Chapter 1: Creating High-Performance Middle Schools: Recommendations from Research

By the 1960s much of the literature on the junior high noted that such schools had turned into “miniature high schools” (Johnson, Dupuis, Musial, & Hall, 1994), albeit “pale imitations of senior high schools” (Grooms, 1967). Aided by sociological and psychological research during the 1950s and 1960s (Bossing, 1954; Gruhn & Douglass, 1956; Lounsbury, 1960), educators judged the junior high school organization as inappropriate for young adolescents (ages 10-15) who are psychologically, socially, emotionally, intellectually, and physically at a very different place than adolescents. Eventually, in the early 1960s the call to reform the junior high evolved into a call for the creation of the middle school. This call was supported with the publication in 1965 of W. M. Alexander’s “The Junior High: A Changing View” in Readings in Curriculum, edited by Hass and Wiles; D. H. Eichhorn’s The Middle School (1966); and W. M. Alexander’s The Emergent Middle School (1969). Eventually, the middle school movement would grow to be characterized as “one of the largest and most comprehensive efforts at educational reorganization in the history of American public schooling” (George & Oldaker, 1985, p. 1).