I spoke up during the meeting, and I made these suggestions:
There are many more suggestions that my school has, or that we have learned about from other schools, including issues such as heterogeneous grouping, creative inservice, full inclusion of resource children into regular classes, etc. There is not enough time to really address all the issues on a single website. Again, I have no guarantees that any of these approaches work, but the team working together can at least be consistent and focused, not only on academic issues, and there will be far more positive results than each teacher working independently.1) First of all, do not adopt the "shotgun" approach. That is, don't try to solve all the problems with MSPAP scores by blitzing the kids with tasks, by adding in a new MSPAP class in mid-year, by changing curriculum to match proficiency levels, etc. Do examine which issues need the most attention, and then work on those accordingly.
2) Do look carefully at your lowest score, which in 8th grade is most likely reading, and decide on some tactics for improving one focus area first. Then, once you have decided on that focus, reinforce it school-wide. For example, if you decide to work on reading to be informed, then all teachers should be addressing it in their classrooms, with reading selections relevant to their curriculums, and scoring it consistently, giving feedback to kids. Make your focus area be one of your milestone assessments, if you want.
3) One of the great strengths of a middle school is its academic teams. Each team, in each grade in a middle school, should be given the responsibility of developing its own plan for addressing MSPAP issues. For example, each team in my middle school was asked to develop a plan for how it was going to address reading outcomes and indicators during the semester. Each team went about it a little differently, but typical plans included things like the science teachers would focus on reading to perform a task, the language arts teachers would focus on reading for literary experience, and the math and social studies teachers focused on reading to be informed. Teams were able to coordinate who would teach the basic skills/strategies for each type of reading, and then coordinate how often kids would have these experiences, so that they were not "blitzed" by reading activities, but fed them in a steady doses. They kept a team notebook of activities and charted the scores on various activities for all the students on their team. At the end of a term, the team could show me the progress for a particular student in all three types of reading.
4) Another focus that can best be reinforced through a team is language usage. The team decided on their LU expectations, taught those to the kids, and then reinforced them as a team. They have stopped accepting shoddy work from the kids. They maintain "word walls" of words in their content areas that they expect to be spelled correctly.
5) Stop separating MSPAP from "regular" instruction and assessment. When a school "stops and does MSPAP," kids, especially 8th graders, see it as different from regular work, and treat it pretty much the way they do the work that a substitute hands to them. Teachers at my school have worked very hard to make their regular assessments look like MSPAP. They do far more performance assessment for their regular curriculum, and at least 80% of MSPAP-like activities and tasks are teacher developed, to fit with the curriculum. It has taken several years to evolve to this new way, but the strength of our middle school teams and their common planning time have enabled it to happen.