Last year, Canton students scored higher than any other Baltimore city school on Maryland's basic-skills writing test. This school is working for a lot of kids. But a lot of middle schools are just surviving. The middle grades have long been a trouble spot in American education. To some degree, it's the result of the challenging age group they serve.
Young adolescents nettle with their weird mix of innocence and churlishness.
Children who have been merely temperamental in elementary school may turn threatening, even violent, as adolescents of 13 and 14. Children who fall behind in the early grades are often painfully aware of their deficiencies by the middle grades, and some give up on school altogether. You've got to keep in mind that the middle shool reform movement originally focused on white, middle-class kids. Impossible is really the best way to characterize it. You've got kids at all different stages of physical and emotional growth entering puberty just as they're usually entering bigger, more impersonal school environments.