(Vol. 1, No. 1 - Fall 1996)


INTERVIEW:
LBUSD school board member Karin Polacheck

"As a district, we need to be a lot clearer about what we expect children to learn. That's what standards are for."


Fellow members say Karin Polacheck is the school board expert on Long Beach middle schools and middle grades reform. One part cheerleader, one part vocal critic, the former LBUSD board chair has kept up the pressure on school administrators, principals and teachers to live up to the school system's promises to raise the achievement of all middle schoolers.

"When I taught, if a student failed, I failed. We have really gotten away from that," she told a reporter several years ago, during the district's early efforts to improve middle schools. Some principals, Polacheck claimed, simply ignored the quality of teach-ing in their schools "and a 6.6 earthquake won't shake them."

Long Beach has now been in the middle school reform business for more than three years. We asked Polacheck, a former special education teacher first elected to the board in 1988, to give her frank assessment of how far the middle schools have come and how much further they have to go.

Changing Schools: In the past, you've been outspoken about the slow pace of middle school reform. Has the situation improved?

Polacheck: Yes, I think it has. Being a teacher and a parent, it was very disturbing to me that teachers weren't always willing to accept responsibility for kids' failure, and that they didn't have high expectations for every child. There was always an excuse or an explanation.

But I really have seen a change for the better in the last year, through the work of our administrators and some teacher leaders. The school system is beginning to focus its improvement efforts directly on the classroom. That's the only way to improve.

That's not to say that I think we're there yet. We still have to maintain very high expectations and take some tough, rigorous stances as a school board.

CS: Can you identify specific things that have changed?

Polacheck: I think the evidence would be in the curriculum department coming out with specific standards -- high standards that say here's what we expect students to learn. To be honest, I have some concern about how the teachers will take those standards into specifics, but there's no question we need standards. It's the right place to start if we're going to improve.

CS: What needs to happen now?

Polacheck: The most critical step is to get very specific about basic skills and concepts. We've been extremely fuzzy about what and how we expect students to learn, in part because when you're fuzzy, you don't have to be accountable. We have not done a good job on basic skills.

CS: Why not?

Polacheck: When we created our middle schools, we did a lot of things they say you are supposed to do - interdisciplinary teaming, the 'touchy-feely' approach to kids and their problems, dealing with the raging hormones and so forth. All those things are important pieces, but if you only deal with that side of things and forget that kids also have to read and write and do math, then we're not doing our job.

I think we have really started addressing this issue with our content standards. They say very clearly what we expect to teach and what we expect kids to know. The basics are there and a lot that goes beyond the basics.

We don't have all the specifics worked out - the piece that says what every teacher is going to do every day to meet the standards, or what we're going to do if the standards aren't met. But we're on the road. Just getting the district staff and the middle school teachers and principals to agree that our number one task is the actual learning in the classroom is a great accomplishment.

We were sending very mixed messages to our teachers about priorities. I think the message is much clearer now. I really do.

CS: Can you state the message for us?

Polacheck: The message is that schools and teachers must take these standards and expectations and work toward them in the classroom. There are specific learning requirements in important subjects like reading, math, and so on that we have for each grade now. This is the curriculum, these are the standards, and how you teach it at your school is your choice.

We know that some teachers are sitting down and figuring out how to fit these things into their lesson plans and others are not. But it's early in the process, and the plan is to support teachers to get this work done. One major improvement I see is that the district curriculum staff is really working in the schools now, and that's having a positive effect on principals and teachers.

In particular, I think we are more serious about our belief that principals should take direct responsibility for the quality of teaching in every school. We are doing a better job selecting our principals. And with some urging from our area superintendents, our principals are paying more attention to teaching. If you keep on hitting principals with the same question, "What's going on in the classroom?", they begin to believe it's really a priority.

CS: The district has also begun a process it calls "certifying classrooms." As we understand it, principals are expected to visit each classroom and certify to the district that adequate teaching is taking place. Is this likely to improve instruction?

Polacheck: The certification process is a start, although I think it needs some more meat to it. We are asking the principals to go to every classroom and answer this question: "Would you put your child or grandchild in this class?" That's a real specific question -- not specific in the sense of a checklist, but it really gets to everyone's gut. On that premise, it's a good measure.

What I hope will come out of this process is that once you're certified, you're not certified for life. We need to take the approach that you meet this year's standards, but as we ratchet up our expectations and our standards for teaching, we should expect that teachers will have to perform at higher levels to get their classrooms certified.

CS: Some teachers and even principals say they don't see the need for content standards. How do you react?

Polacheck: I don't think there's much question that, as a district, we need to be a lot clearer about what we expect children to learn. That's what the standards are for. We're not asking anyone to pray at the shrine of content standards. They are just a framework or tool. If they're already teaching kids so that they will meet all the standards, that's good. But I doubt that's the case -- and I doubt anybody really thinks it's the case.

CS: Teachers in different grades tell us that as they look at standards together, they're discovering a lot of duplication in what they teach, and a lot of holes, too. One example we heard is that every science teacher teaches volcanoes but maybe nobody teaches something else. Is this one
of the ways standards can be a tool - by encouraging teachers to talk more about what they're teaching?

Polacheck: Yes, I think that's a good example. Having standards doesn't fix what's wrong with the schools, but they can help us find out whether we're teaching everything we should be teaching. Then we have to teach those things, and teach them well. That's something standards can't do for us. #