I hope the vigorous conversation we’ve seen so far on this question sparks a broader discussion, not only on the proper configuration—on their own as middle school or as part of elementary or high school-- of grades 5-8, but on the importance of what we teach those 10-13-year olds and what they learn.

Everybody now recognizes that preparing students for college means providing them with rigorous high school courses in math, English, science and other key areas so that they can not only go to college but graduate from college. In turn, students need rigorous pre-high-school preparation for those rigorous high school courses. A student who has not had pre-algebra in seventh or eighth grade will not be prepared to succeed in algebra-1, alegebra-2 and calculus in high school. I’d take it a step further: The student who has not received a strong grounding in elementary-school math will not be ready for even the best middle school math courses.

This points, I think, to two important facts about education. First, education is not modular but a continuum or pipeline. I welcome this discussion about the importance of middle school, but I think it’s a mistake to focus on any stage of education in isolation. Students deserve a strong education that begins on the first day of pre-school and doesn’t end until at least college graduation day. Failing to give students a strong education at the beginning or at any point along the pipeline seriously jeopardizes their chances of going to college or succeeding in college.

Which leads to the second point: Thinking about college and planning for college needs to begin not in the junior or senior years of high school with SATs and ACTs looming, but from the time a child starts school. Without starting to plan for college from the outset, students may not get the foundation in elementary school that prepares them progressively for middle school, high school and college. Not planning for college from the beginning also reduces the years parents have to save to pay the cost of going to college.

Of course, it’s never too late to start preparing for college. But for every year that a child’s education is not focused on college graduation as a goal, the mountain they will need to climb becomes higher and steeper.

We all know learning among 11-to-14 year olds comes with unique challenges: Hormones are raging. Bodies and brains are changing. These young learners are becoming complex thinkers, but still are plagued by the emotions associated with their ages.

Yet, Gayle Andrews is right. Efforts to support high school readiness cannot wait until high school. We’ve got lots of work to do in middle school, or perhaps better described as middle grades.

In the past 20 years, education reformers have focused on literacy, math and science at the K-4 and 9-12 levels and have left the middle school curriculum largely undefined. Now is the time to connect our investments. As they were originally conceived, “Middle Schools” were designed to do many things right. The middle school concept focuses on personalization for students and collaboration among teachers. What is left out of the middle schools design is the formal description of what middle school students should know and be able to do.

There is variance in the standards for middle school from state to state. Maybe the national standards movement will crystallize the vision for what students in the middle grades need to know and be able to do to be successful in a high school that is preparing students for college. The Alliance for Excellent Education rightly notes that unless the nation makes a greater investment in reading and writing instruction in grades 4-12, it will squander its investment in early childhood education and undermine its investments in the teaching of match, science and other subjects.

The middle grades, maybe more than any other group of students, have been shifted from one building to another, from one instructional strategy to another over the past 20 years. The shifts have been made more to satisfy the needs for facilities (and sometimes concerns about student safety), rather than on teaching and learning goals.

That, too, must change.

As some have noted, teachers of middle school-age children have been seen as generalists, caretakers who are there to usher students into high school. We need teachers who are intellectually interested in middle schoolers, who are deeply thinking about the pedagogy and classroom structure, and who have the energy to deal with the unique challenges of middle schoolers.

There needs to be a deep understanding of who these learners are at this point in their lives and who they are capable of becoming. They are often treated either as very large elementary kids or – more harmfully – as miniature high school kids. They are neither, psychologically or intellectually.

Finally, true reform must require us to look at many different options.

On top of establishing a formal description of middle school students should know and be able to do, other questions are worth consideration: Would a K-8 model provide more uniformity than a 5-8, 6-8, or 6-9 models? Should mandatory physical activities be incorporated into the school day for middle schoolers? Similarly, should service learning opportunities be considered to help students focus on others rather than themselves?

The nation's middle schools are often treated like middle children: overlooked and underserved. There is a critical relationship between middle school and postsecondary success, and the education community should seize the opportunity to make middle schools the next focus of school reform.

Middle schools provide a critical link to ensuring that all students receive an education that provides them with 21st century skills. The middle grades lay the foundation for students' success in high school and beyond. It is essential that middle school students are exposed to a broad, relevant and engaging curriculum that is tailored to their developmental needs and enables them to become independent and life-long learners. Similarly, middle school teachers have unique needs and require mentoring and ongoing professional development in order to prevent dropouts, expand college preparedness, and connect effectively with young adolescents.

While we have seen some improvements over the years in the quality of support and programs geared toward this level, middle schools are experiencing the same pressures to prepare students with limited resources. That’s why it’s encouraging to see the newly-proposed College Pathways and Accelerated Learning initiative and continued support for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP), whose mission is to significantly increase the number of students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education.

