Chapter 4: Creating Quality in the Middle School Curriculum

Little more than a decade after the first junior high schools opened their doors, leading reformers like Thomas Briggs (1920) and Leonard Kobos (1927) were already warning that the most difficult challenge facing the fledgling movement would be in working on the curriculum. Unless a curriculum was organized for the junior high school itself, not simply as a prelude to the high school, the institution would make little headway toward providing an appropriate education for young adolescents. As it turns out, they were partially, though not completely, correct in this forecast.

Though the evolution of middle level schools from the junior high school of those years to the middle schools of today has seen its shares of ups and downs, there can be little question that substantial progress has been made (Cuban, 1992). Improved understanding of young adolescents and the subsequent development of structural arrangements like team teaching have helped to make middle level schools in many places increasingly more appropriate for that age group (Lee & Smith, 1993; McEwin, Dickinson, & Jenkins, 1996). Yet the matter of the curriculum remains largely unsettled and unsettling (Beane, 1993; Dickinson, 2001; Powell & Skoog, 1995; Powell, Skoog, & Troutman, 1996). As those early reformers predicted, the lack of an appropriate curriculum continues to frustrate the lives of young adolescents and a great many of the adults who live and work with them in school and at home.