Parents who don't understand!

Parents who need to be educated about the mission of an exemplary middle school!

So parent education will commence!

.... If I were the new principal of a middle school in which numerous well-educated parents seem to be operating under the impression that middle school is or ought to be junior high, I would take that as a sign that my "audience" is people who are actively concerned about knowledge and academic achievement.

Not team-teaching and exploratory programs.



What is growth?

What is growth? In the simplest terms, growth is change over time. To study growth, we measure a thing repeatedly on successive occasions and draw conclusions about how it has changed. People may speak of growth in the context of a system (e.g., a population) or in terms of an organism (i.e., an individual). In the former, we may be concerned with how many individuals comprise the population, how they are dispersed and how rapidly their number increases. In the latter instance, we are generally concerned with how attributes of the organism (e.g., height, weight, reading ability) change over time. Although both notions of growth are interesting, in this paper we are mainly concerned with the second idea because it most closely relates to the concern we have for how individual students develop physically and cognitively.