Thanks to Ms. Kinney and Ms. Williams, we have two good lists of the traits of effective middle schools. What strikes me most is that these lists look like good lists for schooling, in general. I think all schools—elementary schools, high schools, even community colleges, and university departments—work better when these traits are present. So perhaps middle school is not so different after all, and perhaps our current reforms, however focused they may be on the beginning and end of our system, will make a difference in the middle, too.

Additionally, there seems to be at least a rough consensus in our community here that middle school achievement is an accurate predictor of high school achievement. I wonder what the exact correlation is, for example, between final middle school GPA and final high school GPA? Or between middle school attendance and the high school dropout rate? If the correlations are high (and I suspect they are), then middle school’s purpose emerges quite naturally out of these statistics.

Middle school is the “crossroads.”

Look at these definitions of “crossroads” from Merriam Webster’s online dictionary: “a road that crosses a main road or runs cross-country between main roads”, “the place of intersection of two or more roads”, “a small community located at such a crossroads”, “a central meeting place”, “a crucial point especially where a decision must be made.”

That last one seems "spot on" to me.

We tend to think of the “K-12 system” as an uninterrupted continuum. But perhaps there’s a better governing metaphor: that of middle school as a junction where two roads—elementary and high school—intersect.

If, as research and common sense suggest, there is a high correlation between middle school performance and high school performance, then middle school’s purpose is to help kids “cross over” from elementary to high school. That may sound obvious but I think it has a two very important implications: This is where we must make our most significant interventions; and we shouldn’t throw kids across if they lack the ability to make it on their own.

It’s no coincidence that many cultures see the ages of 12 and 13 as significant milestones in the passage from childhood to adulthood. Even in our secular public schools, we have tacitly accepted this notion in our conception of middle school as a legitimate destination distinct from elementary and high school. This sense of middle school as an important place or point in time is a vital piece to the puzzle of middle school identity. Perhaps middle school is far more important than we have led ourselves to believe.

My father was Jewish. My mother was not so I was raised in a secular household. But I attended many Bar Mitvahs. One by one, I watched all of my male cousins learn Hebrew and participate in the ceremony. It looked hard to me, and I knew it took several months of practice.

One of my cousins was born with Down syndrome. He experienced significant developmental delays, especially in language. His family wondered if he could learn Hebrew and complete the Bar Mitvah ceremony at the same age that his brothers and cousins did. Should they even push him to try?

Ultimately, my cousin made the effort. Through his own persistence and good nature, and with tremendous support from his family and his synagogue, he was eventually successful. It was very, very hard for him; it took him many more hours to learn the language and to master the ceremony than typical kids. It was also a lot of work for his family and for his teachers as well. But everyone rose to the challenge and it was met. He crossed over into adulthood just like his brothers and cousins.

Perhaps middle school should work in a similar way. We say we don’t want to leave any child behind, but we currently have two problems with that, problems that are endemic to traditional education culture. First, we prefer to move kids up to the next grade regardless of the skills they have developed. In this sense, “grade level” merely means “age level” and often has little or nothing to do with educational need. Second, we seem inclined to bring our most urgent attention to this issue only at the end of high school when it is clearly too late to do much about it. So instead of worrying about the high school graduation rate, what if we brought the same attention and intensity to “graduating” from middle school?

It’s not hard to formulate the basic skills and knowledge required by the end of 8th grade:

• 9th grade reading and writing skills (easily measured with something like the Lexile system).
• Algebra I skills in math. (Yes, we should just move Algebra I to 8th grade and get over ourselves. Algebra I is not that hard.)
• A pre-high school standards-defined knowledge of US History, Government, and Geography.
• An equivalent knowledge base (though slightly smaller) in what we might call World Studies.
• A modest amount of foundational scientific knowledge that would facilitate entry into high school Biology, Chemistry, and Physics courses.
• A clearly stated plan for high school graduation, college attendance, and/or career preparation. (Subject to change, of course, as kids actually move through high school. But nobody leaves middle school without a plan.)

Would it be a bad idea to test for these things in middle school? And to give kids who don’t pass this test an extra year to finish? This extra year could be dedicated to an intense focus on the areas where students were struggling the most.

Everyone seems to agree these days that setting big goals, measuring progress, and providing individualized support are vital to student and school success. Why not just move the “finish line” a little closer and concentrate these efforts at the middle school level? Eighth grade, not twelfth grade, should be the “watershed” year. Instead of thinking of eighth grade as the year before high school, let’s rethink it as the most critical measuring mark in a child’s learning life—and then develop policies and practices accordingly.

