The ‘Middle School Muddle’

With thoroughly mixed emotions, Babs Fine gave up a house and neighborhood she loved in Pasadena and moved to nearby La Canada Flintridge. Why take such a drastic, not to mention costly, step? So that her children could attend the middle grades there.

Like thousands of other parents, Fine has been swept up in the search for what seems the educational equivalent of the Holy Grail: a good, clean school where an adolescent can flourish.

It is a quest that often proves emotionally and financially bruising.

“Many parents whip themselves into a frenzy,” said Thomas C. Hudnut, headmaster and chief executive of Harvard-Westlake School, an elite private institution with a middle school in Bel-Air and a high school in Studio City.

Indeed, no sacrifice seems too great as parents strive to get a child situated. Desperate parents tap college funds to pay private or parochial school tuition, commit to long commutes to magnet schools or overextend themselves on housing in exclusive suburbs to be near well regarded public campuses. A rare mom will even take a low-paying job at a desirable school miles from home to qualify her child for a classroom spot.

Driving the angst is the perception that urban middle schools are low-performing, threatening environments, unless there happens to be a magnet program. Compounding the anxiety is the normal turbulence that comes with this hormone-riddled age, when children can run amok and parents lose their grip.

Just the thought of their little sixth-grader walking the halls with big, sullen, pimply-faced teens is enough to strike fear in many parents.

As physiological changes run rampant, youngsters enter a large, unfamiliar environment where lockers displace jungle gyms and students must interact with a bevy of teachers rather than one or two. Peers come from a broader area and, often, vastly different economic and cultural experiences. As kids hobnob with older students, the issues of gangs, drug use and sexual activity loom large.

Parents recognize this “middle muddle” over school choice as a life-altering quandary. They are choosing far more than an institution of learning. They are also selecting their child’s friends and, to a great extent, their future path.

“There is no greater time of stress in a child’s life,” said Richard Lieberman, psychologist in the Los Angeles Unified School District. “It’s a very crucial crossroads.”

‘I Feel as if I’ve Thrown in the Towel’

The anxiety is helping to perpetuate the departure of middle-income families that many educators say has contributed to the decline of urban schools.

“I feel as if I’ve thrown in the towel,” said Susan Jacobs, a renter in the Westside neighborhood of Cheviot Hills. She and her family relish fast-paced, diverse Los Angeles but are contemplating a move to Agoura, where they can afford a house near good, tidy schools.

“I fear that life in the suburbs is a little slow, and there are no interesting, edgy people,” she added. “But the schools are new and nice, and at least you feel your kid will be going into a clean bathroom.”

Suburban schools have acres of fields, she noted, and children play in greenery. That beats the “penitentiary-like” Westside middle school she recently visited. Having attended such a school in the San Fernando Valley as an adolescent, Jacobs said she began hyperventilating at the thought of sending 10-year-old Samantha there.

Hal and Cheri Kaliman of Glendale are vacillating over where to send their 12- and 10-year-old daughters for middle school. After seeing what Hal described as “scary kids” coming out of the nearby high school, the Kalimans began scouting real estate in La Canada Flintridge, where three-bedroom houses run $450,000 or more, and La Crescenta, a less expensive community.

Concern about quality of instruction led Yolanda Townsend of Inglewood to forsake the local public middle school, Monroe, and apply for a permit to send daughter Ashli to sixth grade at Richard Henry Dana Middle School in Hawthorne. While working years ago as a teacher’s aide at Monroe, Townsend had noted a disturbing tendency to promote students to the next grade, even when they couldn’t read their own names. Townsend said she would have been prepared to home-school Ashli if Dana had not granted the permit.

For Judith Helle, a self-employed single mother in Los Feliz, “middle school has been the black cloud of hell hanging over us pretty much since preschool.”

