not obvious whether a boy like Freddie counts as a success or a failure. He had a dismal average in physics, Mr. Gordon recalled, but came alive during a project of building a car.
Freddie got into it, and did
a pretty good job. He learned
something about aerodynamics.
The day we finished, we decided
to race them the next day.
Freddie was all excited about
it. I never saw him again.
He never showed for the race.
Later I heard he was in all
sorts of trouble. His dad is
an alcoholic, and he's debating
running away from home, a counselor
told me.
Freddie's troubles were not out of
the ordinary. "Everybody has to
act bad," an English teacher observed.
One of her former students agreed,
defining bad as "wearing
my hat backwards and shaving my
head." He called the game "King
on the Streets," with each player
trying to go one better than the
next guy. "If I got more gold than
the other fellow does, if I've got
more rings on, the girls might look
up to me and think I'm the big guy.
But another dude says, 'No, that's
how I am,' and that causes
fights."
Various kinds of bad account for the stacks of referrals on each assistant principal's desk. Many are for cuts and tardies, others reflect more serious offenses. The assistant principals want teachers to come see them before they write up anyone for a major infraction. One assistant principal remarked, "I get slips now saying 'disruptive,' and I have no idea just what they mean. The kid tells me it was no big problem, then later the teacher, flabbergasted, tells me [he] did this, this, and that." She had seen how some teachers wrote up kids all the time, when others sent in two or three all year. "We didn't want it to be so easy to whip out a referral. Come see us first. Ninety-eight percent of the faculty are fine now, but that 2 percent keeps us inundated." A few teachers were outraged by the restricted access, many didn't seem to mind, and Wendy Campbell, a member of the ninth-grade Zephyr team, jokingly offered to swipe and hide packs of referrals if teachers would themselves handle discipline, as she believed her team did. Some infractions go beyond the teams' capacity. Last spring, the shots in the air in the parking lot were fired by outsiders, but Lincoln's students bring weapons to school. The number who carry a gun, either occasionally or regularly, is unknown, but nearly all the students have a story to tell of someone they know who does it. Ozela Watson recalled a "little-bitty freshman" who yelled at her, "Get away! I'm packin!" as he flipped through a roll of fifties and hundreds to find a dollar for the soda machine. Jill Davis said, "[I was] giving one of my best friends a hug the other day. He said, 'Don't move your hands down too far.''' Jill knew what was there. With him and her other friends she has backed off. "I used to joke with everybody and tell them they're crazy. I can't do that now. How do I know if the guy's going to pull out a .44 and blast me?"
Vanessa wasn't blasted, but someone left a death threat in her locker. Immediately, she called her mother, who came to the school. When they could not meet with a counselor or administrator, they went to the police station, and an officer returned with them to the school. They spoke with Ms. Greenfield, a counselor. Because Vanessa was already earning credits by working two periods a day at the teen parenting program, the principal arranged for her to spend the entire day there. Soon she felt "frustrated and out of place because [she] wasn't pregnant." She transferred to a self-paced district program known by the shorthand "Wash County," where she moves through worksheets and workbooks in essential living, English, and biology. Teachers are available for help if she needs it. "I like it. It's not a zoo. It's so quiet I could hear a pin drop." She works thirty hours a week at her fast-food job, longer hours than before, because Wash County only has her from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. At first, Vanessa's mother worried that she no longer attended a "regular" high school, but now she is pleased with the switch, which she also made for Vanessa's brother. Vanessa appreciates Wash County as a safe and fast path to her diploma. Although she remembers science facts she can use on her biology worksheets now, there is nothing else that carried over from Lincoln, which she recalls as "baby-sitting."
Aside from the carrying of guns, the kind of disrespect that students notice the most is foul language, especially voiced by students toward teachers. When asked to put away a guitar, a freshmen told his English teacher to "kiss [his] ass." A junior football player started a remark by insisting he's not racist, then claimed that many blacks say "f-you this and suck that--anything you can imagine--but I slip and say something smart, not even a cuss word, and it's, 'You! Down to the office!'" David, a senior fascinated by electronics, came from a Catholic middle school. He reported, "When you talked back to a teacher there, man, you were in the office. Usually got paddled. They called your mom, then she'd beat the crap out of you. But here kids are always cussin' their teachers."
[Return to Table of Contents]
The Third Lens: Commitment
Students and parents share a positive
attitude toward various aspects
of the school experience: the Public
Safety Magnet program, involvement
in school activities, preparations
for the SSIA test, and special performances
that allow students to "be somebody."
[Return to Table of Contents] Enthusiasm for the Public Safety Magnet Program
Both students and parents have positive feelings about the Public Safety Magnet program. One student said, "Most of us want to be back here. We know if we mess up, we're out." Who would mess up when the public safety course work "feels like a real job"? Besides, the building is cleaner than the main campus, the bells are not as jarring, and there is less smoke in the bathrooms. And parents appreciate what their kids learn. One reported, "My son came home and asked, 'Where's our fire extinguisher?' He checked it out. He told us not to ever use it on trash fires."
Connections between academic and public safety work look promising. Ms. Hiebert, for instance, invited Mr. Holden to her geometry class to show how triangles could be used to analyze a crime scene. Mr. Thornton set up a photo composition station where facial features are selected and arranged to make pictures of suspects. He also sent the English teachers a meticulous note reviewing his students' writing about graphics software, which he hopes will find its way into their portfolios.