By thinking of middle school as the “crossroads,” we can bring better interventions to bear on bigger problems at a time when we still have many years to address them. This would make middle school more important and middle school students more successful. It would also improve the percentage of students who succeed in high school and college, something Mr. Merisotis reminds us as being critical to our goal of more than doubling the percentage of college degree holders in our country over the next 15 years.

The debate over the most effective structure (middle school, no middle school) to ensure that students learn what they need to know to academically succeed is an important one. But let’s keep our eyes on the prize: we want middle school students to be successful, because what they know and understand is critical to their further educational success. It is especially critical because somewhere along the way to college the structure seems to fail our students. When asked, 90 percent of all eighth graders say they plan to go to college. The majority never make it because most low income and first generation students and parents do not know what it takes academically, financially, and socially to be prepared for college. The students who fail to realize their college dreams face the difficult life of the working poor.

One way we’ve tried to address this challenge is through KnowHow2GO, a media and ground campaign that clearly tells students the critical steps they need to take to prepare for college. This Ad Council campaign is coupled with a national effort to build sustainable high quality networks of organizations to support students in grades 8 to 10 and help prepare them for college success. Networks of community-based and education organizations support the campaign on the ground in sixteen states by providing services directly to students.

Offering the most effective educational structures possible for these students is a critical tool to reaching the national goal of 60% of Americans holding high quality postsecondary degrees and credentials by 2025. Ultimately, however, the educational structures must ensure that students have what they need to achieve college success—not just complete high school—because that is clearly now a prerequisite for a middle class life in 21st century America.

I would just note that Trish Williams seems to be saying that the middle schools that produce academic success are those that have rejected the tenets of "middle school-ism" and reoriented themselves to academic achievement. I'm not a bit surprised. But if you go back through the origins and guiding principles of the "middle school movement" you will see that such schools are deviant. I say bravo and let's have more of them.

All, I wanted to direct your attention to a new study on Middle Schools by EdSource released today, Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better

Trish Wiliams, executive director of EdSource, has already joined the conversation

Here is a link to the narrative summary of the study. Check out page three of the summary (p 5 on scribd); there is a scatter plot graph that suggests school practices are a more important factor for performance than socioeconomic status.

Trish Williams, executive director of EdSource, submitted the following to this week's question:

Excellent and timely question! In 2008 there were several studies released (Kurleander, Reardon, et al; Zau and Betts) indicating that student failure in high school could be predicted as early as late elementary school by student test scores, course grades, attendance records, and behavior reports. EdSource read these with interest and thought, “If the middle grades are the last best chance to get all students on track, why isn’t there more focus on reform at this level, on finding out what practices make the most difference?”

We launched a study to find out. Several of your panelists have talked about whether grade configuration is at issue. Sandy Kress emphasizes the need for a demanding curriculum and use of interventions for the many who are behind. Chester Finn believes one problem is with the middle school movement’s emphasis on the “child” not the “academics,” and Diane Ravitch appears to agree. Steve Peha asks: What is the purpose of middle school? This question hits at the heart of the issue, because the beliefs middle level educators hold about the purpose or “mission” of middle school have determined the kinds of organizational and instructional processes they put in place and are satisfied with. And some of these philosophies or ideologies are strongly held, as in “This We Believe.” Lots of beliefs, scant research, and even less research based upon student outcomes.

On Wednesday February 24 EdSource will release what we think is the largest study of middle grades education ever conducted. Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better is based upon an extensive set of three surveys covering a combined total of over 900 items. Conducted in California, the study’s respondents included 303 school principals; 3,752 English Language Arts and Math teachers grades 6-8; and 157 different district superintendents. The unit of study was the school, with a school average of 88% of teachers responding. The sample included 27 charters and 5 CMOs; 50% of the schools were grades 6-8, 25% were 7-8, and 25% were K-8. The dependent variables were the 2009 California Standards Tests in ELA and Math for the 204,000 students in our 303 schools. We had a longitudinal file with scores for all students covering four years so that we could control for prior student achievement. We also controlled, in our regression analyses, for student demographics and other relevant factors.

EdSource entered the study with no preconceived ideas about what would matter most. Our survey questions focused on concrete practices and policies: what is in place at your school or district? How often? To what extent? We analyzed ten broad domains of effective practice as well as grade configuration.

The study was designed to identify the practices and policies that differentiate higher from lower performing middle grades schools that serve similar student populations.

The major contribution of this study is the identification of numerous, actionable inter-related and coherent practices that are leading to gains in middle grades student outcomes.

But the single most important overarching finding was in how these higher performing schools create a shared, school-wide intense focus on the improvement of student outcomes:

• they set measurable goals on standards based tests and benchmark tests across all proficiency levels, grades, and subjects;
• their school mission is “future oriented,” with curricula and instruction designed to prepare students to succeed in a rigorous high school curriculum;
• they include improvement of student outcomes as part of the evaluation of the superintendent, the principal, and the teachers;
• and they communicate to parents and students their responsibility as well for student learning, including parent contracts, turning in homework, attending class, and asking for help when needed.

