The Education Gadfly has a glowing review of Cheri Yecke's new Fordham Foundation report, Mayhem in the Middle. It's online in .pdf format. The middle of what, you ask?
American middle schools have become the places "where academic achievement goes to die." So says Cheri Yecke, K-12 Education Chancellor of Florida and author of the new Fordham report Mayhem in the Middle: How middle schools have failed America, and how to make them work. Today's middle schools have succumbed to a concept of "middle schoolism" in which a strong academic curriculum is traded for one that focuses more on emotional and social development, and less on learning the basics. And the achievement data reflects "middle schoolism's" results...According to Fordham President Chester E. Finn, Jr., "Trying to fix high schools while ignoring middle schools is like bandaging a wound before treating it for infection."
That the middle grades can be a time of strong academic growth and marked achievement in core skills and knowledge is demonstrated by numerous effective school examples. Though youngsters between the ages of 10 and 15 can be ornery and exasperating, they can also learn lots of math and history, plenty of literature and science, and an abundance of art and music... Yecke focuses instead on the education philosophy, assumptions, goals, and expectations that drive a school spanning the middle grades and those who lead and teach in it. If they worship at the altar of middle schoolism, their theology tells them not to dwell overmuch on academics; other things matter more. If these leaders and teachers subscribe to standards and results-based accountability, however, they will pay greater heed to their students' long-term prospects than to their short-run adjustments, and to the academic gains that play so large a role in these youngsters' futures. Yecke's goal is to show why middle schoolism should be consigned to history's dustbin—another education fad that, however well intended, now needs to be retired.
Yecke, and Checker, aren't the only ones to quibble with the "middle-school theology." At least one researcher believes gifted children are routinely shortchanged by middle school policies.
Posted by kswygert at September 19, 2005 02:53 PM