Ed Lite: Middle schools stress social adjustment at the expense of academic achievement

Katherine Esposito:

Helen Fitzgerald, Sherman parent and president of the school’s parent-teacher group, wants high expectations set for Sherman.

"My kids want to compete!" she says, clearly frustrated. "They want to go to Brown. They want to go to Yale, to UC-Berkeley. My daughter wanted to go to Harvard when she was in the fourth grade! That’s their eye on the ball. That’s their expectation. And Sherman ain’t teachin’ those kids!"

In the modern middle school, however, competition is barely a footnote. Cooperation is king.

In the 1960s and 1970s, as an antidote to a hierarchical and often violent world, American educators proposed a middle-grades school for preteens that would place a premium on their social needs. Such practices as cooperative learning, peer tutoring and heterogeneous grouping would be kinder, gentler substitutes for the traditional top-down form of classroom organization in these "middle schools."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 11, 2005 4:21 PM
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