The Columbus Dispatch has had great coverage of the struggles of? and now the proposed fix for ? the city's troubled middle schools.
Of Columbus's 18 middle schools, 13 are rated ?D? or ?F? by the Ohio Department of Education. Only one school scored well enough to garner a ?B.? Proficiency results have been well below the state requirements, and seventh and eighth-grade test results have been particularly worrisome, as they've declined overall since 2007.
Now, after some time examining the issue, the district has an explanation for this low performance. In a recent Dispatch article, the district admitted that it has been treating its middle-school students more like ?miniature high-schoolers.? Students in grades 6-8 had been going to eight 52-minute classes a day. While this kind of schedule isn't unusual, it seems that Columbus middle schools were lacking proper supports in the transition from the elementary grades to high school. Santo Pino of the National Middle School Association told the Dispatch that this schedule isn't best for early adolescents, who need stronger relationships with adults with more support and opportunities to explore new subjects before they get to high school.
In order to provide this, the district is proposing that students instead be assigned to smaller communities of ?houses? in each grade level that share common teachers. Each house would have two to four teachers each, with block periods of 260 minutes. The house teachers would have flexibility to divide the time of this block among core academic subjects. Incoming sixth graders would be paired with an older student mentor, and opportunities for electives would be expanded.
The irony here is that thirty years ago, CCS was the first urban district in the state to switch from junior highs to middle schools and enact the very changes they are proposing today.? These changes eventually faded over time and the schools began to resemble junior highs again.
Regardless, this is definitely a step in the right direction. Policies that allow close-knit teacher collaboration with an emphasis on closer student-teacher relationships should be commonplace in the middle grades, particularly for at-risk students at such a critical age.
- Eric Ulas