New York City has a great new idea: Shut down the middle
schools.
According to the New York Post, almost 50 of the city's 220
middle schools have closed in the last two years, part of a plan
to move back toward the old K-8 grammar school model. New York
City is joining Baltimore, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Philadelphia
and Pittsburgh, among other urban school districts.
Why did this take the "experts" so long? Many parents can tell
you: If an otherwise decent school district has a problem school,
it's going to be the junior high. And even high-functioning
middle schools can be a problem for the students in them.
After a miserable two years in junior high school, for
example, my niece entered high school in Oregon this fall. We all
breathed a sigh of relief. A straight-A student, she was never in
any academic trouble, but the social horrors of junior high
school for this graceful, outgoing teen left us all stressed on
her behalf. The level of peer-generated torture suddenly dropped
considerably.
Apparently we are not the only ones. The most striking
research result of our middle-school mania is that American early
adolescents are unusually miserable, according to international
survey data.
"Folks have been aware, in achievement terms, that what
happens in the middle grades is disappointing," Douglas J.
MacIver, a principal research scientist at Johns Hopkins
University's Center for the Social Organization of Schools, told
Education Week. "But I don't think they realized how stressed
middle-school students are."
An influential 2004 Rand Corp. study looked at international
data comparing American students to their peers in 11 other
developed nations. American students rank near the bottom on
measures of emotional health, including whether students feel
their school is a pleasant place, and whether they find
classmates to be kind and helpful. On that last question, only
Czech students reported less kindliness from their peers. Only
students in Latvia, Israel and Lithuania reported feeling left
out, lonely, helpless or bullied more often than American
students did.
This June, Pittsburgh closed seven middle schools and doubled
the number of K-8 elementary schools. One advantage of the K-8
model is that it tends to spread the potentially problematic
middle-graders around. "It's like 'Invasion of the Body
Snatchers' when they hit sixth grade," Assistant Principal Gina
Robinson told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.