The Middle School Movement: “A Charge to Keep”

he title of John Wesley’s hymn written in the mid1700s fittingly appears in this special section of The Clearing House on middle schools, for we who are active in the middle school movement do indeed have “a charge to keep. ” The honeymoon period of the middle school movement is over, the easy days of organizational success are largely in the past. The generally positive reception of what many thought was a new idea perhaps lulled us into a naive complacency. We were exhilarated as the National Middle School Association and its fifty-six affihates grew by leaps and bounds. The hunger of teachers and administrators for more information led to extensive professional development activities and publications. Everything seemed relatively smooth on the road to middle school success. But now middle schools are “under siege,” to use the phrase applied by Jim Beane in a March 1999 Middle School Journal article. Although that phrase may be a bit of hyperbole, the point is frightening valid. There are groups in our society whose values conflict with the middle school concept as it moves beyond organizational matters toward full programmatic implementation. Not only is the middle school concept at risk, American democracy itself is vulnerable as selfish and narrow views gain a foothold. The inclusiveness of middle schools, a point of pride to many of us, is not to the liking of others. Our advocacy of cooperation over competition does not sit well with many. Our perceived lack of emphasis on traditional college preparatory curriculum makes us suspect to other misguided but very influential folk. 1 believe that our schools are becoming too utilitarian, too ready to serve special interests, even blatantly commercial ones, and that they have lost in the process the democratic spirit that was so instrumental in creating and building them. To help alter this situation, middle level schools must be places where important lessons about commitment to the general welfare are learned. The events in Littleton, Colorado, and Rockdale County, Georgia, the most recent of a series of tragic shootings by young people, cannot be dismissed as aberrations. Although no definitive answers as to why these shootings took place can be offered, it is clear that schools must consider what they can do to prevent other such events. Metal detectors, clear book bags, and more guards are not solutions. The middle school concept, if implemented more broadly, however, would provide much of the answer. It seeks to establish a climate of caring and the kind of student-teacher relationships that would ensure that serious student alienation would be known about and dealt with; and it involves students actively in the life of the school, building its curriculum at least partially on student concerns. The middle school concept is at the center of a fundamental reform movement that is gathering strength even as new waves of criticism are striking the middle school shores. The purported academic failure of the middle school, it should be noted, is due to the fact that the tenets of the middle school have not been suffciently implemented-not that these tenets have been implemented. To blame the rarely implemented middle school concept for unsatisfactory test scores is unfair. The push to bully middle schools and teachers into raising test scores, in fact, will move us back to the very practices that made the junior high school a failure. So we have a charge to keep-a heavy and awesome responsibility, but one so critical that we dare not shirk it. As active participants in the largest, most extensive educational reform effort of this century, we must wear our mantles proudly and courageously. We must not become weary, for it would be a sad day if by the year 2010, we had won the battle for higher test scores but lost the war to build a better America. T