This large-scale study documents the role of the superintendent, principal, and teachers in aligning a standards based curriculum and instruction, making extensive use of student assessment data to improve instruction and practice, and implementing a wide array of required and voluntary intervention strategies to get struggling students on track.

I hope you all will take a look, and share your questions and feedback.

You can find the study at www.edsource.org/middle-grades-study.html

If its important to have more students graduate high school college-ready, then its time to give middle grades educator, their practices, and their students more attention and support.

Patti Kinney, associate director of  Middle Level Services for the National  Association of Secondary Schools Principals, submitted the following:

Gayle does a thorough and eloquent job of stating the case that more attention needs to be directed at the middle grades and I couldn’t agree more with her analysis. The sad truth is that while high schools bear the brunt of the drop-out statistics, students become disengaged from school far earlier than that and waiting to address these issues in high school is far too late.

We know what constitutes quality middle grades education for young adolescents – and it’s not a matter of grade configuration. There are good 6-8 schools and poor ones; good K-8 or 6-12 schools and poor ones – it’s really about how the young adolescents within the school are being educated. Regardless of the school structure, young adolescents are capable of meeting high academic standards when they are in a supportive, personalized environment and taught by teachers who can challenge them, connect with them and care for them.

The National Association of Secondary School Principals and National Middle School Association (both members of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform) focused on this concern in a joint advertorial published in Education Week in September 2008. Then-presidents Larry Bradley (NASSP) and Theresa Hinkle (NMSA) listed several starting points to use when addressing the issue:

• create seamless transitions from the time students enter middle school until they graduate from high school, and ensure that curriculum, instruction, and assessment are aligned and targeted to meet the needs of every student they serve.

• offer a relevant, challenging curriculum that supports all students in meeting high standards, is taught in ways that engage students, and is assessed by multiple measures.

• understand and appreciate the unique nature and needs of the students they serve.

• tailor instruction and programs to recognize the significant changes in physical, emotional, social, and cognitive maturity that occur between the time students enter middle school and graduate from high school.

• promote professional conversations between faculties that move beyond the basics of curriculum articulation and delve into topics that genuinely personalize the learning and the school experience for all students at all grade levels.

• ensure that all social, economic, and racial/ethnic groups have open and equal access to challenging activities and learning.

• engage families in the educational process in a meaningful manner.

• support federal investments in both middle level and high school education such as the Success in the Middle and the Graduation Promise Act

It’s interesting to read the various responders interpretation of what the middle school “movement” is all about – for a first-hand look at what it is really about, the four best sources that spell it out are Breaking Ranks in the Middle (NASSP, 2006), This We Believe: Keys to Educating Young Adolescents (National Middle School Association, 2010), the Schools to Watch Criteria (National Forum) and Turning Points 2000 (Jackson & Davis, 2000). All of these documents call for an engaging, challenging curriculum taught in a manner that responds to the needs of young adolescents, in smaller, personalized environments (think school within a school) and in ways that connect curriculum, instruction and assessment to real-life experiences (interdisciplinary and relevant) – many of the practices mentioned by the responders who do not appear to favor middle schools..

Middle grades school improvement is not easy and there’s no silver bullet – it takes hard work and commitment and understanding. But young adolescents are worth it and we must all serve as their advocates and continue to draw attention to their needs and press for their achievement.

Mr. Kress is exactly right in his assessment of why middle school is here to stay. Parental discomfort over certain mixes of students drives the segmenting of our system. The only mitigating factor is school size. When schools are very small, parents seem less concerned about K-8, K-12, and 6-12 configurations.

But many of our middle schools hold 1000 kids or more; many of our elementary schools have 500 plus; and modern high schools take on 2000, 3000, or even 4000 students at a time. Reconfiguring the grade levels won’t be possible without building many more smaller schools—a highly unlikely outcome even if national policy suddenly shifted toward the middle grades.

So I’d like to pose those existential questions once again: What is the purpose of middle school? What should middle school be? And I’d love to get some answers here from our talented and prolific group of experts—or from experts outside our cozy forum (via our excellent editor).

As so many of us have noted, middle school is a big deal that gets surprisingly little attention. I believe strongly that until we understand the purpose of middle school, it will continue to languish simply because no one knows exactly which way to push it.

So who wants to give it a friendly shove in the right direction this week?

I agree with Checker Finn's blast at "the middle school movement." It generally has all the deficiencies he describes.

