Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Middle level education was entering its heyday around the time I started teaching in my eighth grade classroom. Its disciples were passionate in their conviction that between sixth and eighth grade, students became entirely different creatures. Instead of adolescents, middle level specialists called their students “transescents.” Later instead of teens, experts christened them “tweens.”
The great minds at the helm of public education are nothing if not cute.
Naturally, they had evidence proving that middle school students possessed “a unique nature.” One popular theory cited the influence of tailbone growth on behavior, a contention apparently resting on the assumption that contemporary adolescent tailbones are somehow different from Renaissance and 1930s adolescent tailbones, and that’s why 12-year-olds can’t sit still or learn anymore.
Advocates were and still remain adamant that middle schools are qualitatively different from junior high schools, despite the fact that both deal with essentially the same students. That’s because middle schools are a state of mind. They’re never “repressive” or like a “factory,” which junior high schools allegedly always are. Of course, it was never clear exactly how experts defined “repressive,” or whether schools that run like factories would really be worse than schools that run like a cross between Monday night wrestling and “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.”
They were also fanatical in their faith. The middle school consultants who visited my school imposed a ban on what they deemed “killer phrases.” At one indoctrination session they plastered the walls with signs listing the heresies we weren’t allowed to say, outrageous, inflammatory statements like, “We tried that two years ago, and it didn’t work.” Any contrary sentiment provoked a chorus of experts, pointing and shrieking, “Killer phrase, killer phrase!”
Many actual classroom teachers soon saw the holes in middle level theories and practices. Unfortunately, it took the great minds in education a few years longer to catch on. Those few years amounted to a generation of American students.
By the dawn of the millennium, middle schools had rightly earned the nickname “the Bermuda triangle of education.” Some experts tried to salvage and justify their theories by interpreting that to mean that the middle years are a turbulent time when “hormones are flying all over the place,” as if hormones haven’t always coursed through pubescent bloodstreams and don’t course through bloodstreams at other stages in life. Others, however, were ready to concede that middle schools as they’d developed were characterized by “academic and social” decline that “loses kids the way the Bermuda triangle loses ships,” places where “student academic achievement goes to die.”
The incipient fashion is to place “kindergarten through eighth grade on one campus.” This K-8 “reform” configuration would make my grandmother feel right at home.
Sadly, those ill effects extended well beyond the middle years. The content-light, “student-centered,” undisciplined, “whole child,” social skills and services version of education that had first afflicted middle schools swiftly infected the nation’s elementary and high schools. The observable result was that academic achievement was dying at every age and grade level.
Reformers have moved to counter this decline by stressing alleged “rigor” and promoting initiatives like algebra for all eighth-graders and advanced placement for more and more students. The common result has been watered-down algebra that really isn’t algebra and advanced placement classes that really aren’t advanced. The inconsistent, arbitrary, frequently age-inappropriate expectations of the Common Core are the latest incarnation of this reclamation effort.
Despite this rhetorical rigor, the same calamitous hallmarks of middle school remain. They’re even enjoying a resurgence.
While the Common Core specifies what schools must teach in often painful, exalted detail, reformers have renewed their complaints that “traditional” school curricula are “a mile wide and inch deep.” Instead of classes that are surveys of basic information to provide students with an introductory understanding of U.S. history or biology, for example, experts once again, under banners like thematic, interdisciplinary, and “project-based” learning, are prescribing courses where students focus on topics of particular interest to them. The result will once again be graduates who don’t know anything about too many things.
Add the renewed campaign against enforced disciplinary standards led by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in his crusade against the “school to prison pipeline,” implemented under banners like “restorative justice” and “positive behavior intervention,” couple that with the ever-burgeoning social services demands laid upon schools in the name of the “whole child,” and you have a recipe for another generation devastated at every grade by the middle school mentality.
Reformers point to our continuing obsession with standardized testing, further extended as part of the Common Core, as evidence that we’re serious about academic achievement. But all those endless tests are just cosmetics masking over the fatally flawed theories and practices experts continue to cling to.
Now a number of studies indicate that placing sixth through eighth grade students in separate middle schools is exactly the wrong thing to do. In extensive surveys of New York City and Texas schools, for example, children attending K-8 schools scored consistently higher than those attending “dedicated middle school buildings.” A nationwide review found that a “majority of studies” similarly concluded that students who did not attend “typical middle schools did significantly better on GPAs, standardized math and reading tests, and state test composite scores.”
In response, the incipient fashion is to place “kindergarten through eighth grade on one campus.” This K-8 “reform” configuration would make my grandmother feel right at home.
I’m not saying that housing the middle grades in a separate place can’t produce educated students. It’s worth noting, however, that middle school boosters who ordinarily love to cite “the research” will probably choose to ignore this research.
I’m saying that it doesn’t matter what sign you hang on the door, or what grades you house inside it. What matters is what you do inside that door. Yet once again, rather than address the fundamental flaws in the education reforms they’ve imposed over the past 40 years, reformers are just rearranging the follies.
Until we acknowledge those follies and restore reason to our public schools, it won’t matter how we arrange the students who pass through them.
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