But here is one of the key questions that k-8 advocates have to answer: if all middle schools are abandoned, then what will urban districts like Boston do with the 6 foot, 200 pound, weapon-toting eighth grader with tattoos, a criminal record, and a probabtion officer?
And believe me when I tell you that: 1) kids like this exist in urban middle schools in substantial numbers, and; 2) they rank among my favorite kind of kid to work with (lest anyone accuse me of saying uncharitable things about my students – which I would never do).
My point here is that the parents and policy makers are never going to allow a 6 foot eighth grade boy or a pregnant 7th grade girl to roam the hallways of a k-8 school.
So how then is the district supposed to implement more k-8 schools without further isolating and segregating the most troubled kids into a smaller and smaller number of schools?
Maybe 7-12 schools can be one strategy to help close the achievement gap and improve student achievement. But then again, this will create a similar problem as the k-8 model, whereby parents of 7th graders won’t feel comfortable sending them to school with juniors and seniors, at least not outside of the exam school setting.
Concluding thought: a certain number of middle schools are likely to be part of the BPS “portfolio” as Superintendent Contompasis calls it, for the foreseeable future for a number of reasons, in addition to those already listed.
In the end, if the goal is to decrease the drop out rate and improve student achievement, the BPS is going to have to focus on ways to bring additional strategies and resources to bear on all at-risk kids, regardless of the type of school they attend – not just cherry pick those who are better prepared to learn and then ship them off to k-8’s.
To do otherwise will be to doom the most at-risk kids to failure.
K-6
7-9
10-12
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For one thing, there are few 16 year old 9th graders… so it means that you don’t have to worry about drop outs much in that chunk.
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7th – 9th graders are definitely quite different from the K-6 crowd, both physically and mentally. Still, there’s a lot of ground between a 7th or 8th grader and an 11th or 12th grader.
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It seems to me like those three school groupings might work particularly well in urban schools, particularly if you split 10-12 into vocational and traditional schools.
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Personally, I’m of the opinion that smaller schools serve everyone better. Sure, due to a lack of economies of scale you can’t have as many specialized courses. The flip side is that a smaller community makes it harder for teachers to lose track of individuals among the masses.
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Your thoughts?
First of all, stomv, I agree that division best groups the students together according to levels of maturity and obediance. In other words, it puts most of the terrors in one place, out of sight (which is more or less the approach to middle schools these days). Remember, by the time the kids reach 16, they can and often do drop out, so those students that make a junior high tough are often don’t make it to senior high.
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Don’t get me wrong, I teach in that sweet spot, grades 7 & 8 and love it. But my understanding is that many districts moved away from the junior high model a couple decades ago. I’ve been told that putting all adolescents together under the same roof merely exacerbated the worst tendencies and drove out many who didn’t share them. It also made the junior highs the home of staff who couldn’t manage to be elsewhere. I wasn’t teaching at that point, but this is what I’ve been told.
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That said, a place like Boston could manage to have a few junior highs for those who would prefer such an environment. It’s the smaller towns that have to choose one or the other.
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That said, I believe that in reality our school model only works for some 40% of students, it doesn’t actively work against some 30%, and actively hurts the causes of learning and character building in the other 30% (adjust numbers from location to location). But that’s a conversation for another day.
to know the history of “junior high” in the Boston area. I didn’t go to junior high — my track was K-1, 2-5, 6-8, 9-12. My wife did go to a junior high in North Carolina.
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I agree both that (a) towns in Boston metro probably have to choose to have or not have junior high, and (b) that Boston has enough students that it could incorporate both. The difficulty with incorporating “lots of choices” is that it can lead to kids going to 9 schools in 12 years or some such, and that probably isn’t so helpful. Furthermore, the kids doing 9th grade in junior high may have a difficult academic transition into an otherwise 9-12 high school because the courses don’t flow properly.
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It’s a difficult problem to make sure the course flow works, and to make sure that the flow of students in to and out of each school keeps the overall school population size balanced. Certainly possible, but certainly difficult.
