The most telling part of yesterday's Oregonian story about Superintendent Vicki Phillip's plan to close two middle schools and send the students to Jefferson as a reconfigured grade 7-12 school was this buried gem about the academic performance of middle schools:
"Today, most of the nation's sixth- through eighth-graders attend middle schools.
"But middle schools have never delivered academically. A 2004 review by the RAND Corp. found that about 70 percent of eighth-graders in U.S. public schools were not proficient in reading, math and science on national achievement tests. RAND recommended that districts consider groupings other than middle schools."
That comes as no surprise to me. My entire family went to K-8 schools before entering high school. I never did understand the rationale for the middle school model in the first place, let alone similarly structured junior high schools.
I have nothing against 7-12 schools (I taught in one for two years), but here's a better idea: shut down all the middle schools and send the students back to grade schools-- K-8 grade schools!
Middle school reform is based entirely on emulating grade schools. What better way to finish that reform than by turning middle schools back into grade schools? The self-contained grade school classroom is a perfect small community of learning, the most fundamental feature of a restructured school. It allows for integrated instruction and provides the flexibility to group and regoup students according to their needs and abilities. Scheduling would be a breeze, all handled by teachers working as a team across two, maybe three grade levels. The possibilities are endless.
Grade school teachers see themselves as generalists rather than specialists. That's a good thing, something that's missing in the increasingly subject-oriented culture of the average middle school. Most middle school teachers are trained and certified in a particular academic "field". If truth be told, most would rather teach in a high school.
I was high school language arts and reading teacher before I took a job as a developmental reading instructor at a Hillsboro junior high school. It wasn't long before the school reform bug infected me and a few other like-minded teachers. After a few long, but exciting, years of hard work, I found myself teaching math (up to Algebra I), life science, health (including sex ed), and social studies. Even P.E. My last few years at Evergreen Middle School as a team teacher were by far the best, and most fulfilling, of my public education career.
The good news in Portland is that high schools are trying to reform themselves with "academies", or schools within schools. They're trying to reinvent themselves as smaller, more intimate, communities of learning, to better connect with their students
The bad news is that funding shortages may undermine those efforts. Portland's school choice policy doesn't help matters either.
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In a related development, NEA President Reg Weaver reports that a National Conference of State Legislatures task force has issued a scathing critique of the No Child Left Behind Act:
"The Republicans and Democrats on this Task Force found serious 'methodological flaws' in the law's centerpiece—its Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) provisions—noting that schools must be evaluated by comparing 'successive groups of students against a static, arbitrary standard, not by tracking the progress of the same group of students over time.' And the state legislators recommended that the states be given greater flexibility in meeting the AYP objectives. What's more, they called for allowing multiple measures in evaluating student performance rather than relying exclusively on standardized tests."
I've written before that test scores are no measure of a school's performance. Authentic assessments, which measure what students can actually do rather than what they know, in combination with a survey of a school's instructional programs, might yield a clearer picture of how well a school is functioning. It has been predicted that well over half the schools in the country will fail to meet NCLB's AYP standards by 2014.
As I pointed out in a previous post, not a single Portland high school currently meets the draconian (and punitive) federal standards.
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