Traditional Social Focus Yielding to Academics

Instead of a Year to Adjust to Puberty, 13-Year-Olds Now Given Algebra and Other Demanding Coursework

Science teacher Jim Haile uses computers to instruct seventh-graders at Arlington's Kenmore Middle School, which has increased the rigor of its courses. (By Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)

The first in an occasional series looking at learning in the middle and high school years

Three seventh-grade girls huddled in a corner of Room 269 at Kenmore Middle School in Arlington County as they attempted the delicate task of critiquing one another's writing. One had found what she considered insufficient information about a literary character another had profiled.

"Does she have a job?"

"Yeah."

"Do you have more details about her job?"

The questions were asked with care, for this was where the social traumas of seventh grade clashed with the national demand for more academic achievement. The students wanted to learn, but they didn't want to become outcasts in the process.

For two decades, policymakers have decreed that seventh grade should be a time when children have a chance to adjust to puberty and cliques and the other annoyances of turning 13. Lessons should be engaging and enriching, middle school advocates have said, but not put too much emphasis on mastering subject matter and passing difficult tests.

That attitude is changing, at Kenmore Middle School and in much of the rest of the country. Middle schools have "overemphasized emotional development at the expense of academic growth," said Mike Riley, superintendent of Bellevue, Wash., schools.

Barbara A. Sposet, a middle grades specialist at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, said that middle schools have done well making instruction relevant to students' lives but that "one of the weaknesses may be the overemphasis of self-esteem."

Riley recalled being told by one middle school principal that "the brain grows in spurts and that during the middle school years, the brain stops growing -- plateaus -- and so kids couldn't really learn much during this period."

Most seventh-grade classrooms in the Washington area do not operate on that premise anymore. Dotsy Fraker and her team of six teachers are pushing their 110 students, half the seventh-graders at Kenmore, to what they hope are new heights of achievement, to be measured next spring by new state tests in reading and math.

Seventh grade remains unlike high school, where scores and grades can have a direct effect on college selection and a student's overall future. But the Kenmore teachers say they are trying to make classes more academically challenging, particularly for students who might have been left behind.