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I do think that a “magnet” junior high school in Boston could have tremendous results in getting really promising kids more prepared for local public magnets like Boston Latin, local private schools like BC High, and even private boarding schools in the New England area. A nice feature is that you’ve got 2 years to get the kid ready to apply for a 4 year high school, and if he doesn’t get in to that school he can stay at the junior high and give it another shot, since lots of schools will accept entering 10th graders.
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I do think that cities must provide many different paths for public school kids. For one thing, it allows different models of education, helping to find better fits. For another thing, it does help to fend off the “charter schools” cry since there would be more choices, both of the “randomly chosen application” and the “exam” variety.
Disclosure: our family left the public school system because one of our children required a K-8 learning environment, but our school system refused to have one within its more than eight elementary schools, resolutely stating “one size fits all” – we were driven to incur debt for a private K-8.
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That being said, in a school system the size of Boston, or through multi-district cooperation, it would be better to offer more than one model for the 12-16 year old student.
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1. K-8 for those for whom, due to developmental issues such as executive function or rate of emotional maturation, this is the needed model.
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2. Middleschool, with or without a “vocational/technical” ornhyands on component.
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3. 7-12 facility, as a 200 pound 7th grader would need this, in some situations.
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4. Farm school/residential school on a regional basis where being home on weekends only is what is needed for any number of reasons AND large motor work is critical to development.
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5. Gender separated schooling for those who would benefit.
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6. Specialized learning style schooling [a visual learner trapped in an auditory learning model is in trouble, for example.]
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Kids are NOT identical widgets pumped down an assembly line. Public education fogets this at its peril.
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Deb
Agreed, great points. What are your thoughts about the districts with 2, 3 or 4 elementary and one or two middle schools with one high school? The smaller districts with less academic/music/art/technology that have close-knit community aspects but really limited choice? I am thinking about central and western ma districts as well as the regionals with students on buses for hours a day. For several years I have been advocating for regionalizing many special education services to provide “Specialized learning style schooling” like you describe in your point #6 (above). Enhancing choices is one reason I believe that many people jumped on the Charter School idea, the other was to
implodedivert public education. It would be exciting to see more dialog on options that meet student needs and are fiscally viable.And so does the BPS. That is sort of the model that the central administration seems to be working toward – a number of kinds of schools to meet varying needs and demands.
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I guess what has really bothered me is the dogmatic attacks against the middle school model all in the name of k-8 ideology. To me that wreaks of politics, not good policy.
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As for Junior Highs, I don’t think that there is any chance of going back to that model. And as a middle school teacher myself, I have to say that I agree with that.
As a general Boston resident, I say, bravo, yes, we need a place for 200-pound seventh graders or whatever.
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As the father of a daughter in third grade at a Boston public school, however, I say nothing terrifies me more than the thought of what happens to our daughter in sixth grade. Maybe I’m talking to the wrong people, but I have yet to hear a single good thing about the basic middle-school experience in Boston. And sorry, but when the local weekly paper has more police briefs about kids at the local middle school (typically for punching out teachers) than at the local high school, yes, I get worried. When our daughter’s school went K-8, yes, I was thrilled. It’s one less issue we have to worry about (do not get me started about advanced work, but that’s another issue).
It has come to a time in which our models and ideas of solutions to real problems simply cannot be worked out. Society itself is changing faster than studies of workable solutions can be made.
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The saddest thing, and I say this as a 51 year old is that chronological age does not equal maturity. I know lot’s of 26 year olds today that are less mature than my junior high classmates.
It is the job of those of us who are ‘adults” whatever our chronological age to do what we can so children have a real chance. I do not mean protecting children by giving them to social workers [stay away DSS !!!], I do mean not treating kids like widgets on a conveyor belt in schools to save money. While democracy means each child should have equal rights, it does not mean any two children are identical and restricting education to a “one size fits all” factory model in a time of rapid change is toxic – I am neither for nor against charter schools – I have no personal experience with them and, at any event, none were available that met any of my children’s needs.