

The Middle School Plunge - wallflower
http://educationnext.org/the-middle-school-plunge/

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joezydeco
Here's how the middle school transition works in my particular district. Use
it as a data point:

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.

~~~
akavi
> 5) Elementary begins at 9:00 a.m. Middle begins at 8:00am.

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.

~~~
superuser2
> Why would you do that?

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).

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rdtsc
What is the reasoning behind having completely different school buildings,
different sets of teacher, differing facilities, buses for all these different
types of school?

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.

~~~
vasilipupkin
I am sorry, Soviet education did not produce better results. The result of
Soviet education is modern Russia, which is a banana republic with nukes.

~~~
vasilipupkin
the result of Soviet education is that Apple capitalization is greater than
the entire Russian stock market

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favoritemartian
Details here:
[http://www.edweek.org/media/gradeconfiguration-13structure.p...](http://www.edweek.org/media/gradeconfiguration-13structure.pdf)

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...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/11/the-science-of-
cliques/382570/)

------
drawkbox
I think that having a move from elementary to middle school (junior high) is
going to prepare a student better for high school because they have already
made one leap. That change of environment is a mental exercise that requires
kids to refocus.

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.

~~~
cholmon
> 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.

~~~
VLM
Our middle and high schools had nearly identical recruitment areas, so
socially the transition was irrelevant. Almost exactly one quarter of my
middle school class came from my elementary school. Everyone I went to
Kindergarten with, graduated as a senior with me 13 years later, minus obvious
attrition due to moving, etc. From observation of other posts this is
apparently highly unusual. Perhaps you all draw lots and are randomly assigned
to any school in the district? This is kinda interesting.

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.

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geebee
Out here in sfusd, middle school is known as the weak link. Benioff recognized
this and specifically donated some money to try to improve them.

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.

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markbnj
My primary reaction to this piece is that it is content that matters in
education, not the specific venue in which it is delivered, or put more
precisely venue may matter, but content matters far more. Our ancestors were
successfully educated in many different environments. Perhaps modern
educational policy makers could worry less about what sort of building to make
and who should sit in it, and more about what sort of material to teach and
how it should be taught.

~~~
jonnathanson
All fair and strong points, but we must keep in mind that our ancestors lived
in different societies than we did. Their societies had different economies,
different social orders, and in some cases, fundamentally different
structures.

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.