But, with few exceptions, most parents of younger children will not permit 7th and 8th graders to be brought into their elementary schools. And most parents of 7th and 8th graders don't want their children in mega-high schools with 17 and 18 year-olds.

So, while we can talk school structure all we want, we're going to have middle schools educating virtually all students in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades for the foreseeable future.

The challenge for us is how to change the organizational principles of these schools and to attract principals and teachers who know and can teach a demanding curriculum, understand and use interventions for the many who are behind, and deal with adolescence. I've seen schools where all this is done extremely well.

"College/career readiness" depends as much on success here as anything we do in high schools.

We obviously have a problem with the middle grades--that's when student achievement in the U.S. begins to fall off a cliff--but it's not obvious that the solution lies with middle schools. Tom Vander Ark has it about right: if stronger pupil performance is the goal, middle schools are not a very good mechanism for producing it. Sure, some of them--he cites the KIPP example--are fine. But they're exceptions to the regnant ideology and educational philosopy of the "middle school movement". That movement arose in reaction to the "junior high school" of yesterday and in response to the view that early adolescents need TLC and understanding more than they need algebra, geography and sentence-diagramming. Advocates proudly declared that "we teach the child, not the subject" and put empathy--ah, those poor 13 year olds with all their insecurities and hormonal storms--ahead of academic achievement. (Check out pp. 5-18 of this five-year-old Fordham study by Cheri Pierson Yecke: http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/2960_MayhemFINAL.pdf.) This may or may not have been a good idea at the time but it's not what other countries do and it's not what the United States needs in 2010. Though grade configuration per se doesn't matter all that much, the combination of isolating early adolecents in separate middle schools and having them taught there by people who have drunk the Kool-aid of the "middle school movement" is a big mistake.

Gosh, it looks like everybody’s right so far.

Ms. Ravitch wants “genuine, coherent, substantive curriculum.” Sounds great. Mr. Kress has many smart things to say. His concern about low levels of adolescent literacy is the issue I confront most often in my own work. Not only is it real, but since middle school is not designed to address this problem, the inability of kids to read and write prior to entering high school makes middle school literacy one of the linchpin issues of reform, in my opinion. Mr. Vander Ark has a no-nonsense solution: no middle school. He is correct, in fact, that middle school is unnecessary: K-8, K-12, and 6-12 arrangements seem to work better, especially when grade level populations are relatively small. Finally, our editor poses the question, “Are middle schools being overlooked?” I would say the answer is most definitely “Yes,” and that our mini-panel of experts this morning tells us exactly why this is so.

Middle school is overlooked because middle school doesn’t look out for itself. It knows it has a problem but it also knows that it doesn’t have what it needs to fix it—even when solutions, as suggested here, are readily available. As a result, it lays low, hoping no one will notice. Middle school doesn’t know who it is or why it exists. If it were a superhero, its name would be “Existential Crisis Man".

Think about it from a teacher’s perspective. If you care about literacy, basic math, and social skills, you go elementary. If you care about content mastery, coaching, or college and career prep, you go high school. The purposes of these two ends of our system are relatively clear. That means it’s easier to define problems, undertake initiatives, make concrete commitments, and move toward measurable goals.

But what is the purpose of middle school?

Middle school replaced “junior high” which existed at all simply by accident. In the early 1970s, a set of theories about children gave rise to the “Middle School Movement.” However, like so many educational movements, this one was well intentioned but incorrect, or at least unnecessary.

The truth is this: for some students, the middle years have to be devoted to a completion of elementary school. If you can’t read, write, or do basic math in 6th grade, there’s no point in hustling you on to high school, or even into Ms. Ravitch’s world of new and better curriculum. For other students, the middle years are truly high school prep, or even a high school head start.

But because we choose to educate children by age rather than by need, both groups of kids end up in the same middle schools. This doesn’t have to be a disaster. There are wonderful ways of educating kids of different abilities in the same schools and classrooms. However, we don’t train middle school teachers to use these approaches, and the structure of middle school discourages their application.

Middle school, because of its traditionally departmentalized nature, tilts toward high school and away from elementary school by default. This has at least two critical consequences with regard to Mr. Kress’s point of view on the importance of literacy and Ms. Ravitch’s point of view on the importance of rigorous content. First, in middle school, kids lose half their Language Arts time relative to elementary school. Second, it’s unlikely that a middle school student’s Language Arts teacher actually knows how to teach reading or writing. Much more likely is the case that a middle school Language Arts teacher will be a teacher of literature. There’s nothing wrong with literature, of course—unless your students can’t read it or write intelligent things about it. Low levels of literacy make it tough to tackle literature, yet that’s what we train most middle school Language Arts teachers to teach. Low levels of literacy also make it hard for kids to crunch through rich curriculum, which is what most middle school content area teachers would like to teach.

