A Lesson in Middle Grades Education for Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education Director Bob Walser

At last evening’s (Tuesday, 25 June 2019) Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education meeting of the Committee of the Whole, District Four Member Bob Walser made another of his outrageously erroneous statements, intoning that the first schools specifically provided for the middle grades did not appear until the 1950s.  Apparently, Walser had run across a reference to the advent of the middle school (as contrasted to the junior high) during the 1950s.  Walser leapt to the conclusion that until the 1950s, schools had been organized into elementary and high school institutions only, leading him to ask, “Why do we have middle schools anyway?”

 

Here for the edification of Walser and for the additional information base of my readers, is the answer to that question:  

 

A Review of How the “Junior High” School Concept Came into Being

 

Through the 19^th century and into the early years of the 20^th century, schools for students between elementary or “grammar” schools and those in high school were rare.  There was not a pressing need for any such schools, since the grammar school that in the 19^th century typically encompassed grades one through six (1-6) accounted for the educational experience of most students, who did not even continue schooling beyond grade 6.

 

Then, as an increasing number of students did proceed into the years of grade 7 and grade 8 in the course of the first decade of the 20^th century, many commentators expressed concern that there was not enough new content presented for students at these two grade levels in the grammar school curriculum.  Thus was born the idea of creating a “junior high” that would be offered at grades 7-8, with grammar school now encompassing just grades 1-6.  These junior highs were in fact modeled on the senior highs for which they were similarly named and to which they sent students directly from grade 8 into grade 9.  At both junior high schools and senior high schools, curricula focused on the subjects of mathematics, English, history, government, geography, natural science, art, music, physical education, industrial arts, and home economics.

 

But well into the 20^th century, graduation from high school was not the expectation of most students, many of whom truncated their education somewhere in the midst of the grade 8 to grade 10 years.  Children of immigrant families from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe were thought by many educators to be ill-suited for continuing education.  If they did reach high school, they were tracked into industrial arts courses, away from the classical liberal arts, and as soon as these students felt ready to take and extend what they knew into the workaday world, they did so.

 

As a consequence, “high” school really did function for much of the first half of the 20^th century with a “high” level of academic instruction that in our current institutions as of the year 2019 would more nearly parallel community colleges (effectively grades 13-14, not the 9-12 of “high” school).  Accordingly, the “junior” “high” schools that were modeled on “high” schools tended to offer a challenging curriculum, and educators at this level also stereotypically thought of students as falling into categories within which many would drop out as unsuited to a challenging liberal arts curriculum.

 

At the turn of the 19^th century into the 20^th century, the educational expectations of the public differed dramatically from what they are in the context of life at year 2019.  I maintain a large personal library, with volumes that are relatively old in age (published over a century ago or more), of very recent publication, and in between.  A relatively old volume that I have is a Heath English Classics volume of The Tragedy of Hamlet :  Prince of Denmark, published out of Boston by D. C. Heath and Company in 1899, under the editorship of E. K. Chambers, B. A.  It is especially that latter titular designation that is of interest here. 

 

At the turn of those centuries, to have graduated from high school and gone on to college placed a person in the very highest educational levels of the American populace.  Obtaining a bachelor’s degree was regarded as an accomplishment approaching the kind of status that having a Ph. D. would bring today.  Today, it is not very likely that an editor of such a volume would even shout about her or his holding a master’s degree.  The expectation would be that a person with the right to comment authoritatively on works of Shakespeare would be a scholar holding a Ph. D.        

 

By extension, we would say that at the turn of the 19^th century into the 20^th century, those people who graduated from high school commanded the status of someone graduating with a bachelor’s degree today.  “High” school really meant “high” school, and junior high students were treated as high school students in training, expected to master a curriculum much broader and deeper than middle school curriculum in the year 2019 at which I now write.

 

So how did we go from “junior high school” to “middle school,” anyway? 

 

The Advent of the “Middle School”

 

This transition began in the middle reaches of the 20^th century and accelerated during the 1960s and 1970s.  As the student population grew, and as Grade K (kindergarten) became more of an exercised option, decision-makers in many school districts across the nation moved Grade 6 into the junior high with Grade 7 and Grade 8.  Either by changing the name, or putting the designation on a new building, those making decisions increasingly opted for the appellation of “middle school,” rather than “junior high school.”

 

And these changes coincided with an ideological movement among educators and those who took some sort of elevated interest in public education.  By that time, there was a burgeoning “Middle School Movement” that was an offshoot of the so-called “progressive” approach to education that envisions many purposes of education aside from the impartation of knowledge from teacher to student.  The progressive creed that had taken hold at departments, colleges, and schools of education values process of delivery and the manner of information acquisition over the systematic dispensation of knowledge from teacher to student;  the constructivist approach, which is a subset of the progressive creed, eventually came into particular favor among professors of education.

 

Thus it was that standards had already been lowered by the 1970s, when the Middle School Movement took off.  People who belonged to the National Middle School Association took the lead in this movement, the adherents of which argued that the main task of educators in the middle school context was to assist students in developing socialization skills and negotiating the emotions and physical changes of early adolescence.  By the early 1980s, this movement was taking hold among decision-makers in locally centralized school districts, and by the early 1990s the notion of middle school purpose as socialization dominated the thought of middle school public educators. 

 

The rise of the middle school was accompanied by an increasingly popular theory holding that human brain development plateaus during ages 12-14, and that the brain at this point should not be overburdened with a lot of new information.  By the early to middle 1990s this theory had been thoroughly debunked by the preponderance of neuroscientific evidence, but its popularity did not abate among middle school educators.  Thus, for two decades, students had undergone a boring and unchallenging middle school education, impelling many parents to move students into suburban, private, and charter schools in search of more rigor (rarely finding it in charter schools).

 

The standards movement that inspired No Child Left Behind legislation undercut the socialization-as-purpose premise, but middle school education has not recovered from the errant curricular approach of the Middle School Movement.

 

Taking Middle School Curriculum to Unprecedented Heights

 

The curriculum for grades 6-8 that I present in Part Three:  Philosophy of Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect far eclipses in rigor the sort of unchallenging drivel that has passed for middle school education during the decades since the advent of the Middle School Movement;  it goes far beyond any content level that has ever been widely available at public middle schools.  It ensues upon the challenging curriculum that I present for grades K-5 and continues in direct sequence from grade 5.  By the time a grade 8 student would graduate from a middle school of my devising, she or he would have more knowledge than a current high school graduate has at the time that the knowledge-deprived student walks across the stage to snag a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only. 

 

There would be a good case for reinstituting the old moniker of “junior high” to connote connection to high school and the suggestion of rigor that “high” school should have.  But making major effort to make the name change might require more energy than a mere change in appellation would justify.  So I’ll stick with the name “middle school’ and put energy into advancing high quality curriculum.  Putting this curriculum in place takes the K-12 experience to unprecedented heights of knowledge that makes possible the recreation of true “high” schools providing curriculum at grades 9-12 that now typify the first and second collegiate years, with subject matter from the technological, vocational, and liberal arts.