Mid Kids

The years from 10 to 14 are critical ones in the emotional, social, and intellectual development of young people. Adolescents today face more complex and life-threatening issues than young people faced as recently as a generation ago. AIDS. Gangs. Violence. Drugs. But adolescence also is a time of emotional awakenings and intellectual growth. Researchers tell us that a single caring adult can make all the difference in the direction a young adolescent chooses to take.

Early adolescence. The middle years. The wonder years. It's a time of heightened self-awareness, sexual stirrings, peer bonding, risk taking, and increased independence. It's a dynamic time when young people ride the waves from childhood to adulthood—a time when parents frequently push children away in the mistaken belief that what kids really need and want is to be left alone.

Researchers tell us that middle schoolers need the direction, love, and guidance that they received from caring adults as grade-schoolers. Their fears need to be addressed, their hopes nurtured, and their voices respected.

"Barely out of childhood, young people ages 10 to 14 are today experiencing more freedom, autonomy, and choice than ever at a time when they still need special nurturing, protection, and guidance," write the authors of Great Transitions: Preparing Adolescents for a New Century. "Without the sustained involvement of parents and other adults in safeguarding their welfare, young adolescents are at risk of harming themselves and others."

Teacher Talk, a publication from the Center for Adolescent Studies at Indiana University, notes that adolescents need a balance of five key supports, including:

Belonging: a feeling of love, trust, and attachment to others or institutions
Mastery: the potential to achieve in a variety of ways
Independence: learning the difference between being a strong leader and an aggressor
Generosity: using opportunities to help others
Stimulation: a variety of interesting, fun, and engaging activities

Increasingly, children between 10 and 15 are involved in unhealthy risk taking that can lead to a lifetime of grief. Many of these kids come from neighborhoods steeped in violence and homes infected by poverty, abuse, drug addiction, or indifference. Toss in reduced funding for education, higher teacher-student ratios, and reductions in counseling and other programs and it becomes clear that middle school reformers have some formidable obstacles in their paths.

Pete Lorain, President-elect of the National Middle School Association (NMSA), says that funding reductions are shortsighted and counterproductive to efforts to restructure middle schools. "We know what makes schools work, but it flies in the face of what is happening in education," says Lorain, a former middle school principal who currently is Director of Personnel in Oregon's Tigard-Tualatin School District. "Funding is the key issue. The shift is going the wrong way. It's suicidal."

In This We Believe: Developmentally Responsive Middle Schools, the NMSA identifies six characteristics of middle schools and describes several educational practices that reflect student and societal needs. The characteristics are not a boilerplate for middle school reform. "This We Believe represents a process, a belief system, a way of thinking," Lorain says. "Educators need to understand that school improvement is not an event. There's an ebb and a flow to improvement that occurs as communities change and as kids change."

Developmentally responsive middle schools, the NMSA says, are characterized by:

Educators committed to young adolescents. Middle-level educators need specific preparation and ongoing professional development as they pursue their careers. State departments and higher education must play active roles in providing continuous professional development, and school districts must take advantage of the opportunities to secure, motivate, and sustain middle-level teachers.
A shared vision. This vision becomes the catalyst for a written mission statement supported by students, teachers, administrators, families, and others in the community. It should be developed collaboratively and reviewed and renewed periodically.
High expectations for all. Teachers, administrators, and others must hold high expectations for middle-level students and themselves.
An adult advocate for every student. Each student will have one adult who knows and cares for him or her and who supports that student's academic and personal development. "The ideal school," the NMSA notes, "demonstrates a continuity of caring that extends over the student's entire middle-level experience so that no student is neglected."
Family and community partnerships. Schools must take the initiative in providing varied and meaningful opportunities for parent and community involvement. They also can assist families in creating and sustaining positive home learning environments.
A positive school climate. A safe learning environment is inviting and caring. It also promotes a sense of community and encourages learning.

The NMSA also says that developmentally responsive middle-level schools provide: curriculum that is challenging, integrative, and exploratory; varied teaching and learning approaches; assessment and evaluation that promote learning; flexible organizational structures; programs and policies that foster health, wellness, and safety; and comprehensive guidance and support services.

"Successful middle-level schools are grounded in the understanding that young adolescents are capable of far more than adults often assume," the NMSA says. "Young adolescents are curious and concerned about themselves and their world rather than being rebellious and argumentative as they are often portrayed in the media. They want to contribute and need adults who believe in them and who can provide appropriate challenge, opportunity, and support."

Dropping Out: A Growing Problem

In "Dropping Out of Middle School: A Multilevel Analysis of Students and Schools," Russell Rumberger focuses on young adolescents who choose to leave school. Rumberger, Professor of Education at the University of California at Santa Barbara, uses data from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey (NELS) of 1988 to examine the middle school dropout issue from individual and institutional perspectives. His article appears in the fall 1995 American Educational Research Journal.