Therefore, we’re back once again to the existential problem: Why does middle school exist? Moreover, it is precisely our reluctance to deal honestly with this question that the problem of middle school plagues us and why middle school always seems to take a back seat to beginning and end of the system. We prefer to overlook middle school because we know that fixing it will require something dramatic.

Consider this: it took all of about four hours this morning for Ms. Ravitch, Mr. Kress, and Mr. Vander Ark to propose excellent and reasonable approaches. Even an inveterate policy nitpicker like me won’t argue with their ideas. My mother, a middle school teacher for many years, echoed a similar sentiment: “Middle school is worthless. Why don’t we just let the kids stay at home until 9th grade?” Her comment—spoken only somewhat in jest—stemmed from her realization that everything in our city’s middle school curriculum was basically a review of 4th and 5th grade, but with longer assignments and more homework. Taking a shot at middle school means taking out the big artillery. No wonder it hides in the shadows.

So if a teacher who was there at the beginning of the middle school movement recognized that it didn’t work back then, and if we realize that it doesn’t work now, why isn’t middle school under the microscope of reform? Because no one can agree on what form it should take. That’s the beauty of K-8, K-12, and 6-12 solutions. They tackle the existential crisis head on. However, our nation is not likely to move in this direction; or if it does, it will move only grudgingly, and in increments so small as to never address the problem fully.

As a nation, we are inherently hung up on school structure. After all, structure is just about the only thing a non-educator can understand about education: when my kids are a certain age, they go to a certain kind of school. This is not only a rite of passage but also a cultural constant, one that has held true since at least the 1950s. Changing the grade level structure of school, though it really is the best idea, is simply too hard for our nation to swallow—and charters will only be able to take it on in piecemeal fashion.

Therefore, with all due respect to Mr. Vander Ark, who is, I believe, 100% correct, I think we have to plot a different course for middle school, a course that combines Mr. Kress’s concern for literacy with Ms. Ravitch’s concern for content.

Why couldn’t middle school look like this: one hour of reading, one hour of writing, one hour of math, and two hours of interdisciplinary study? I use the term “interdisciplinary study” intentionally not to mean a little Social Studies, Science, and whatever. But actual content, new content that has never before existed in schools, content that spans the traditional disciplines, that is technology rich, and hormone-racing brain friendly, content designed to help kids of a certain age understand the essential ideas that will serve them best in high school, college, and beyond.

Kids in the middle years are just beginning to connect the dots in life. Some of this surely has to do with their social, emotional, and sexual maturation. But some of it also has to do with brain growth. There are certain kinds of thinking that 12- and 13-year old brains can engage in that 9- and 10-year old brains cannot—and that 16- and 17-year old brains aren’t as interested in anymore. We could choose to take advantage of this with a rigorous conceptually-organized interdisciplinary curriculum—with appropriate degrees of choice—that differed from both elementary and high school, but that prepared kids for their next experiences of learning and life. As other countries do for kids at this age, we could also help students select a pre-college focus of study. Imagine how much better high school would work if the kids who went there knew why they were going. At the same time, a strict focus on the skills of reading, writing, and math would assure that all middle schoolers emerged after 8th grade ready to tackle the academic challenges of the next level.

In addition to changes in curriculum and structure, one policy change would make middle school work much better: retain kids at 5th grade who aren’t ready to enter, and retain kids at 8th grade who aren’t ready to leave. Would it be wrong to give some kids a little more time? Why send kids on to the next level who aren’t ready to be successful? In this way, middle school could function as a true “crossing point” in a child’s education. Every kid who made it through the middle would almost certainly succeed in the end.

Retention policies would offer another important incentive: the incentive to get kids the help they need when they need it, rather than just passing the buck up to the next set of teachers. No elementary school can tolerate filling up with extra “5th graders” year after year. Nor can any middle school tolerate a similar excess of perpetual “8th graders.” Isolating struggling 5th and 8th graders in their own “special” schools could be outlawed to avoid stigmatization and the incentive for districts to warehouse their lowest kids.

This brings up a very important issue that I wish we would consider carefully as a nation when it comes to testing and accountability. Testing is very costly. It requires time and money. It also takes our teachers away from teaching and focuses their energies on test preparation instead. Personally, I don’t think test prep is evil. A little bit, especially at just the right time, is not only appropriate but advantageous as well. However, testing every year between grades 3 and 8 is overkill.

The key years, the “gateway” years as some of us call them, are grades 1, 3, 5, and 8. We would want to test near the end, at 11th grade most likely, to see how kids finish up, but by then we’re looking for summative information not formative information. There’s no research data I’m aware of which suggests that testing at grades 4, 6, or 7 provides any additional diagnostic value to students, teachers, parents, schools, or school systems. Yet anyone who has taught 1st, 3rd, 5th, or 8th grade knows that these years represent high stakes milestones in a child’s development. Why not put our high stakes tests where they belong and save some money, time, and teacher focus while we’re at it?

