Turning Points 2000: Educating Adolescents in the 21st Century
Excerpted Remarks by Anthony W. Jackson and Gayle A. Davis
Plenary Session
National Middle School Association
St. Louis, Missouri
November 3, 2000

Why did we write this book?
So why did we write Turning Points 2000: Educating Adolescents in the 21st Century, and what's it about? After all, the original report, Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century, was very well received and has reached a very broad audience in the past decade -- if it ain't broken, what's to fix?

I think the reason for writing Turning Points 2000 was captured best by Sue Swaim in a recent special section of Education Week on middle grades education that many of you saw. She said that middle grades education is at a crossroads. There is now across this country, a growing chorus of educators, parents, and others who point to the clearly disappointing results of the TIMSS studies for eighth graders along with other national assessments, and continuing low performance of middle grades students in their local schools, and would have us believe that there is a fatal flaw in the basic concept of middle grades education. So there are calls to abandon what people believe to be the essential philosophy and practices of middle schools because, they say, in this age of accountability, middle schools just don't work.

We felt a need to write this book, in part, because that analysis is simply wrong. It is wrong because it is based on a superficial and outdated notion of what middle grades education is all about. Perhaps more importantly, it does not recognize the enormous amount that has been learned, particularly in the past decade, that can allow and is allowing middle grades schools to be the powerful communities of learning that they must be in the 21st century.

Core beliefs

At the core of the book are a set of beliefs that guide us at every turn. The first of these is that the primary purpose of middle grades education is to promote young adolescents' intellectual development. Of course it is also very important that middle grades schools help students learn to lead healthful lives, to become caring and tolerant people, and to become active, contributing citizens. But we assert that in order to get to these other goals, young adolescents must first be helped to use their minds well.

We also assert that adolescents' intellectual development, and their ethical and social development, require strong, supportive relationships. Strong relationships between adults and students and within student peer groups are the conduit through which learning happens. So as we consider the kinds of changes in curriculum, assessment and instruction that will push middle grades education to the top of the mountain, we must realize that far from abandoning the structural changes in schools that promote caring climates of support for adolescents, these structures are the necessary foundation upon which the ascent to the top will be made.

The third core value of Turning Points 2000 is that no middle grades school can be called successful unless there is equity in outcomes for all groups of students, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, family income or linguistic background. [There are] significant differences that exist between white, black, and Hispanic students in the percentage of students scoring below basic achievement levels in reading, writing, mathematics, and science. Even at this low level of achievement, the gaps range from striking to enormous. This is not equity, this is a continuing national disaster. Middle grades schools must be part of a solution.

I should point out that the core values of Turning Points 2000 are similar to those set forth in the vision statement of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, which we strongly endorse and which is reprinted in the book.

Turning Point 2000 Recommendations

Those of you familiar with the original Turning Points report will see significant continuity with the recommendations in Turning Points 2000. As I said, we believe the significant contribution of Turning Points 2000 is to go into much greater depth, based on research and practice over the past decade, on what it takes to actually implement the Turning Points framework. But there are some important changes from the original Turning Points report as well.

First, the original report listed ensuring success for all students as one of eight recommendations. What we and others have realized, like our colleague Robert Felner who leads the National Center for Public Education and Social Policy at the University of Rhode Island and whose program of research based on Turning Points, is that ensuring success for every student is the core mission of the middle grades school, not one of several recommendations. Success for every student is the outcome to which the recommended changes in middle grades schools contribute.

Also, as I've said before, there is a much greater emphasis on how to improve teaching and learning in middle grades schools, to the point where the 7 pages devoted to the chapter on teaching a core curriculum in the original report has expanded to over 60 pages across two chapters in Turning Points 2000.

And in that context, we have also redefined the notion of a common core curriculum to mean a curriculum grounded in rigorous, public standards for what students should know and be able to do. This does not mean that every middle grade student learns exactly the same thing. Rather, that every student is helped to meet or exceed commonly high standards of knowing and understanding. Such standards will necessarily contain common requirements of foundational knowledge from school to school but should be flexible enough to allow and encourage students to tenaciously pursue issues that are of deep interest to them as individuals.

Finally, the original Turning Points contained separate chapters on family and community involvement in adolescents' education. Our finding is that family and community do not represent separate influences on adolescent development as much as they are integrated, mutually reinforcing influences. For that reason, we believe the discussion of family and community should be linked. That's what we've done in the next to last chapter of the book.

The full text of this plenary address is also available here.