Hmmm. During my school years (1962-75) in Pennsylvania, it was:
Elementary school: kindergarten-6th grade
Junior high: 7th-9th grade (and sheer hell, I might add)
High school: 10th-12th grade
My 11yo son moved from elementary into middle school last year, a 6-7-8 arrangement.
There are dances, with all grades, where slow dancing is encouraged. (“Okay, folks, we’re going to slow it down now. Don’t be afraid to ask that special someone…”) 8th grade boys as old as 14—maybe even 15—ask 11yo girls to dance. I doubt the girls feel like they can say no. I think it’s a bad idea for both kids.
I’d like to see school systems divided into k-6, 7-8-9, and 10-11-12. Move everyone down a bit. People complain that “kids grow up too fast.” Well, moving the grades up faster is one of the ways we promote that.
But who were the Freshmen in that arrangement?
My experience was kinda weird in this area. We had 1-7 as elementary school and 8-12 as high school. The 8th graders were known as pre-Freshmen. We were the lowest of the lows, but it didn’t matter because we were in High School, baby!!
This changed the year after I was gone, and they made 8th and 9th Junior High. Or maybe it was 7th and 8th. Can’t remember.
I graduated from a junior high school in the early 1980s. The elementary school was K-6, the junior high school was 7-9 and the high school was 10-12. About five or ten years ago, they moved the ninth graders to the high school and the junior high schools were renamed middle schools.
That’s how it still is here.
I was the first one in my household to go to a middle school instead of a junior high. That was 30 years or so ago.
I get the idea that there’s been quite a lot of fluidity and experimentation in how the different grades are arranged and named. When I was at my high-school reunion, I noticed that, in her yearbook, my older sister’s graduating class was named “Year 5” instead of “Grade 13”, for example. It would be interesting to make a history of such changes.
for me in MA it was:
Kindergarten (it’s own building)
1-6 elementary school
7-8 jr high (same building as the elementary)
9-12 high school (we didn’t have a high school and got to pick one in the surrounding towns)
now in my home town it is:
k-5 elementary school (the former 1-8 building)
6-8 middle school (new building)
9-12 (regionalised with a specific town)
In 1982, I asked the “why middle schools question” to my professor when I took my educational methods and materials classes. Population change was his answer- many school districts in the rustbelt were losing students then due to industries moving away or just shutting down. They couldn’t afford to keep all their school buildings open and therefore regrouped their students in grades and buildings best suited to save money. This caused unusual (for then) groupings of, say, grades 5-8 or maybe 7-9. It didn’t seem right to call 5th, 6th, or 9th grade “Junior High”, so the Middle School moniker emerged.
These weird grade combinations have created a back-formed idea called “the true middle school concept”.
Not in my experience. There was not a single junior high in the city that was physically connected to, or even in the vicinity of, a high school. Perhaps it’s a distinction now, however.
I recall some child characters in TV sitcoms in the early 1960s went to “grammar school.” Was that just another name for junior high/middle school?
I see several references in this thread to kindergarten being included in elementary school. Kindergarten was strictly optional and loosely structured where I grew up. I actually attended it in Arkansas, because we did not move to Texas until I was almost 6. In West Texas, it was definitely not part of elementary school, and where we were in Arkansas I recall it being held in a church basement. Is it more part of the regular education curriculum now?
Exactly the same in West Texas.
I live in MA and my hometown is like yours.
In MA in the 80’s
Elementary (modern word for ‘grammar’) K-5
Middle 6-8
High 9-12
Ah yes, I guess the age of those “grammar school” characters would have been that of elementary-school students. Sometimes they lasted long enough that I can’t remember which age they were for grammar school. Think Leave It to Beaver.
There seems to be some confusion as to what exactly constitutes a middle school versus a junior high school.
Here’s how it was explained to me.
If you start with the traditional elementary school model, you generally have a class of students who is taught by one teacher who provides almost all of the instruction for the academic disciplines.
Skipping forward to high school, you have students choosing their own schedules, and who then have individual teachers for their subjects and each class is comprised of a different assortment of students.
In the simplest terms, the junior high model uses the high school scheduling system with each student having a different schedule and a different set of classmates for each class. For many students, this is a drastic change from what they had in elementary school.
As a result, the middle school model provides a more gradual sense of transition.
With the middle school model, you have a group of students who stay together for their academic classes and move as a whole to different subject area teachers. This allows some sense of stability for the students and allows a team of teachers to work with the same kids and in theory, better address their needs.
My middle schoolers have a high school model - they don’t stay with the same group of kids all day and they get to select (or are placed in) different classes. However, my kids did have the model you are talking about as a middle school model - in 3rd - 5th grade - where they would move from classroom to classroom and teacher to teacher - but as a class.
I moved from Chicago to Idaho in 82.
In the outlying Chicago area <St. Charles, if it matters> it was Jr high, 6-8th grade, high school 9-12th.
In Idaho, it was middle school to 9th grade, with high school being only 10-12.
So I’m guessing it’s a matter of districts, as much as anything else.
Thank goodness we hadn’t moved a year earlier or I’d have had to endure being a freshman twice!
IME 6th grade was more like elementary school, 7&8 like HS.
No idea. I was in junior high in the early 90s and it was still called junior high.
Preschool, kindergarten, elementary school (1-2), middle school (3-5), junior high (6-8) and high school (9-12). I always assumed that was the universal jargon.