If we add Mr. Kress’s literacy emphasis to Ms. Ravitch’s content emphasis, and we throw in Mr. Peha’s scheduling and retention ideas, we might just come up with a middle school model that works. And if we don't, then we really should take Mr. Vander Ark’s advice and get rid of middle school altogether, even if it makes us a little nervous.

Now, for those of us who don’t live in the middle school world, the problems and solutions of middle school may seem obvious. Nevertheless, I imagine the issue is murkier for people who actually work in middle schools and for districts that have them. I don’t want to appear insensitive to this. Personally, I find middle school kids to be by far the most challenging to teach. Moreover, I have great respect for those teachers and administrators who have truly mastered this most difficult spectrum of the system.

However, even among the amazing teachers and principals I have met in middle schools across the country, there is the near-unanimous feeling that something isn’t quite right. Kids come in with terrible deficits yet there isn’t the time or the means to help them. Other kids are utterly bored at a time in their lives when being utterly bored is practically a curriculum all its own. I’ve worked in middle schools all over the country that have a sense of their problems, yet can’t implement solutions even when they know what those solutions are. Clearly, there’s more going on here than test data alone can show. Perhaps those of us with easy opinions need to spend more time on the hard linoleum floors of middle school classrooms.

If we decide to keep middle school as a structural component of K-12 education, we must change it dramatically. With reference to those who work in middle schools, we must help them understand their purpose, and we must give them the training, the time, and the resources they need to fulfill it. We will also need policy changes, like the retention and intervention policies I suggest, to make middle school make sense for the children who attend and for the adults who seek to make their attendance truly worthwhile. Fixing middle school means fixing middle school structure, culture, curriculum, and purpose. It’s a complete overhaul. But one that must be undertaken before we can hope to make progress on our national goals of college and career-readiness.

One of the big problems in middle schools is the absence of a genuine, coherent, substantive curriculum. It would help students in middle school if they had a solid program in history, the arts, science, civics, geography, mathematics, and literature. Unfortunately, many "experts" think that the problems of adolescence preclude any real engagement with challenging ideas and insist that adolescents should study the problems and issues of adolescence. This is wrong. Adolescents are idealistic and hungry to explore a wider world. Schools should engage their hearts and minds with great ideas, great adventures in science, history, and literature, and great experiences in the arts, and stop prying them with pap. No wonder they are bored and restless.

Thank you, Eliza and Gayle, for starting up this most important discussion.

There have been some initiatives across the nation to address the problem of students getting so far behind in middle school they're unprepared to take credit courses in high school. We began an adolescent reading program at the end of the Bush administration. The current Congress has maintained some interest. In states, such as ours, middle school math initiatives around pre-algebra readiness have been started.

But this activity is way too limited and piecemeal. It boggles the mind how it has become so fashionable to establish such a bright focus on upping high school standards without first establishing a firm foundation upon which middle school students could become truly ready for high school. This shows how little we truly understand system change.

When we started the federal adolescent reading program, i remember showing Senator Kennedy's staff the NAEP scores for children of color in the 8th grade. They were virtually in the single digits as to proficiency!

And, yet, we wonder why we have a 30% dropout rate. We wonder why standards are so low in high school. We wonder why so few students graduate high school ready to do freshman level work at the community college without need of remediation.

Our high school teachers were trained to teach high school courses. Many of them want to teach literature or algebra or biology or world history, not remediate for basic skills that should have been garnered in the late elementary or middle grades.

This is not to say, as Don Deschler has shown us, that we don't need recovery and acceleration efforts in the high school for youngsters who are several grades behind. But unless we want high schools to be "critical disease centers" or "dropout factories," we'd better get serious about keeping youngsters on grade level in the middle years. This is why KIPP and YES are so reluctant to take on high schools and far prefer 6-12 schools, so they have enough time to take students who are a couple of grades behind and get them to college-ready upon graduation.

Happily, as Gayle points out, we know a lot from scientific research and proven practice about how best to construct reading, writing, and math interventions to do far better work in the middle grades. We know more about teacher knowledge and skills that can garner greater achievement of middle schoolers. Frankly, of all the work I'm currently doing and promoting, these efforts at improvement in the middle schools may be the most important and gratifying.

But, back to the question, let's be more constructively critical of plans for greater college/career readiness, including those that narrowly focus merely on raising standards. If they don't have robust efforts based on strong research and proven practice, with clear goals and accountability, to lift students first to true HIGH SCHOOL READINESS, they "ain't worth a hill of beans."

