Education come full circle

According to a Wednesday NY Times article, New York City is scrapping many of its middle schools for a return to the K-8 grammer school. The add, "Many other districts across the nation have reinstituted kindergarten-to-eighth-grade schools."

The National Association of Middle Schools isn't sure this is a good idea. Perhaps they are just self-interested.

Another quote: "Since 1999, under New York State's tougher academic standards, fourth grade scores have risen sharply on the standardized English and math tests. But eighth grade scores have improved only modestly, reflecting what the state education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, has described as a lack of focus and mission at many middle schools."

This reflects a serious problem whose ultimate cause I suspect is peer socialization. If the new schools could be arranged to maintain adult authority in the school, those scores might be improved at the higher levels. The drawback is that longer childhood makes the shift to more adult behavior in high school harder. Dealing with the 10-15 year old is vexatious.

Interestingly, the remaining middle schools will be for gifted kids, which is probabaly a good move. By that age, its really counter productive to group them with the mainstream. Brighter kids just tune out and develop bad learning habits. They need more challenge and can handle more academic responsibility if handled right.

They are also experimenting with 6-12 high schools. I'm not sure what to make of that, I've heard nothing of it.

Schools used to be K-8 and then 9-12 at the beginning of the century. Then the junior high school movement came along and argued that upper elemntary kids would benefit from a more high school type of enviroment, the junior high. Organized like high schools by content area and including many of the same kinds of extra-curriculars, the junior highs were typically 6-8 or 7-9. They were replaced by the middle school movement which argued that there should be a school that transitions kids from elementary to high school and occupies a middle place between the central classroom of elementary and the content organized high school. So middle schools had less class movement because kids had a home room where they might spend almost half of the day.

This return to the original model sure casts doubt on the utility of experiment in the first place.