Report Questions Wisdom Of Separate Middle Schools
The nation's middle schools have far to go to dispel their reputations as an educational "Bermuda Triangle," a report released last week by a prestigious think tank suggests. Researchers from the rand Corp. portray the middle school years, typically spanning grades 6-8, as a time when American adolescents feel unsafe, socially isolated, and academically unchallenged.
What's more, the report questions whether students teetering at the brink of adolescence should be in separate schools at all during such a critical, emotionally turbulent stage in their lives.
"It turns out the onset of puberty is really a bad reason to try to move kids to another structure and to another school altogether," said the report's primary author, Jaana Juvonen. "Middle schools, intermediate schools, and junior highs became the norm more because of social and demographic reasons, and not so much because of any empirical...
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