The Middle School Plunge
educationnext.org
educationnext.org
1) Elementary schools are K-5, Middle schools are 6-8.
2) Elementary schools are local to the neighborhood and serve about 300-400 students.
3) A middle school consolidates 4-5 elementaries.
4) Because of the consolidation, the middle school tends to be farther away. A lot of kids are bussed to school. This can take up to 45 minutes for some kids.
5) Elementary begins at 9:00 a.m. Middle begins at 8:00am.
So, a 5th grader that was starting his day at 9am (and could walk to school) becomes a sixth grader that has to be ready for the bus at 7am, enduring a 40 minute ride with peers that can be significantly older than him.
Nobody believes this is an impact on attitude and performance? This age is hard enough as it is and we suddenly throw kids into a mix like this with a heavily modified sleep schedule on top of it.
Wait, what? What places have older kids start school earlier? Why would you do that?
Almost every 7 year old I've ever known naturally woke up at the crack of dawn. Almost every 16 year old I've ever known would sleep till noon if you let them.
My school district had older kids start school later (7:45 for elementary, 8:30 for middle, 9:15 for high), and that seems fairly sensible.
Fairfax apparently recently changed (or will change) for high school to start at 8 am. That's still earlier than I think is civilized, but it's an improvement. (One that I would have welcomed as a high school student.)
There is a surprisingly persistent belief that waking up (and going to bed) early is more moral. That it's somehow related to responsibility, work ethic, strength of character, etc.
Proposals to start school later are often dismissed on the basis that students are just whining about the character-building that they ought to be subjected to.
Staying out late and sleeping in are both signifiers of irresponsibility/laziness and things that parents and parent-like figures discourage. Despite the fact that, so long as you are doing both at the same time, you're still getting adequate sleep and probably just as healthy (if not healthier).
The ironic thing is, as an elementary schooler, I would frequently wake up much earlier than I needed to be to watch cartoons/play video games/read/do homework/etc. It was only after hitting puberty that I actually needed the extra sleep time, and that's exactly when they hit you with the schedule change. And people wonder why teenagers are so grumpy these days.
As far as I can tell, the reasoning behind this is "parents drive their elementary school-aged kids to school and need the extra time." The vast majority of kids, myself included, rode the bus from kindergarten onwards, so I guess this is just another case where the upper crust got to fuck everyone else over for the sake of their own convenience.
EDIT: The other half was the school-run extracurriculars that started in middle school. I remember an attempt to start our high school later being shot down; the athletes didn't want to stay any later than they already were, and the sports coaches didn't want to lose any practice time. Clearly football is more important than the health and education of the average student.
I grew up in a different country (ex-USSR) with a more severly underfunded eduction, but what I think produced much better results.
Things that they did differently:
* One school building for a city district for grades 2-11. The grades up to 2-5 or 5-11 were split into separates parts of the building. Some some teachers taught in both.
* Some facilities were shared auditorium, cafeteria. some were not like gyms.
* Some earlier grades would be split into shifts -- some in same grades I remember going to school around noon and coming home in the evening when my parents came home. I did my homework in the morning.
* There wasn't much of "pick any class you like". Everyone in the same grade took the same classes but you stuck with the same set of students possibly all through your school years (2-11). +/- kids that moved in and out of the area.
This last point cannot be overemphasized. I think it helped quite a bit having the same people you know always there. We helped each other study. Went to each others birthdays. Had dances and other things organized together.
I also went to highschool in US for a year, so I can compare. And I found it very stressful running around, picking classes, always seeing different sets of people from class to class. Yeah I had the language and cultural barrier as well, but this was an additional level of stress.
This is the key difference which was specifically ignored in the article by focusing solely on reading and math scores.
A traditional American school started specialization in middle school and the level of specialization becomes rather extreme by high school.
So in elementary school there is no specialized gear larger than a tupperware container other than the school library, gym, maybe an art and music room (although there's a push to get rid of the last two in favor of math and reading).
In middle school you'll see dedicated rooms. There will be a "shop" room and a "home ec" room and a couple others.
In high school we had one room for auto shop, one room for CAD drafting (that was an interesting class), one room for ceramics arts, one room for chemistry, etc.
Generally speaking there has been a trend to get rid of all hands on activity and get rid of pretending any educational track other than college to cubicle exists. So close the metal shop and shove all the kids into college prep, close the ceramic arts room and shove the kids into a 4th year of english lit, close the CAD drafting lab and shove the kids into a required 3rd year of math, that sort of thing.
(edited to add, and its been a miserable failure at increasing math and reading scores, but its done a truly excellent job of making sure none of the kids know how to change the oil in their car or which end of the soldering iron gets hot)
IF and only if you get rid of all the specialized classes, such that all kids attend the same college prep classes, THEN it'll be realistic to go all K-12 in the one room school house again.