At the individual level, Rumberger found that several family- and school-experience factors emerge that influence the decision to drop out of school. Both the structure of the family and the way parents interact with their children and schools influence the dropout rate, Rumberger notes, and poverty remains a "powerful predictor of dropping out." Rumberger also identifies several family structures that increase the likelihood of dropping out. "Students from single-parent families, stepfamilies, and non-English-speaking families had significantly higher odds of dropping out of school than other students."

Rumberger also found that students whose parents had low educational expectations (only graduating from high school) were more than five times as likely to drop out of school.

Among the academic background factors, grade retention was the single most powerful predictor of whether a student would drop out. "Students who were held back in school were more than 11 times as likely to drop out of school than students who were not held back," Rumberger found. Changing schools also significantly increased the odds of dropping out. "Each time a student changed schools, the odds of dropping out increased by 30 percent," Rumberger says.

Student attitudes, behaviors, and academic performance in eighth grade also are gauges of whether a student will drop out of school. Students with a high self-concept and a strong sense of control were more likely to stay in school. Conversely, students who felt they were viewed as troublemakers or poor students were 50 percent more likely to drop out than other students. Students with low educational expectations—only graduating from high school—were seven times more likely to drop out than students with high educational goals.

Students who were absent 15 percent of the time and more were far more likely to drop out, Rumberger notes. Other behavioral indicators of dropping out include non-participation in extracurricular activities both in school and in the community.

Grades and standardized test scores also influence students' decisions to leave school early. A one-point increase in grade-point average reduces the predicted dropout rate by 70 percent, Rumberger found.

Demographic factors also play a role in school success, with African American, Hispanic American, and Native American eighth-grade students all at a significantly higher risk of dropping out than European American or Asian American students.

"Overall," Rumberger writes, "the results reveal that a wide variety of demographic, family, and educational factors predict the odds of eighth-grade students' dropping out of school. These results are consistent with the many empirical studies done on dropouts, most of which have focused on high school rather than middle school students. The results confirm that many of the factors that predict dropping out of high school also predict dropping out of middle school."

Rumberger says schools should review policies on grade retention, school transfer, and discipline that penalize students for certain behaviors but have detrimental effects on academic performance. "These policies," he notes, "have more to do with behavior issues than academic learning and, as such, are often ignored in the school reform debate. Yet they may be critically important if schools want to become committed to improving the education of all students."

The Road from Risk to Resiliency

In rural Moses Lake, Washington, a youth walks into a middle school classroom and opens fire, killing a teacher and two classmates with weapons he concealed under his coat. In Portland, Oregon, a boy slits his best friend's throat, then kills the boy's sister and mother before ending his own life. In Butte, Montana, a 10-year-old boy shoots and kills a classmate on the school playground.

As a society, we try to make sense of the brutalities that erupt in our homes, communities, and classrooms. But it is important to remember that the incidences of violence committed by youth are isolated and infrequent. This observation is not meant to diminish the grief of those violated, but to provide a perspective that defies the increasingly common perception of schools as armed camps.

"When there's one gun in a high school, the average citizen starts to believe there's one in every school," a San Diego teacher said in the Public Agenda Foundation report, Given the Circumstances: Teachers Talk About Public Education Today. "The same with drug busts. They believe what they see on TV."

Of course, the situation for American youth has worsened in recent decades. Consider, for example, that 12- to 15-year-old children are the most likely age group to be victimized by violent crime. One of eight young people in that age group become victims of violent crime, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics Report cited in the January 1996 Middle School Journal. This is more than double the rate for 25- to 34-year-olds and seven times that of 50- to 64-year-olds.

Crimes committed by youth also are on the rise. Gay bashing, race-related hate crimes, religious intolerance, and sexual harassment all are being perpetrated by young people at increasing rates. Self-destructive behaviors—suicide and suicide attempts, sexual intercourse, and drug abuse—are prevalent among young adolescents in rural, urban, and suburban communities.

The Public Agenda Foundation reports that teachers and the public agree that persistent troublemakers should be removed from class, that students should be kept on campus during the school day, that drugs—including tobacco products—should be banned on school grounds, and that kids caught with weapons or drugs should be expelled.

"The emphasis on order is one area where the top concerns of teachers overlap with those of the public," the foundation notes. "Fully 81 percent of teachers say that the worst behaved students get the most attention in school. In focus groups, teachers regularly talked about the one or two unruly children who are so disruptive that they siphon off the teacher's time and keep other students from learning."

