NYT Middle School Article

This article is over how to increase middle school performance and cut down on the rate of behavioral problems among the students. Some educators believe the way to do this is to reconfigure the concept of middle school. A debate ensues when the educators started to disagree on whether or not to incorporate middle schools into the younger grades or the older grades; to coddle them or to force them to mature earlier.
As was mentioned in the article, I don't think that moving the middle grades into the schools for older or younger students will make a difference. The positive change has to come from a restructuring of the curriculum so that more in depth discussion on the material is allowed to happen and that the class sizes are decreased to allow for more personalized attention. As I learned in my psychology class, the biggest problems for middle schoolers academically is lack of challenge and lack of in depth discussion. Simply moving the students to a elementary or high school is not going to change that. Therefore, I think the change needs to come from an entirely different source. I think this debate will most definitely affect my teaching as I plan to teach the middle grades. It will be a constant battle over to coddle or prod my students into one age set or the other while all the while, the genuine problem isn't being addressed.