ABSTRACT
One of the premises of this book is that the middle school concept is not in need of reinvention, but instead, that the school is. All the chapters in this text say as much. They are ripe with numerical, quantitative data—recent research that makes this point, but equally, the chapters burst with stories of success and portraits of powerful teachers. The personal perspectives of these researchers are clear, and their voices calling for reinvention of the school carry a strong mes sage, a different kind of call for action than that of the middle school reinvention in the middle of the twentieth century. It is a call grounded more firmly in foundational elements of the middle school concept, supported by data, but also in a deeply felt need to create the school anew which permeates each writer's text.
