My Boarding School Blog

The problem with middle schools

One particularly puzzling problem that plagued junior high schools and continues to plague middle schools is what Samuel H. Popper termed being “a school without teachers”. Because of the lack of teacher education programs and licensure that focus on the middle school level, the majority of young adolescents are taught by teachers who prepared for a career as an elementary or high school teacher. Fewer than one in four middle-grades teachers have received specialized training to teach at the middle level before they begin their careers. As a result, teachers who wind up teaching in middle schools, even those who discover that they enjoy teaching middle school students, find themselves woefully unprepared to work with this age group.