I'm not a fan of middle schools and find the growing urban trend toward K-8 or 6-12 configurations to be promising. K-12 charter networks like Aspire confirm this trend by creating paired elementary and secondary schools.

Giant urban middle schools are nearly as irretrievable as giant high schools--the shift to multiple teachers in an big anonymous environment is the beginning of the end for many students.

The 'forgotten middle' was in too many places the 'forgotten academics.' KIPP demonstrated that the middle grades can be academically challenging and supportive simultaneously. Successful middle grade programs appears to 1) be academically challenging, 2) be a connected part of a K-12 academic sequence, and 3) incorporate youth development principals. And, by the way, KIPP and Aspire and other good school developers stick to the 100-students-per-grade formula. Until we develop more sophisticated personalization strategies, size matters in the middle perhaps most of all.

Gayle Andrews, president-elect, National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, submitted the following:

Has the nation overlooked middle schools in the dialogue about college and career ready standards? In a word, “yes.” The education of students in grades 5-8 is too often overlooked, underserved on nearly all policy levels, and under-resourced while policy and resources flow to the “bookends” of education P-16: high school/college on one end and early learning on the other. ACT’s recent report, The Forgotten Middle, underscores the reality that is lost in the shadows between the bookends: far too many students pass 8th grade exit tests but arrive at high school so far behind academically that they cannot become ready for college and career regardless of the rigor of the high school curriculum, the quality of high school instruction, the difficulty of the high school graduation test, or the amount of effort that the students themselves put into their coursework.

As for dropout prevention, students gradually disengage from their schooling, often beginning that process in the middle grades and dropping out figuratively, in spirit, long before they can drop out literally. In short, the middle grades cannot be ignored in national and state efforts to reduce dropout rates and improve high school completion rates, college preparedness, and career readiness.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, led by Robert Balfanz, used longitudinal methods to follow almost 13,000 Philadelphia students from 1996-2004, from the time when those students were 6th graders to one year past when they would have graduated if they had graduated on time. The research uncovered four critical predictive indicators that can identify sixth graders likely to drop out: (1) failing math; (2) failing English/language arts; (3) attending school less than 80% of the time; (4) receiving a poor final behavior grade in one class. Course failure was a better predictor of drop out than test scores. The four flags combined were 34 times more likely to predict graduation than student race.

A common response to students who struggle in the sixth grade is to wait and hope they grow out of it or to characterize the difficulty as temporary as students adjust to a new school, more challenging curriculum, or less personalized attention. But the Johns Hopkins research demonstrates that these 6th graders don’t recover from these early struggles. Instead, they drop out. Intervention in the middle grades is both productive and absolutely essential.

The National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform (www.mgforum.org), a special collaborative of major leaders and organizations whose work intersects with the middle grades, is committed to making middle grades education academically excellent, developmentally responsive, and socially equitable, all facets of an education that prepares students for high school completion and college and career readiness. The Forum’s members—representing educators, researchers, national associations, professional organizations, and foundations—share a sense of urgency that high-performing schools with middle grades become the norm, not the exception, in this country.

Such schools respond so that every student:

• Experiences an academically excellent, relevant, meaningful, and rigorous curriculum that fosters critical thinking and problem-solving;
• Learns in a safe and healthy environment responsive to the needs and interests of young adolescents. Small learning communities and learning teams ensure each student is known well by adults who care and communicate high expectations;
• Has access to high-quality classes and the support they need to achieve at high levels regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic level.

The good news is we know what works. The National Forum’s state Schools to Watch (STW) initiative is operating in 18 states. STW identifies schools and fosters middle grades improvement through a rigorous set of 37 criteria for high-performing middle grades schools. In 2010 nearly 200 schools across the country are showing how to make high performance middle grades schools a reality that emerges from the shadows between the bookends. (www.schoolstowatch.org)

In line with the National Forum’s sense of urgency around improving the education of young adolescents, the Success in the Middle Act of 2009 represents policymakers’ recognition that the Federal government has a role to play in middle grades education. The most recent version of the legislation, introduced in late June 2009, creates a competitive grant program for states with three primary stated purposes:

· To ensure that all students in the middle grades (grades 4-8) are taught in an academically rigorous curriculum with effective supports so that students complete the middle grades ready for success in high school and postsecondary endeavors;

· To improve state and district policies and programs relating to the academic achievement of students in the middle grades;

· To develop and implement effective models for struggling students in the middle grades.

Let’s pull the middle grades out of the shadows with legislation like Success in the Middle, build on what works in middle grades Schools to Watch all over the country to support high school completion, and demonstrate that we’ve gotten the message: college and career readiness doesn’t begin in high school, and efforts to support that readiness cannot wait until high school