The picture for young adolescents is not entirely bleak. Increasingly, researchers are exploring protective factors, those attributes that increase a young person's potential for growing into a healthy, productive, contributing adult. "An important approach to improving the school success rate of students who experience many of the risk factors which can lead to failure, is to examine the notion of resilience," note the authors of "Defying the Odds: Middle Schoolers in High Risk Circumstances Who Succeed."

"Despite incredible hardships and the presence of several of these risk factors, there are some students who benefit from what is known as protective factors," the authors write in the September 1995 Middle School Journal. "These students can be termed resilient. They have defied the odds for failure."

A resiliency approach differs from the risk-focused approach in some fundamental ways. Researcher Bonnie Benard characterizes the resilient child as one who is socially competent, with problem-solving skills, and a sense of autonomy, purpose, and future. Benard's synthesis of three decades of research identifies three key facets of families, schools, and communities that produce resiliency in children:

The presence of at least one caring, supportive adult in the child's life
The communication of consistently clear and high expectations to the child
The provision of ample opportunities for the child to participate and contribute in meaningful ways

The shift from a risk to a resiliency model of addressing student behaviors involves fundamental shifts in thinking and acting. Linda Winfield, principal research scientist at the Center for Research on Schooling for Disadvantaged Students at the Johns Hopkins University, writes that education policymakers must address new questions if they are to shift their focus from risk factors to protective factors.

"In order to move beyond simply identifying and categorizing youth as at risk," she writes in Resilience, Schooling, and Development in African American Youth, "the focus must necessarily shift to understanding the notion of resilience. Viewed in this manner, the critical issues in education are not who is at risk or how many of the factors one has to have to be at risk. Rather, the critical issue of policy and instruction centers around identifying the protective processes and mechanisms that reduce risk and foster resilience."

Researchers have identified four protective factors that develop resilience:

The reduction of negative outcomes by altering either the risk or the child's exposure to the risk
The reduction of a negative chain reaction following risk exposure
The establishment and maintenance of self-esteem and self-efficacy
The opening of opportunities during critical periods in children's lives

In her research synthesis, Fostering Resiliency in Kids: Protective Factors in the Family, School, and Community, Benard notes that a higher percentage of high-risk children develop various problems than the general population. However, a "greater percentage of the children become healthy, competent adults," she writes.

For example, research shows that 75 percent of children of alcoholic parents do not develop alcohol problems, and 50 percent of children rise out of the disadvantaged conditions in which they were raised. "The challenge for the 1990s," Benard writes, "is the implementation of prevention strategies that strengthen protective factors in our families, schools, and communities."

What Kids Need to Thrive

In recent months, both the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development and the NMSA have published major new reports on the needs of young adolescents and the schools that serve them. Children between the ages of 10 and 14 are experiencing profound emotional, intellectual, physical, social, and moral growth, note the authors of the NMSA's This We Believe: Developmentally Responsive Middle Schools. "It is important to remember that these areas of development are inexorably intertwined," the report notes. "With young adolescents, the achievement of academic success, for example, is highly dependent upon their other developmental needs being met."

In Great Transitions, the Carnegie Council urges communities to adopt five recommendations that "provide life chances for adolescents." They are:

Re-engage families with their adolescent children. Parents, the council notes, often disengage from their children once they are out of elementary school. Instead, they should remain active in their children's education, and schools should welcome families and cultivate their support.
Create developmentally appropriate schools for adolescents. Middle and junior high schools should promote health and learning in safe, small-scale environments. They should be intellectually stimulating, employ cooperative learning strategies, and not employ tracking strategies.
Develop health-promotion strategies for young adolescents. The health risks for young people have changed dramatically in recent years. Health professionals must learn new ways to connect with families, schools, and community organizations. To meet the growing health needs of young people, Carnegie recommends expanded health insurance coverage for adolescents, increased school-based and school-related health clinics for adolescents, and training for health providers that meets the developmental needs and behavior-related problems of adolescents in sensitive and caring ways.
Strengthen communities with young adolescents. Expand the services of national and local youth organizations to meet the needs of young adolescents before and after school. Communities must provide safe, attractive, and stimulating settings for youth during the times when parents are not available to supervise their children.
Promote the constructive potential of the media. Adolescents are bombarded daily with media messages that promote the use of violence to resolve conflicts, that glamorize the use of drugs, and promote irresponsible sexual activity. "The undeniable power of the media could be used far more constructively in the lives of young adolescents," Carnegie notes. "Families, schools, and other pivotal institutions can help young people become more media literate so they can examine media messages more critically."

The council also urges businesses, government, universities, professional organizations, and others to help meet the needs of young people. Any efforts, the council notes, must be nonpartisan, sustained, and based on facts and research. "Above all," the council says, "a long-term view is essential to bring about the difficult, indeed fundamental, changes necessary in modern society to improve the life chances of all our children."

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