Also there were not "college prep" classes. There were classes designed to teach a wide area of emphasis. Math, physics, biology, chemistry, literature, geography, (even strange things like drafting), foreign langauges.
The idea that someone in the middle school is going to specialize to do pottery for the rest of their lives and only take minimum math classes is a bit silly I think.
Based on further detail our experiences were not all that different.
"college prep" this was more of a tag on the depth of study in the classroom than a specific class. They generally separated and tracked and labeled the classes by "intensive" "college prep" "unlabeled" and "basic" from top to bottom. I was in "intensive" math so in my last year I took college calculus. I was merely in "college prep" english lit with the primary effect that I got better letter grades than my friends in "intensive" english lit, also my reading assignments were shorter as were my essay requirements. It was explained you'd never be able to do college level work unless you took the "college prep" level classes. It was explained to us that for the rest of our lives our industrial corporate employers would care very deeply about who took Int English Lit 11 vs College Prep English Lit 11, not to mention how much they'd care about our middle school grades (LOL). There is something of a fad in the usa to mainstream absolutely all students into the "college prep" classes, to maximize revenue. I suppose it minimizes expense, at least as long as you can pretend there's no difference between students. Conformity at all costs!
As I think back, pretty much everyone in the "intensive math" class was together from 7th grade until 12th grade, plus or minus people moving, etc. Thru attrition we were down to about 15 kids by senior year.
Sorry that does seem confusing. Let me try to clear it up.
The point was that the main thing students should be doing -- getting an education, whether it prepares them for college or not was at the top of the list. Students being able to pick classes and specialize was not a top priority.
Then another point was that _optionally_ many had opportunity to further their interests by joining an external "club" or organizing one around the school. But these were optional and everyone did it if they wanted it. I didn't for example, my friends beleonged to a airplane modeling club and so on.
My argument was that the choice and ability to specialize starting in middle school as well as having to switch schools teachers, having different classmates every class is stressful enough and a uniform set of classes everyone takes is better. If anything just because it reduces the emotional stress of having to fit in different cliques or getting used to new schools and so on.
The reason I make personal annectodes is that I participated in both systems and can compare the two, based on how it felt for me.
Not to say I am extolling or saying all things were better and one should just copy that system of education -- there was lots of corruption and cheating or instance. But something I believe were better.
Given that "... Although middle schools offer far fewer grades than K–8 schools, Florida middle schools on average enroll 146 more students than their K–8 counterparts; as a result, typical grade cohorts are almost three times as large.", I was surprised (and skeptical) that the authors found no correlation when they controlled for cohort size.
Going from 50 kids in 5th grade to 300 kids in 6th grade, and adding in puberty, seems a recipe for chaos.
Also worth a read: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/11/the-sci...
Moving to junior high is a big step and even as a kid you prepare and start over in a new environment, just like you would do in high school and again in college, then in jobs and so forth. Changing environments I believe is important for preparing kids, dealing with change, mental state/clearing the slate of the last school. Also kids get to be the big kids on campus at 6th grade, again at 8th or 9th then again at 12th grade, they also get to experience being the lower grade at a school a few times. These experiences I think just make people prepare/focus better. Change is good when it comes to environments of learning.
Is this change in environment actually beneficial though? One could argue that the social stress of such a change is detrimental to the students, as it forces them to focus more on the social aspects of their environment than the academic aspects. One could further argue that maintaining a consistent (necessarily smaller?) K-12 school environment is more beneficial as it strengthens the students' social cohesion, allowing deeper, longer-lasting relationships to form among the students themselves, and between the students and faculty/staff.
I live in the same city in 2014 as we lived in the 80s when I was going to school, and the district still does things the same way... assuming I don't move, my kids will graduate high school with the kids from their Kindergarten class. So if its a fad, its long lived.
I would propose the transition can't be any more "awful" than moving to a new school. My parents never moved during my entire K-12 experience, which is apparently also an outlier. I am told that other kids have survived moving to a new school one or twice; going thru the experience with 250 of their closest friends can't be nearly as bad.
However, it may be difficult to overcome a structural difference. It's telling that middle school is the one area where public and private schools completely diverge. Private schools are almost always K-8, followed by a separate high school. This happens for small very expensive private schools as well as larger parochial schools which often serve a more middle class or low income population (often reaching a similar scale to public schools), so it's really not a function of scale. Only the public schools seem to engage in the practice of separating out students for 6-8k.
The education system we have now is an industrial system. That is to say, it was developed in the midst and aftermath of the industrial revolutions of the last several centuries. It is out of date. Unfortunately, "what sort of building to make and who should sit in it" is a very real concern. It's a concern about the efficient allocation of resources in service of a particular outcome. I'd argue that the outcome (i.e., why are we educating our children, and to what particular end?) is in need of reevaluation. Until we can define it for the 21st Century, we're just moving players around on a field with shifting goalposts.
Educational reformers, on various sides of various platforms, are tacticians in want of a strategy.