Students of different abilities and backgrounds benefit from it all. In fact, two of the eight interns with the police department came to Lincoln classified as "behaviorally disordered," slotted for a self-contained classroom. [Return to Table of Contents]
Parents' Interest in Getting Involved
Parents' interest goes beyond attending an open house or joining the PTA board. Information is made available to parents so that they can help their child take advantage of the choices in arena scheduling, and they are given counsel on how to seek the teacher or team known to be the right match for the child. Parents who have spent time in the school or in PTA have a remarkably good sense of who teaches well and who does not, and they coach their teenagers accordingly.
Other types of help also abound. Parents appreciate Mr. Gordon's offer to attend his physics classes--"take the quizzes, do everything with your kid." Cindy's mother heard about a poetry contest, and she collected Cindy's previous year's poems and encouraged Cindy to enter. One mom, who sits with her son every night before "lights out" and asks him exactly what he did in each period that day, said, "I'm real lucky. A lot of boys wouldn't do that." Her husband volunteers as a teacher's aide in the school, working with Ms. Hiebert in math.
For some parents who grew up nearby and went to Lincoln High, their commitment derives from the contrast between then and now. Betty Foss was delighted when her daughter, Louise, announced in the car that she could calculate in her head the height of the trees along the roadside. Betty compared that achievement to the dead-end vocational math class her husband endured twenty-five years ago at Lincoln: "It really didn't have anything to do with his vocation. There was no one who encouraged him to take algebra. All that changed when Miss Taylor got here in l986." [Return to Table of Contents]
Support for the SSIA Exams
The SSIA exams were regarded respectfully. Several mothers reported that their daughters went to bed earlier than usual, to be sure they were alert each day. The school asked employers to limit the hours students could work that week. Teachers encouraged students by posing, weeks in advance of the test, practice questions parallel to what would be on the test. During the test there was constant encouragement--"Come on, I know you can do more." Afterwards, teachers praised students who had tried hard and done well. Mr. Warner read one girl's work on a math/science problem, and he congratulated her in the hallway. She wasn't his student, so she was surprised and delighted by the unexpected pat on the back.
[Return to Table of Contents] Opportunities to "Be Somebody"
The SSIA tests assess academic domains, but the performances students do throughout the year are not confined to academic courses. In band, for instance, students always demonstrate what they are learning. Mr. Young welcomed the two-hour blocks of time made available during the SSIA testing week. "Five whole rehearsals of nothing but two hours...I saw amazing improvements in their playing." Because students typically need a half hour to rise to the point where Mr. Young wants them, the two-hour block gave them an extra hour for peak performance. He knows that two hours might strain some teachers in other departments, but he had his hopes up for having them at least eighty minutes at a stretch in future master schedules. Even without eighty minutes, many teachers reported special moments when they make contact and suddenly a student is bursting with interest. For Mr. Krug, those breakthroughs included a geography student's doing a special cartography project; a boy's voluntary reading of two Desmond Morris books; and a special ed student's asking for a hundred-year-old flood plain map to help his family determine if their house was located in that area. For many kids, the chance to perform at Lincoln seems within closer reach than it would be at other schools. The sophomore daughter of a counselor transferred to Lincoln from a high-octane, upper-middle-class high school. "It's easier to be somebody here," she glowed. Her mom had considered her "lost in the crowd" as a freshman. At the other school, with twice as many freshmen, it was harder to join teams and clubs. She had to apply, write stories, and sell ads to be considered for a position as reporter on the newspaper staff; at Lincoln, she volunteered and was in. Last year, she had seen with dismay senior girls cut from the squad after three years of cheerleading--a fate she doubted awaited any of her fellow cheerleaders at Lincoln.
[Return to Table of Contents]
Questions for Reflection
- How are the first and second
scenarios different?
- Why are the topics of decision
making and teams absent from
scenario three?
- What aspects of the third scenario
please you the most?
- What needs to happen to improve
the odds of the third scenario's
coming to pass by 2004?
[Return to Table of Contents]
Notes
- See Robert Hampel, "Possibilities
and Priorities: Choices for
Change," Studies on School
Change (Lincoln No. 4), Coalition
of Essential Schools, Brown
University, Providence, September
1993, for a fuller discussion
of the impact of the SSIA on
Lincoln High School, as well
as on the other schools in
the state.
- The Fifty Schools Project,
started and run by the Coalition
of Essential Schools, began
in spring 1993. In this project,
up to fifty schools across
the country are selected to
work in a supportive relationship
with at least one other school
nearby in their "cluster." These clustered schools commit
themselves to push the reform
agenda especially quickly.
Their goal is to become exemplary
Essential schools by putting
all of the nine Common Principles
into daily practice.
[Return to Table of Contents]
The Lincoln research team was headed
by Robert L. Hampel, professor at
the University of Delaware and author
of The Last Little Citadel (1986).
The other members of the Lincoln
team were Laraine Hong, a former
elementary and college teacher,
now working for the Bellevue, Washington,
school district and author of a
forthcoming Teachers College Press
book recounting a stormy year in
her elementary school; and Neill
Wenger, a cognitive psychologist
who has taught in elementary school,
consulted for the Pew Foundation,
and is currently co-authoring a
multimedia textbook.
Price: $6
Code: LI6
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This resource last updated: June 10, 2002
Database Information:
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Publication Year: 1994
Publisher: CES National
School Level: All
Focus Area: Leadership
STRAND: Leadership: the change process
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