Middle grades to high school: fixing the weak link


  • January 4, 2016
  • /   Reggie Dogan
  • /   education

Youmone Berrien with Turnaround Solutions helps Casey Kramer’s seventh grade class at Warrington
Middle School in Pensacola, Fl. Thursday, May 14, 2015.(Michael Spooneybarger/ Pensacola Today)

By most accounts middle schools are the weak link in the chain of public education, even though those years represent a critical time for young teens.

With so much attention directed toward kindergarten readiness and high school graduation rates, middle schools are often left out of the education debate.

Too many students leave the middle grades unprepared to succeed in rigorous high school studies and unable to take advantage of all that high school can offer. By ninth grade, many struggling students have fallen behind and are on a path to become high school dropouts.

The high school graduation rate is one of 16 benchmark metrics that the Studer Community Institute measures in the Pensacola Metro Dashboard. Developed with the University of West Florida, the dashboard is a snapshot of the educational, economic and social well-being of the community.

Driven by newly documented slumps in learning, by increasing crime rates and high dropout rates in high school, educators across the state and the nation are struggling to rethink middle school and how best to teach adolescents at a transitional juncture of self-discovery and hormonal change.

Derrick Thomas, assistant principal at Warrington Middle School, lamented the dilemma they face in getting people to pay attention to this important, but too often overlooked, link in secondary education.

“It’s hard grasping the levels of differences coming in from the elementary schools,” Thomas said. “It’s a hard task because sixth grade is where we have our issues and that’s where we lose teachers.”

Research does show that the move to middle school, which occurs as children enter adolescence, is a treacherous time.

On average there is a substantial drop in school engagement and achievement. Family relationships become more strained and kids report increased stress levels. The adolescent spikes in substance abuse, delinquency and other problems began to surface.

Middle schools have been blamed for the increase in student behavior problems and cited as the cause of young students’ alienation, disengagement from school and low achievement.

"The Bermuda triangle of education,” former Louisiana superintendent Cecil Picard once called middle schools. “Hormones are flying all over the place.”

Of eight middle schools in Escambia County, only Brown Barge, a magnet school that includes the program for gifted students, consistently posts high state standardized test scores.

In general, the school's reading and math proficiency scores are in the 80s, based on the FCAT 2.0, the latest data available.

The rest of them remain mired in mediocrity with scores that rank average or below, year in and year out.

{{business_name}}FCAT Chart 2016

Middle schools were created in the 1960s, after educators determined that seventh-through-ninth-grade junior high schools were too rigid and out of touch with young people’s personal development.

But now, a battery of standardized tests, some required under the defunct No Child Left Behind law, are starkly illustrating that many of these sixth-through-eighth-grades are failing too.

“The Middle School Mess” in EducationNext detailed how a group of researchers from EdSource and Stanford University analyzed how district and school policies and practices are linked to higher student performance.

Under the guidance of Michael Kirst, professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford University, the researchers looked into the “black box” of middle-school performance to analyze how district and school policies and practices are linked to higher student performance.

Controlling for student background, they studied 303 middle schools and compared 200,000 student scores on California’s standardized tests in mathematics and English to responses to school practices surveys provided by 303 principals, 3,752 English and math teachers, and 157 superintendents.

“Our findings were surprising in their consistency,” the report concludes.

The 44 higher-performing schools (those with average schoolwide math and English test scores a full standard deviation above the mean) “create a shared, schoolwide intense focus on the improvement of student outcomes,” the report says.

Those high-performing schools did things like “set measurable goals on standards-based and benchmark tests across all proficiency levels, grades, and subjects; create school missions that were ‘future oriented,’ with curricula and instruction designed to prepare students to succeed in a rigorous high-school curriculum; include improvement of student outcomes ‘as part of the evaluation of the superintendent, the principal, and the teachers’; and communicate to parents and students “their responsibility as well for student learning, including parent contracts, turning in homework, attending class, and asking for help when needed.”

Amanda Nolte is a math specialist for Turnaround Solutions. The Jacksonville-based company was hired by the Escambia County School District to improve student achievement at Warrington Middle School.

Nolte is keenly aware of the challenges middle schools face in the transition period between elementary and high school.

Middle school is where teachers spend a majority of their time trying to help students catch up on what they should already have learned, Nolte said.

“We have kids 13 and 14 years old, basically working with us on sight words, the part of language and reading they should have learned in grade school,” Nolte said. “If you look at the typical elementary school student who has been in elementary school for six years, we have three years to essentially catch them up on everything that they didn’t already get.”

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