"District after district is getting misled by thinking our K-8 schools are doing better than our middle schools," said Douglas Mac Iver, a Hopkins education researcher who has studied middle schools for more than a decade.
Shutting down a middle school in a neighborhood with gang violence and open-air drug markets to open a new school will not insulate the students from those influences, he said: "The grade span itself is not some magic bullet…"
Hard to teach
For several decades, educators have debated where to put 11- to 14-year-olds, the most difficult-to-teach age because of the rapid physical and emotional development that occurs during those years.
Historically, when most children left school after eighth grade, schools were organized in one building. Then, in the middle of the 20th century, educators decided to keep sixth-graders in elementary schools and move seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders into junior high schools.
Change came again in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when school districts began building middle schools for sixth through eighth grades, which today is the most common configuration, according to Alan Summers, director of professional development at the National Middle School Association.
"Currently, there is no research that says what should be the most effective grade configuration," Summers said.
The Mac Ivers' research did not look just at test scores from one grade at a middle school compared with the same grade at a K-8 school, as most school systems do.
The research went deeper, investigating how good a job middle schools did in educating the students over three years. The researchers looked at the growth students achieved in their three middle school years.
The research could help guide administrators deciding how to reform middle schools in their districts.
What it shows, Mac Iver said, is that the quality of the teaching, the curriculum and other factors matter just as much…
Math programs
Mac Iver said his research indicates that students who were taught using several different reform math programs scored higher than their peers who did not use those programs.
"Our research has consistently shown the positive effects of National Science Foundation-supported reform mathematics programs on student achievement," he said, adding that it must include coaching for teachers and other kinds of teacher training...
Teachers are key
Summers believes the pitfall in creating K-8 schools is that the school might not be large enough to provide teachers who specialize. For instance, a math teacher in a small school might have to teach Algebra I and other levels of math, or math and science, and therefore might not be as experienced in teaching one subject.
And he said that sometimes the developmental needs of middle-schoolers are lost in K-8 schools.
"The desire to go to K-8 is fine as long as you treat them as early adolescents and not elementary school kids," he said.
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