The Beauty and Terror

The Beauty and Terror - "Ten years ago the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation initiated its relationship with a few urban school systems to encourage and support them to reform their middle schools. We believed then and we believe now that middle schools need to have a much greater academic focus and be more academically challenging and engaging than is the case in most schools serving the middle grades. This is not to suggest that middle schools should abandon or devote less attention to addressing students' developmental, social, and psycho-emotional needs. Indeed, no middle school can succeed if it fails both to value, respect, and support young adolescents as people, not just children, and if it does not devote great effort to developing these youth as students. These roles of middle schools are complimentary and interdependent, not in opposition to one another. However, it was our belief that this equation for successful middle schools was seriously out of balance. Many, many middle schools were devoting more attention to nurturing young adolescents than to creatively challenging and engaging them academically."