Dysfunctional Middle Schools

I have in the past few months heard perhaps a dozen hair-raising stories about how children, especially girls, have been treated in public middle schools. And the national news in the past year has had a steady stream of stories about child suicides traceable to brutal middle school bullying. Clearly our public middle schools are highly dysfunctional.

The problem, as near as I can tell, is that overworked and overstressed teachers are simply not plugged into the “Lord of the Flies” culture of brutality that evolves in middle school in the absence of sensitive adult supervision. Children, quite frankly, are savages unless they are taught otherwise, unless they are “socialized” and “civilized” by an adult culture. And too often middle school children are without effective adult supervision, not only on the playground and after school, but even in the classroom and at home.

I suppose this is to be expected in a public school system constrained by teacher unions, overworked by Federal No Child Left Behind mandates and tests, financially driven toward larger class sizes, and burdened by “mainstreamed” special needs students and students passed from previous grades even though they are not up to grade level in their skills. Unfortunately the system seems to be geared toward the convenience and job security of the adults, not the well-being of the students. As someone once asked me, where is the union that represents the students?

What would help this? First of all, I would propose that we do away with middle schools. Children would remain in elementary school until 9th grade, with a homeroom teacher who moves with the class over at least several years, if not their entire elementary school experience, so that the teacher knows every student and their parents intimately, and sees every student every day.

Second, class sizes of 30-40 students are just too large. In my experience as a teacher, class sizes beyond perhaps 20 students are simply too large – beyond that size children begin to fall through the cracks. Beyond about 20-24 students, it is simply not possible for a teacher to get an accurate reading of every student’s emotional state every day, and that is what is needed with young children.

Third, the educational system from the principle down to the lowest teacher ALL have to work to establish a culture of respect among the students. That means (a) modeling that behavior as adults, (b) treating students with real respect, and (c) ALWAYS and IMMEDIATELY interrupting disrespectful behavior or language among the students. This only works if the entire staff support each other in this endeavor – no “playing favorites” among the students. In my experience, it takes two or three years of consistent effort to get this culture established, but then the students themselves begin to enforce it among themselves and it gets easier.

Fourth, the educational system has to train the parents in this approach as well. I am appalled at how often parents are at least unaware of the bullying and meanness of their children toward other children, and at worst complicit in this attitude. Parents need to be taught (because they probably were not taught themselves in school) to teach AND MODEL respect for others. They need to be taught that the success of their own children in the wider adult world will depend on whether or not these children learn essential social skills, and that these skills need to be learned and reinforced at home as well as at school.

There are lots of things wrong with our educational system, but this brutal middle school bullying and shunning is among the worst of the problems, scarring too many of our children for life. It needs to be stopped!