LITTLE ROCK — To borrow a term from computer technology, the Little Rock School District’s eight middle schools - counting an alternative middle school - are being “refreshed.”
After nearly three years of community and district task-force meetings to identify problems and possible fixes to the middle schools, the Little Rock School Board has adopted a multi-pronged approach to revitalize the schools - to make the schools more effective academically and more attractive to parents and students.
In large part the initiative calls for the schools - which serve about 5,200 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders - to broaden their efforts beyond just trying to raise math and literacy scores on the state Benchmark and End-of-Course exams.
“We kind of lost the focus in our middle schools on what middle schools are all about,” said Associate Superintendent for Secondary Schools Daniel Whitehorn, who has been a middle school principal for the past nine years and a high school assistant principal before that.
“What we have largely done is taught to a test,” Whitehorn said about the legally required exams. “At first I thought it was going to be helpful - the test was - it was going to focus on student achievement and it was going to help all of our kids. But what it has really done is narrowed our curriculum and it’s narrowed our focus, and we’ve lost sight of what is really important, which is getting our kids ready for high school and teaching them critical-thinking skills.”
The middle school initiative has multiple components to it, several of which are being put into place.
Whitehorn said what parents and community members need to know first and foremost about the initiative is that the middle school campuses will be safe and secure, and that children will be academically challenged regardless of their achievement level.
“You don’t have to worry about your child while you are at work,” he said. “There is a monitoring and visibility plan that we will have for every building that will say where [faculty and staff members] are supposed to be before school, between classes, during lunch, after school, during assemblies, extracurricular events. It will address how they will cover the bathrooms, how they will deal with a potentially dangerous situation - the protocol for handling that. All those things have to be consistent and in place in all our schools.”
Regarding the curriculum, Whitehorn said the middle school academic program will meet the needs of all students from the lowest achieving to the highest, and that the schools won’t just be “ACTAAP testing stations,” a reference to the Arkansas Comprehensive Testing, Assessment and Accountability Program that is the umbrella name for the state’s testing program, which is used to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
“Our real focus has shifted to getting kids prepared for a rigorous high school curriculum. We can no longer afford to aim so low that we are caught up in trying to get by on the state tests,” he said. “We need to aim a lot higher.We need to get the kids ready for high school and ultimately a career.”
While the middle school strategies call for the schools to teach literacy and numeracy as part of all the subjects taught to students, Whitehorn said it is necessary to provide a broad, rigorous liberal arts curriculum that includes science, foreign languages, music and art.
Whitehorn said the district has done a “pretty good job” in giving extra help to middle school pupils who score below proficient or below their grade level on the tests, and those efforts will be continued and improved upon.
But for pupils who score at proficient or better levels on state math and literacy tests, they will be steered away from “double-blocked” math and English classes. Pupils in double-blocked courses are taking the equivalent of two course units of English or two units of math in a school year, which limits the other courses they can take.
Additionally, the Little Rock district this year has eliminated many of the commercially produced programs and teaching strategies to establish what has been termed the “naked” curriculum.
“I like to call it the ‘true curriculum,’” Whitehorn said. “What has happened is that we bought into all these commercial programs and we looked to them to save our schools and we really weren’t doing the hard work of focusing on effective learning in the classroom.
“By having this true curriculum and having teachers collaborating on the curriculum, we can guarantee ... similar lesson plans, similar activities and similar tests and the teachers can raise the quality of student work.”
Other elements of the middle school initiative include:
A gifted education program expanded to serve more students.
More challenging special education lessons.
A uniform system of collecting and using student data.
Plans at each school for recruiting and retaining teachers and students.
“What I want is consistency,” Whitehorn said. “We’ve proven that it does not work to have every middle school doing its own thing. We’re taking the best ideas across the board and putting them in every middle school and we are going to make sure that the principals and the instructional coaches and leadership teams have the support to make them successful.”
Michelle Odum, a parent of three children, welcomed the district’s efforts to improve the middle schools but also said the changes come too late and don’t yet go far enough to satisfy her family.
When it came time to select a school for her oldest child to attend this year, Odum said, a private school was chosen over the district’s middle schools. Her two youngest children remain in a Little Rock district elementary school where she is the immediate past president of the Parent Teacher Association.
“I do think they are good moves,” Odum said about the new middle school strategies that include a broader curriculum. “The schools do teach to the test and we lose a lot of enrichment that way.”
But Odum was disappointed that the strategies don’t include plans for a new middle school campus to serve northwest Little Rock. As it stands now the two westernmost middle schools in the city are Henderson and Forest Heights, which are significant distances from the Arkansas 10 corridor that is served by the new Dr. Don R. Roberts Elementary School.
“There is no middle school west of Interstate 430,” Odum observed, saying she feels the district has “abandoned” the west Little Rock families by not providing a neighborhood middle school.
School Board member Jody Carreiro urged forming a middle school task force shortly after his election to the board three years ago and has served as the board’s representative on the task force since then.
“I came on the board with the knowledge that middle schools were a weak spot,” he said. “I knew we were more likely to lose students and parents who had a choice at the middle school level and that we needed to do something different.”
He predicted the strengths of the revised middle school program will prove to be the consistency school-to-school in the academic program, consistency in expectations for student behavior and school security, and the efforts to get more students into existing but sometimes under-used music, foreign language and gifted education programs.
Carreiro called the School Board’s recent approval of the middle school strategies “not a finish line but a milestone that will move us along.”
“There is still much to do,” he said. “There are a lot of folks in my part of town that would have liked to have seen a west Little Rock middle school as part of the plan. I understand that. But this is a step on the way.
“We haven’t forgotten or pushed [a new school] aside, but we have got to have a stronger program in our current middle schools to be able to sustain and sell that west Little Rock campus as part of a bigger plan. The school hasn’t dropped off the radar.”
Transitioning from elementary to middle school “is frightening” for parents, Carreiro said. “I don’t discount that at all. A lot of what we are doing ... is trying to get people comfortable.”
Parents can take a look at the revamped middle schools - Cloverdale, Dunbar, Forest Heights, Henderson, Horace Mann, Mabelvale, Pulaski Heights and the Felder Alternative Learning Academy - during the week of Nov. 7 when the district hosts its annual daytime and evening open houses at the schools.
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 10/09/2011