Why did they drop "Junior High" in favor of "Middle School"?

A long time ago elementary school was K-8 and high school was 9-12. Then junior high appeared for 7-8 or 6-8 or 7-9 depending on school district. Now it’s middle school for nominally 6-8. YDMV.

When did this change take place, and more to the point, why?

It happened in the early seventies, I believe, because I was caught up in the middle of it. As for why, can’t help you there.

1974-75 was my 9th grade year. The following year, the 9th grade was at the high school.
I don’t remember if Jr. High was dropped for middle school.

What, if anything, is the difference, besides the name?

Wikipedia is muddled and self-contradictory, and implies there is a difference without specifying what it is.

I attended elementary school K-6, then junior high 7-8. That was in the late 1970’s. When I substituted in a different county in the late 1980’s, that was still how it worked. So the change seems to have come in the 1990’s or later in New Jersey. I think it was to make it K-5 or even K-4, and then 5 or 6 through 8, which is why they call it a middle school.

Junior Highs are generally 7-8-9. Middle Schools are generally 6-7-8.

It changes as populations change. We had a Junior High because as the tail end of the boomers, there wasn’t enough room in the existing high school for the 9th graders. Once the boomers were gone, there was plenty of room in the high school, and the middle school became a middle school.

(There is also some child development stuff - that 6th graders are too mature (or rather, have entered the larval stage of human development) that make them a better fit for seventh and eighth graders, and not a great fit for a school that has five year olds. But I think the real reason is that Junior Highs were popular while baby boomers filled up high schools.)

In Southern California, it was ‘Jr. high’. Up here, I see a lot of ‘Middle Schools’ in my data. I asked coworkers about this a couple/few weeks ago. It sounds like it might be a regional thing.

I went to junior high (mid 80’s) grades 6,7,8. The town built a new school in the 90’s and called it middle school. Still 6,7,8.

The junior high school I attended was seventh through ninth grade. Sometime after I graduated, the ninth graders were moved to the high school and the junior high schools were renamed middle schools with just the seventh and eighth graders attending them. (Kindergarten through sixth grade remained in the elementary schools.)

Yeah, that’s why I said generally.

There isn’t a hard and fast rule - but generally, if there are 9th graders in the school, they call it a Junior High. If the 9th graders go to the high school, its a middle school.

And my sisters kids go straight from elementary school to high school - which usually happens in 9th grade, but because of population sizes, its eighth graders in the high school and seventh graders in the elementary schools - which took me forever to internalize that my nephew was an eighth grade high schooler.

I know that. I was just providing a specific example.

For the record, I went to elementary for K-6, junior high 7-8 and senior high 9-12. A few years before i got there, they built a new high school next to the old one and called it Senior High. The old high school became the Junior High for 7-8. Eventually the junior high became the administration building, and they built new schools away from that campus and called them middle schools, now 6-8

I can see the need for new buildings to accommodate population growth, but it still doesn’t explain the name change from junior high to middle school.

Same here (San Diego). Then I moved to L.A. County for high school, and it was grades 9 through 12. So I didn’t have to put up with ‘freshman hazing’. :smiley:

I imagine that it varies from district to district. When I was at that age range, from about 1988-1991, in the Cleveland district, “junior high” was 7th and 8th grades (there were also K-3 schools and 4-6 schools, both of which were called “elementary”). Nowadays, Cleveland has nothing but K-8 elementary schools and 9-12 high schools, but all of the suburbs have middle schools, which are mostly 6-8 but in at least two districts 5-8. The youngest-range schools are still “elementary”, but the 4-5ish range might be called “intermediate”.

Around Chicago, it seems to be a different philosophy. Our middle school is 6,7,8 and each child has a team of teachers that work together. Also, the grades have very little overlap in the hallways. Each grade has lockers in separate “pods” and the classes are arranged around each pod to keep kids in one area.

I actually like it. Keeps the 8th graders from picking on the 6th graders.

I attended two different Catholic grade schools; both of them ran K-8. However, that was the 1970s, so things might well be done differently at those schools today.

The larger of the two (so big that they had two full classes of 30 or so kids per grade) had a separate building for 6th-8th grades, in part to separate the bigger kids from the smaller kids.

The smaller of the two had us all in the same building (and on the same hallway), though they had the little kids at one end of the hall, and the big kids at the other end.

Cleveland area (at least the east side I was familiar with). Middle school was 7-9. High school (actually often called upper school) was 10-12. K-6 was usually called lower school not elementary. In some larger districts K-3 and 4-6 might be separate and K-3 was called elementary. I graduated in 1967 so this was some time back.

I think one reason for this was that Freshman sports then included 8th and 9th graders. It could included 7th, but they seldom made the team.

The explanation I always heard for the switch was to better pool kids who were all hitting puberty. I guess 6th graders needed to get out of the same building as little kids, or something. Of course, that’s just how the explanation filtered down to me as a student.

[Cool story, bro]
I was in this age group around 1990-1992. I finished elementary school in the Orlando, Florida, and then attended 6th grade at the local “middle school”.

For 7th grade, I moved to South Florida, which still had the 7-9th grade “junior high” model, apparently because there wasn’t enough room to switch over to the “middle school” scenario.

For 10th grade, I moved to Fort. Lauderdale to start high school. There, they had already switched to using “middle schools”, so the high school was 9-12.

So, I ended up getting 4 years of middle school and 3 years of high school, and was never a “lowly freshman”. [/Cool story, bro]

When I was a 5th grader in 1987, the last town I lived in during my k-12 years was in the process of creating a separate school for high schoolers. At that very moment grades 1-5 were in one school and 6-12 in another. The new high school opened the following fall, giving those of us from grades 6-8 a school to ourselves (a middle school), while the 9-12th graders had another.

I’ve heard of 9th graders who weren’t at a high school yet, but I’ve never met anyone in real life who attended one of these junior highs that included grade nine.

Could it have been a gender thing as “Junior” typically implies male?