Thursday, January 04, 2007

The Trouble with Middle Schools

Ann Althouse links to this New York Times article discussing the trouble with reforming middle school.

Driven by newly documented slumps in learning, by crime rates and by high dropout rates in high school, educators across New York and the nation are struggling to rethink middle school and how best to teach adolescents at a transitional juncture of self-discovery and hormonal change.

The difficulty of educating this age group is felt even in many wealthy suburban school districts. But it is particularly intense in cities, where the problems that are compounded in middle school are more acute to begin with and where the search for solutions is most urgent.

It's interesting and dovetails nicely with this column by Maggie Gallagher advocating that we just get rid of middle schools all together. Hell, even Amanda at Pandagon agrees with Maggie (and without any of the normal anti-male attack snark).

Says the New York Times:
Middle school teachers point to the gulf between the smooth-skinned sixth grade “babies” and these eighth-graders on the verge of adulthood, and note how they must guide these students through the profound transformations of adolescence.

“These kids go through more change in their lives than at any other time except the first three years,” said Sue Swaim, executive director of the National Middle School Association.

This is so true. When my oldest daughter was in sixth grade (and stuck in the middle of a turbulent custody suit between her father and me), I used to have lunch with her every week. I was amazed at the difference in 12-year-olds. There were those who still looked (and probably acted) like they were 10, and those that looked (and probably acted) like they were 15. I liked interacting with her friends and finding out what these kids were like (we were in a new district, so these weren't the kiddoes I had known since my daughter was in kindergarten).

By the time she was in eighth grade, I still had lunch with her once in a while, but not with the regularity I had in sixth grade. The same kids were much different now than they had been then; they were more mature and articulate and seemed much more focused than they had been as sixth graders.

One thing I got from the article in the NYT and the column by Gallagher is that breaking off this subset of childhood leaves them much more vulnerable to peer pressure and the strong desire to belong. Now that my oldest daughter is in high school, she's more social and has found places she belongs (band, soccer). She's starting to enjoy freedom from her parents and to be regulating larger portions of her daily life.

It seems to me that only having to adjust to one new school (high school) rather than two (middle school and high school) would help students with the adjustments to adolescence. One student in the NYT article spoke of going from being a big fish in a small pond (elementary school) to being the small fish in a big pond (middle school). To be sure, there's the same feeling when one enters high school, but the person is more mature and able to handle the change. It just seems like common sense to me that students do better in a K through eighth situation because they can spend more time and energy focusing on their lessons and less on fitting in.