Middle School Movement

Early Divides

During the 1990s, there was overt tension between advocates for gifted education and advocates for the middle school movement. Certainly some of the divide between the two groups stemmed from an equity emphasis in the middle school movement and an excellence emphasis in gifted education. That is, many middle school leaders stressed the importance of middle schools as the last, best opportunity for students from low-income backgrounds and students of color to be supported in achieving underpinnings necessary for continued academic success. To that end, middle school proponents emphasized the inherent dangers of tracking and ability grouping, which, when done without concern for equity and diversity, can be disadvantageous for students who struggle in school for a variety of reasons. By contrast, many proponents of gifted education supported ability grouping based on research suggesting it was a viable means of increasing academic challenge—or academic excellence—for highly able learners. Related to the different perspectives regarding ability grouping were the two groups' perspectives on cooperative learning. Middle school advocates strongly supported cooperative learning as a means of ensuring educational equity, and advocates of gifted education decried the approach as ineffective in providing academic challenge for advanced learners. A third source of tension likely stemmed from an early failure of middle school advocates to delineate what constitutes an appropriate middle level curriculum, leaving proponents of gifted education to perceive middle schools as institutions largely devoid of an academic emphasis.

More Recent Perspectives

Beginning in the 1980s and moving forward, proponents of middle level education and gifted education have worked to find common ground in their perspectives. In addition to shared initiatives and joint position statements by the National Middle School Association and the National Association for Gifted Children, an examination of current literature on the middle school movement is more specific in its statements about addressing the needs of advanced learners in the middle grades as well as in its statements about the nature of effective middle grades curriculum. The latter descriptions support development of personal excellence and align easily with much of the literature in gifted education about what constitutes effective curriculum and instruction for highly able learners. In addition, many in the field of gifted education have increasingly emphasized the need for that field to play a leadership role in identifying and developing abilities in students from low-income and culturally/economically diverse backgrounds, which suggests a commitment to equity and implies a willingness to play a role in talent development in more heterogeneous settings as a way to identify and extend capacity in groups traditionally underserved in programs for gifted learners. Thus, in recent years, both groups share, at least to some degree, a stated intent to support both equity and excellence in the middle grades.

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