Iris, her tall, blond 10-year-old, recently began attending Waverly, a new, progressive private school in Pasadena where tuition is more than $8,000 a year. Helle works extra hours to handle the load, but she feels she has no choice. The local public middle school campus, she said, has a reputation as “a rough school” notorious for confrontations between Armenian and Latino gangs.

“Middle school is the most distressing and hideous time of one’s life,” Helle added. “To send a child to a fairly hostile, amped-up environment is not a good thing.”

Iris, who hopes to stay at Waverly through high school, appreciates the well-tended private campus and the fact that she is doing better academically than she did at her local public elementary school. “I’m very happy,” the fifth-grader said. “It’s a nice school for me.”

Laurie Owyang, a friend of Helle, also concluded that the local public middle school would not do for her daughter after a neighbor visited the campus and declared: “I’d rather have you poke a stake through my eye than send my kids there.”

The school that Helle and Owyang rejected is Thomas Starr King Middle School, which, like many other urban counterparts, has a long list of challenges--from overcrowding to graffiti to the vexing tendency of a few students to clog sinks and toilets each day with paper towels and soda bottles.

Years ago, the school’s irrigation system broke, and most vegetation died. Although neighborhood gardening groups have replanted some areas, a large dust bowl remains in the center of campus.

Built for 900 students, the facility is now desperately taxed with 2,200. At lunchtime, they converge on the common outdoor areas, most lining up for federally subsidized meals. A beefy Los Angeles Unified police officer stands guard throughout the day.

The school ranked a lackluster 3 (out of 10) in California’s first Academic Performance Index, not surprising given that half the students are not yet fluent in English and that the scores of hundreds of special education students are included.

Parents put off by the school’s appearance might be reassured if they ventured into classrooms. Computer labs are stocked with shiny new iMacs; 85% of King’s computers have Internet access. The school offers advanced studies programs for high achievers. Principal Thelma Yoshii has also applied to start a computer science magnet at the school.

Yoshii and parent activist Mary Rodriguez, who has waged a lonely campaign to improve the school’s appearance, eagerly await the summer, when the school is slated to be painted inside and out. Meanwhile, custodians battle daily against graffiti, although Yoshii maintains that gang activity is not a problem on campus.

This double-barreled push to improve cosmetics and academics, Yoshii and Rodriguez hope, will lure middle-income parents from Los Feliz and Silver Lake who otherwise would look elsewhere.

As is the case throughout Los Angeles Unified, about 70% of King’s students are Latinos. The 15% who are white are mostly of Armenian descent. The rest are Asian, Filipino and African American. All told, they represent 40 countries and 30 languages--a microcosm of the Los Angeles in which many of these students will have to function as adults.

“I think it’s really important for kids to be able to work with a variety of cultures and socioeconomic levels,” Yoshii said. “That [opportunity] is free here.”

Michael Bancroft, a sixth-grader in King’s advanced studies program, gives the school a thumbs-up on multiculturalism and other counts.

“I like the teachers, and I like most of the kids,” he said. “It’s fun and challenging.”

Former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), a passionate backer of public education, also values the diversity of the region’s schools. Still, he expects to send his namesake son to a private or parochial campus.

“We moved to Mount Washington precisely because it was a great neighborhood with a great public school,” said Villaraigosa.

But Antonio Jr. is now a fifth-grader at that school, Mount Washington Elementary, and nearby Irving and Nightingale middle schools do not pass his father’s muster. The schools earned low statewide API rankings of 2 and 1, respectively.

Reform Program Launched in ‘80s

Gordon Wohlers, assistant superintendent for policy research and development at Los Angeles Unified, acknowledged that most middle schools in the district do not measure up when judged strictly by academics. In the API, based on Stanford 9 test scores, 58 of 72 Los Angeles middle schools had scores deemed “unacceptably low.”

But in communities as varied as Glendale, Inglewood, Pasadena and Long Beach, as well as Los Angeles, academic performance tumbles sharply in the middle grades.

Educators have struggled for years to solve the problem of mediocrity in urban middle schools.

