Middle Schools Begone?

March 04, 2004

What is it with these big-city school districts and their crazy egg baskets? Achievement is sorely lagging behind the suburbs and private schools (for lots of very simple reasons, as outlined briefly in our reform blueprint), yet would-be reformers continually jump on each passing fad as if yet more innovation will solve our school problems.

The latest basket into which they're going to dump yet more eggs has middle schools (typically grades 6, 7, and 8) in the crosshairs. Eliminate middle schools (convert them to either K-8 schools or 6-12 schools) and you'll solve a whole lot of problems, or so they claim.

Joanne Jacobs covers a New York Times article (free registration required) which describes Gotham's plan to eliminate most of the middle schools in the city. Be sure to check out the comments section of her post, there are a number of good perspectives on the positive and negatives of this move.

For the record, we aren't terribly opposed to New York's plans, some of which sound compelling. It's just the sense that the educrats in charge even hope to get any boost in learning out of this restructuring.

When we were in school, it was K-6 in elementary schools, then 7-8 in junior high, then 9-12 in senior high, and it seemed to work fine. When we began teaching, the big push was for "middle schools" which would be grades 6-8. We've always thought the distinction between junior high and middle school to be rather silly.

Show us ten arguments why 6th graders are too old for elementary school, and we'll find ten reasons why 6th graders are too young for middle school.

We find it amusing when people make broad statements on the natural role for particular grade levels, such as "seventh graders are natural leaders" or "ninth graders are too immature for high school." We hate to break it to these folks, but students refuse to conform to their rigid ideas of their development, for one reason: the bell curve.

The bell curve is an interesting (and ubiquitous) creature. Take any good sized group of people, and measure any of a bevy of characteristics (for example, height, weight, IQ, education level, age, hair length, etc), and graph the data. Chances are, you'll find a bell curve lurking about.

Taking up the issue of middle-years students, what many folks don't realize is that these kids are the results of swirling interactions of multiple bell curves (age in months at the onset of puberty being only one of these bell-curve-shaped distributions). Typically in these normal distributions the width of the bulk of the curve (plus/minus one standard deviation) is wider than one year.

This means that declarations that such-and-so grade can or can't do this-or-that--or that X grade shouldn't be in the same school as Y--are little more than meaningless platitudes.

If you're going to restructure schools because you'd like to better utilize your resources (bigger schools tend to favor more efficiency), then fine, go ahead and restructure!

Just don't claim to do so because of pet childhood development theories.