New research around K-8 schools
10/11/2012
"Do Middle Schools Make Sense?"
Mary Tamer, Ed. The Magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Fall 2012
"New research finds that keeping students in K–8 schools has benefits.
"Not all students are so fortunate, as West discovered last spring when he released a study that explored the achievement and dropout rates of students enrolled in grades three through 10 in Florida’s public schools. The findings? In sum, students who left elementary schools for middle schools in grades six or seven “lose ground in both reading and math compared to their peers who attend K–8 schools,” he wrote in “The Middle School Plunge,” published in the spring 2012 issue of Education Next. Additionally, Florida students who entered middle school in sixth grade were 1.4 percentage points more likely than their K–8 peers to drop out of high school by 10th grade — a whopping increase of 18 percent.
"“Intuitively, I had not expected this to be an important policy lever, but there are a lot of indicators that thing..."