Paul S. George

Tracking and Ability Grouping in the Middle School: Ten Tentative Truths

(1993). Tracking and Ability Grouping in the Middle School: Ten Tentative Truths. Middle School Journal: Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 17-24.

K-8 or Not? Reconfiguring the Middle Grades

In the last five years or so, a growing number of large, urban school districts have moved to close what are termed “troubled” 6-8 middle schools and have opened K-8 schools in their place: Boston, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Newark, New Orleans, New York City, Oklahoma City, and Philadelphia have been among the first to do so. For example, New York City, one of the nation’s largest school systems, has announced plans to eliminate two-thirds of its middle schools and replace them with K-8 or 6-12 schools (Gewertz, 2004). In Baltimore, the process has been underway for several years, and in the fall of 2004, there were more than 30 K-8 schools open in that city system. Cleveland and Cincinnati have completed the process. Chicago, of course, has always had K-8 schools, resisting the middle school movement that swept the rest of the nation. With little fervent support for its continuation, and a preference for an alternative gathering momentum in major urban American school districts, it is possible that a substantial reconfiguration of schooling for young adolescents will continue (Nussbaum, 2004).

Renewing the Middle School: The Manufactured Crisis1

www.nmsa.org 51 Editor’s note: Renewing the Middle School is a special threepart series in which Paul George, an eminent scholar in the field of middle grades education, offers his view on the status of middle grades education and its prospects for the future. In this part of the series, Dr. George responds strongly to some of the criticism that has been aimed at American public schools and middle schools, in particular.

Revitalizing Middle Schools: The Guilford County Process.

In many school districts, the implementation and operation of middle schools may have had much in common with the building of sand castles (Tye, 1985). The transition to middle school and the construction of sand castles both require a great deal of effort and plan ning, inspire a great deal of enthusiasm, generate high levels of creativity, involve many people often working together in teams, and both middle schools and sand castles frequently produce new structures and strate gies that are exciting to behold. Creation of such struc tures, whether sand castles or middle schools, can be great fun. Unfortunately, as with sand castles, in too many school districts the creation of middle schools has even tually yielded to the educational equivalents of wind, pounding waves, marauding teenagers, and too little attention to maintenance after the excitement of cre ation passes. In dozens of districts, the result has been the eventual erosion of the components of the middle school concept and the reappearance of an organiza tion and school program that resemble older and less effective educational structures. It is also true that, like a half-finished and abandoned sand castle whose cre

Renewing the Middle School: The Lesson of Hansel and Gretel for Middle Schools.

Editors note: Renewing the Middle School is a special three-part series in which Paul George, an eminent scholar in the field of middle grades education, offers his view on the current status of middle grades education and its prospects for the future. In the final installment of the series, Dr. George draws wisdom from the story of Hansel and Gretel to recommend a path forward and to call us all to action in the critical work of educating every young adolescent. I believe that middle school educators can learn an important lesson about survival during difficult times from the classic German fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, two young adolescents who faced great difficulty. Fairy tales like this one have been popular with generation after generation of children and families because they deal with hopes and fears that every child and every adult deals with, regardless of time or place. Hansel and Gretel are the children of a kind and loving woodcutter, living in a forest home with a hateful and selfish stepmother during very difficult times. Things get so bad, with starvation a real possibility, that the hateful stepmother finally persuades Hansel and Gretels father to do the unthinkable and abandon the children in the woods. So, one night the heartbroken father leads his children deep into the woods and abandons them there. Unbeknownst to the father and stepmother, however, Hansel overhears them planning and gathers up a pocketful of bright, white stones that, reflecting the moonlight, will lead them back home even in the dark of night. And they do find their way back home. It is not long, however, before the selfish and hateful stepmother convinces their father to once again lead them even deeper into the dark forest and abandon them there. Without the shiny white pebbles to guide them, Hansel is left to gather some bread crumbs that he sprinkles along the trail, hoping that they will be able to find them and come home. As we know, however, this does not happen. The birds and creatures of the woods eat the bread crumbs, leaving Hansel and Gretel lost in the deep, dark, and dangerous woods. The story continues by describing an encounter with a terribly wicked witch. I think that the power of this fairy tale lies in its essence as a metaphor for the predicament that all of us occasionally find ourselves in: lost in the dark woods and needing to find our way home. The important lesson for middle school educators and researchers, I think, comes from understanding the two different ways in which Hansel tried to find his way home after being abandoned. One way was to create a path of durable, shiny pebbles that almost glowed in the dark, and the other way was to lay a trail of bread crumbs that were quickly consumed by the animals and left the children lost and alone. We can choose either the shiny pebbles that we can see even in the dark woods, or we can rely on bread crumbs that may seem to work but, ultimately, leave us lost and alone. To find our way home, we need to know the difference between bread crumbs and white, shiny pebbles. What are the pebbles that will lead us out of the dark and dangerous woods? What are the pebbles that can light our way? Which is the pathway home? Here are some of the pebbles I believe need to be in the pockets of middle grades educators-pebbles that will still be there when the moon shines. * Our historic commitment to a developmentally appropriate education for young adolescents. * A common curriculum that grows from the needs and interests of students and their teachers that is guided by standards, not strangled by them. * Meaningful, close, and long-term relationships between and among students and their teachers, understanding that teacher-student alignment should have as high a priority as curriculum alignment. * Strong support for the arrangements that encourage strong student-teacher relationships: interdisciplinary teaming, advisory groups, flexible scheduling, active learning, and other strategies for making big schools feel smaller and more effective. …

The Learning Skills Developer (LSD) and the Middle School Reading Program

All content area teachers need to be concerned about the skills of learning, to be sure, but they need help, in tensively and regularly. And it is also true that reading spe cialists achieve significantly less if they work in isolation, without knowledge of, or perhaps at cross purposes with, the goals of the content area teachers. The skills which middle school students need for continued learning are connected with, but not at all limited to, the skills of reading. The middle school program needs Learning Skills Develop ers (LSD).

Good News: An Operational Middle School Teacher Education Program

In 1971, a visitation team from the South ern Association of Schools and Colleges recog nized the leadership that the University of Florida had given to the emerging middle school movement in the state and across the nation. The team recommended that the University develop a training program for middle school teachers. At the same time, the Florida State Department of Education (SDOE) began to be concerned about staffing the growing number of middle schools with teachers trained specially for the middle school. This concern resulted in the designing of a new special middle school certification. According to SDOE plans, teachers in Floridas middle schools must possess this new certificate after 1975. In the Fall of 1970 the College of Education at the University of Florida responded with the creation of the nations first middle school teacher education program. Since then, many exciting changes have developed. The Universitys first action, in light of this developing need, was to design a two-year middle school teacher education program that the faculty would accept and the SDOE and NCATE would approve. This meant, of course, that a very crucial question had to be answered: Did the middle school teacher education program belong in the Elementary Education Department, the Secondary Education Department, or should an entirely new department be created? Our response to this question was that no new fragmentation (new departments) should occur. Further, all concerned realized that neither the Elementary nor the Secondary Departments should have responsibility for the total program. The solution, viewed by some at the time as a temporary one, was to create two programs, one located in the Elementary Department and another in the Sec ondary Department. These two programs, al though offered by separate departments, were created by a special cross-departmental Middle School Section, composed of faculty members from a number of departments in the College of Education who were concerned about middle school teacher education.