California launched a broad reform program in the late 1980s. The catalyst was “Caught in the Middle,” a task force report indicating that many of the state’s schools were guilty of boring students with poor textbooks and unchallenging instruction. Many institutions also failed to provide appropriate counseling to address the physical and emotional needs of young adolescents.

The report advocated abandoning “junior high schools” with grades seven and eight or seven, eight and nine in favor of “middle schools” encompassing grades six, seven and eight.

Middle schools, the theory went, could provide a somewhat younger population with some of the cozy, nurturing aspects of elementary school before they were thrust into the larger, more anonymous environment of high schools.

Further, a 1990 report by the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development found that substantial numbers of middle-schoolers were at risk of falling victim to a wide array of emotional problems and self-destructive behaviors, such as dropping out.

The report advocated that schools form teacher-student teams that could work collectively to respond to individual learning needs and styles.

“Based on the research, these reforms do work,” said Robert Felner, director of the University of Rhode Island’s School of Education. “Schools are safer, more orderly and higher-achieving.”

In a standards-minded state such as California, however, reform-oriented educators are torn. More sensitive, individualized learning is perceived by some as running counter to a system in which all pupils are supposed to learn the same things on the same schedule--and be held accountable by high-stakes assessments.

The middle-school reforms have never been fully implemented, and it is debatable whether they would placate all parents.

Still, many schools are holding firm on reform. Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica has had team teaching for 13 years and is a “fully exemplary” model of middle school reform, said Principal Ilene Straus.

In 1994 and 1999, Lincoln--which boasts a pristine campus with a turquoise fence, large track and grass field--was declared a California Distinguished School, and it has been nominated for a National Blue Ribbon. It ranked a 10, the top level, in the state’s API.

Straus said the waiting list for the school, where two-thirds of the student body is white, contains 300 names. Of the current enrollment of 1,260, more than 16% attend on permits, most related to parents’ employment in the community. Next year, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District plans to boost the school’s enrollment to 1,290, in part to accommodate more students from outside the area.

The district gives priority to parents who work in its schools or main office. Spotting an opportunity, Susan Pitts of West Los Angeles took a job for nominal pay monitoring noontime visitors three days a week at Lincoln, knowing that would win her son Stephen a sixth-grade slot.

“I enjoy working in a school and being an involved parent,” said Pitts, who has a background in psychology and teaching.

To be sure, most of California’s 1.2 million middle-grade students attend a local school. Only about 12% go to private or parochial institutions.

“Most parents will send their youngsters to the local middle school, and most are pleased,” maintained Peter Murphy, executive director of the California League of Middle Schools, a support organization for mid-level teachers and administrators.

Research indicates that a child might feel unhappy at a private or parochial school where classmates are far wealthier, the student body does not reflect the Southland’s diversity or teachers take a narrow view of the world. Many educators say kids, given their druthers, would prefer a school that exposes them to the “real world.”

Nonetheless, private schools are swamped with applications as a sizzling economy makes tuition more manageable.

Despite an annual tuition of about $14,000, Harvard-Westlake attracts 1,200 applicants each year for 200 spots--worse odds than most of those students’ parents experienced at the college level.

The acute interest in private schools results from “a horrible cycle spurred by the abyss of Los Angeles Unified,” said one mother whose daughter has just been accepted at a parochial school.

When Fine, the former Pasadena resident, went looking for a home in La Canada, she buttonholed parents and students at schools. It was important to find an environment where children had fun learning, as her two youngsters did at their Pasadena elementary school.

By that time, Fine had decided that the local middle school in Pasadena was too threatening, given another parent’s admonishment: “You just have to know whom to stay away from.”

Still, Fine fretted that overly rigorous academics in La Canada could squelch her kids’ enjoyment. At her daughter’s new school, she was relieved to see kids reading from “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and putting on a short play about the book.

“I think it’s really important that kids enjoy learning,” she said. “I don’t think it should just be about getting a high test score.”