Sixth graders are too young for middle school

My wife and I knew something was awry when Primo lost his lunch box less than two weeks into the fall term.

We were pretty annoyed that we were out $10 in what seemed like record time, even for one of our boys, who both periodically misplace various school supplies.

We suspected it was getting worse when we got our first phone call from his French and English teachers a fortnight later complaining about snarky comments and overall jittery behaviour, as well as his consistent failure to bring all manner of required learning implements to class on a regular basis.

Our disorganized sixth grader, who was all of 11 years old at the time, was starting to flounder in his first year in middle school, and our prior fears about his unpreparedness were being realized.

The problem was heightened for Primo and his buddies because they had come from a school with two classes per grade of 20 or so kids apiece to a school with six or seven classes of 25 to 30 kids each per grade. It was a big adjustment.

We tried to keep calm. We’d gone through similar stuff before with Primo. As our eldest, he’s always been the family guinea pig, experiencing all sorts of milestones before his little brother does and testing our evolving parenting skills in the process.

But since we’re learning as we go along, panic can sometimes set in, especially in the absence of full information, and especially with awkward memories dancing in our head of our times in junior high school, which is what middle school used to be called in Ontario, back in the day when it ranged from grades 7 to 9, not 6 to 8, as it does now.

Then we went to curriculum night.

It turned out that the heads of all the Grade 6 parents were spinning, and especially the heads of those parents with boys.

As we all made our way from class to class in between truncated “periods” with Primo’s 10 or so teachers, we commiserated about lost binders and misplaced agenda books, and about the sheer confusion that many of the kids were feeling after going from one or two teachers in Grade 5 to as many as 10 in Grade 6.

Then we went to look for Primo’s lunch box in the five or six lost-and-found bins scattered around the building. In each we found a wide assortment of carrying cases, including, eventually, Primo’s. But had we not found it, we would have had our choice of any number of fine bags, most of which had not even started to smell yet.

That’s when we knew our kid was normal.

Yet that wasn’t the end of the problems he and other kids encountered that year. Our son was occasionally bullied by his peers (and at times participated in some bullying as well), and he periodically mouthed off to teachers and sometimes got in trouble for not paying attention in class or not doing his homework.

He also landed himself  in hot water with teachers while trying to impress the suddenly-quite-interesting girls, and in this new, larger school, there were many more of them than before. They were also physically and emotionally more mature than the boys – even the boys born early in the year, like Primo, our February baby.

It was a pressure-packed, high-school-like (or perhaps high-school-lite) environment that he simply wasn’t ready for.

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Primo’s experience is one of  main reasons I think that even with the many transitional supports that schools put in place, having sixth graders in middle school doesn’t make a lot of sense. (It turns out this sentiment is quite common among parents and is the subject of much debate in educational circles.)

Ironically, our younger, more rambunctious son – a December baby, no less – is having a somewhat more positive experience in middle school as a Grade-6er this year.

After feeling a bit confined in a small elementary school, and as a very amiable kid, he’s taking advantage of the wider social circle that’s available in his new school. As well, he’s enjoying the freedom of being able to move semi-freely about the building, especially at lunch hour. (He’s also benefiting from getting out from under an inexperienced principal who handled discipline issues with him very badly and damaged his self-esteem.)

However, like his brother before him, Secondo, too, has misplaced all kinds of school supplies (he’s lost his binder for almost every class at least once, and in some cases twice), and he’s been bullied by older kids, some of whom were his teammates on the school-wide grade 6-to-8 basketball team that he was so proud to have made.

One study published in 2007 by researchers at Duke University’s Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy backs up my sense that putting sixth graders in middle school is, on balance, a bad idea.

Using administrative data culled from public school students across North Carolina, it found that Grade 6 students attending middle schools are much more likely to be cited for discipline problems than those attending elementary schools. That difference remains after adjusting for the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the students and their schools.

The study also found that, as in Primo’s case, the higher infraction rates persist at least through Grade 9. An analysis of end-of-grade test scores provides complementary findings.

The authors suggest that one explanation for this is that sixth graders are at an especially impressionable age, and that the exposure to older peers and the relative freedom from supervision have negative consequences.

They conclude that their results suggest there’s a strong argument to be made for separating sixth graders from older adolescents.

In Ontario, the move to middle schools coincided partly with the gradual abolition of Grade 13 about 10 to 15 years ago. High schools had begun adding Grade 9 well before that, but the trend accelerated with the demise of Grade 13, which meant many school boards were left with partly empty junior high buildings to fill. This in turn led to more of them becoming middle schools.

So the trend was, in part, born out of administrative necessity, particularly when many school boards were dealing at the time with increased enrolments due to the so-called Baby Boom Echo, or Generation Y.

I realize that some sixth graders thrive in middle school and that by Grade 7, most of them adjust to it somewhat, but the needs of kids should come before bureaucratic or budgetary pressures.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink the whole idea of pushing sixth graders into early adolescence. Maybe we should let them be kids just a little bit longer.