01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 5, 2005

I stand shocked, mouth agape, at the extent to which educators, politicians and the public are obsessing and compulsing about high schools. The governors got together and targeted high schools as their collective top priority. Bill Gates pours money, energy and rhetoric into carving up high schools into smaller configurations. The press is busy putting stories and faces to some of the harsh statistics.

The flashpoint of this concern is America's abysmal high-school dropout rate, estimated at about a third of the school-age population. But hello? That sad statistic didn't spring full grown from the ninth grade, which is when most dropouts leave. Why ignore the middle schools where that dropout rate was nourished and cultivated? Those despairing ninth graders toughed out middle school with the vain hope that high school would be better. The fact that it wasn't is a huge problem, but no one seems interested in looking upstream for clues to the problem.

Many districts' have declared the six, seven, eight middle-school configuration to be a conceptual failure. Some have reverted to K-8 buildings hoping the pubescents will remain little kids for as long as possible. Others move the sixth grade back to elementary and push the seventh and eighth graders closer to the high school model, even though the governors and others point out that that doesn't work either.

Kids are organic. If we're going to fix our expensive, wasteful high-school dropout rate, we'll have to see it as the fruit of a plant with a delicate root system and a nature served best by specific conditions, nutrients and sun. We cultivate them, by the way we take care of them, to be the messes they are. The seeds of the dropouts' despair are sown long before they set foot in a high school.

I believe that middle school is the turnkey in our education system, because the kids require a special kind of attention from us. We seem to have trouble designing schools that face, honor and help early adolescents in the midst of their huge, distracting, important and completely natural transitions. They literally can't learn unless certain conditions have been met, like giving them the feeling they've been heard if something's preying on their minds. If you can wholeheartedly wrap your arms around what's wrong with education at the middle, the rest will follow more easily, more organically.

So the first thing to understand about middle school is that the very word "middle" is a problem. "Middle" implies a central section of a continuum that takes place in a consistent transition from point A to point B. More appropriate might be to call them radical transformation schools, chrysalis schools, or when-your-world-goes-upside-down schools. I would call them Life Design Institutes, because that's what the kids want to know at that point -- who are they and what do they have to do to mold their lives into a viable form.

Right about sixth grade -- for most kids, but by no means all -- those pals you've been hanging out with are suddenly your friends, that omnipotently powerful, intriguing social entity with one judgmental mentality expressed by certain individuals. Suddenly, because of friends, or lack of them, the highs are higher and the lows lower. Whatever social rules once applied, apply no longer.

Indeed, it seems like everyone but you knows a secret language of expectations and protocols. Being left out was never fun, but now it's a misery. And to be included means you might find yourself doing something you know is wrong. Moods are wild. New, unnamed feelings blast through your mind, and the next thing you know, 10 minutes have passed and you haven't been paying attention. To fit in with your peer group's magnetic, compelling attraction -- be it by dress, behavior, interests -- you find yourself wriggling out of your parents' grasp -- especially Mom's -- frustrated and sometimes very angry in the process.

All of this is developmentally appropriate.

Middle-schoolers are people in transition. They occupy a foxhole of confusion. Traditional culture had rituals to focus community attention on people in transition -- rites of passage, attention to the newly widowed, gifts to the family encumbered with a baby. Our culture backs away from people in transition on the pretext of "giving them space" while things get worked out. So using standard, lecture-format teaching in middle schools is like saying to someone who just had twins or won the lottery: look, we understanding you're having all these moods and feelings, but you really need to do them on your own time and not here. Here we have something more important to do. Here we are learning about Egypt.

Middle schoolers are all about me. If you can figure out how to make the story of ancient Egypt inform their concerns, go for it. Early adolescents are huge information sponges, aching to learn how to put some order to their chaos. They will be eternally grateful for whatever light you can shed on their issues. I believe that 90 percent of existing curricula can be tweaked to speak directly to them. The Magna Carta will never work just as a bit of important history, but as a story about individual rights and what such rights mean to me, even that dry document will keep their attention.

As one ninth-grade dropout said: "I left school because I just couldn't park my game that long." We need to acknowledge their "game" by giving them the tools to be successful in their own terms, as well as in ours.

At this time in their lives, kids pull away from their parents' grasp. Parents need to keep hanging on no matter what the resistence, but this is when the greater community needs to step up to the plate. Alternative, extra-familial adults can catch the kids before they are swallowed up in the toxic world of peers informed mainly by the mass media. Kids may not say thank you, but they deeply appreciate adult mentors. In surveys they tell us they crave adult help.

Starting in the sixth grade, in my imaginary Life Design Institutes, teachers would say: At the end of the day, it is up to you to make your own life work. But adults are here to help. As your teachers, we'll work to equip you with a toolbox of skills, information and strategies, so you know how to go about accomplishing your own goals and how to solve whatever problems inevitably come your way. One day you're going to confront a problem and reach in and find that you have an algebra tool, an ancient history story, a scientific understanding that shows you the way to solve the issue. Rigor and discipline are essential, and we are going to hold you responsible for meeting high standards. Because only when you are successful, are we successful.

Over the course of this summer, this column is going to examine first the middle-school child and later the kinds of social and educational responses to that kid that work most effectively. Honestly, if we can get much more serious about climbing into the foxhole of confusion with these kids, meeting them partway, we'll have a much easier time figuring out how to prevent the high school kids from blowing us off quite so much.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny [at] cox.net or c/o Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.