The middle school dilemma

Student learning has improved in recent years across the region and around the nation in elementary and high schools, but not in middle schools. As Chronicle Staff Writer Greg Gelpi's extensive report pointed out recently, middle school is the weak link in the U.S. public school system.

Richmond County schools are a good example. It's got some of the best elementary and high schools in the state, many of them singled out for excellence. Not so with the county's 10 middle schools, where the only one singled out is Murphey Middle - and that's because it's been designated as "persistently dangerous."

Not only are the county's middle schools academically challenged, they're also badly behaved. Recall last year's rash of middle school bomb threats, false fire alarms and fights? Security had to be increased at five middle schools.

Improving security does not, of itself, improve math or reading scores. Richmond County principals are meeting monthly this school year to address middle school discipline problems and, hopefully, develop successful teaching strategies.

The middle school years are very difficult. As children mature into adolescence, their hormones rage, they become rebellious toward adults and become more responsive to peer pressure.

One major reform local educators are looking at would abolish middle schools and revert to a system that was abandoned several generations ago: Combine elementary and middle schools into a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school. High school would still be ninth through 12th grades.

Changing the grade structure has been done in school systems across the nation and the results, though tentative, are mostly positive. Part of the reason is that continuing the elementary school structure maintains stronger control of pupils and sustains a sense of community in which the older kids are encouraged to help the younger ones.

Surely grade restructuring is a reform that Richmond County and other middle schools may want to experiment with - and if they produce better academic results, that's a plus. But reorganizing grades is tinkering with the mechanics - it's not getting to the heart of the matter.

Sixth- through eighth-graders need parents to impose structure on their lives more than ever. Yet many parents, mistaking physical maturity for emotional maturity, let go - leaving kids largely to their own devices. If there's no structure to kids' lives out of school, it's harder to provide it in school. Bad parenting - not all parents, of course - is at the root of the middle school problem.

Behavior and discipline problems start at home, then are exported to school. Finding ways to get more parents constructively involved in their children's middle school education would solve most of the problems. But this will be the hardest reform of all to achieve.