"Obviously the transition years are very difficult for kids, so whether it's moving from grade five to six or eight to nine, it's a challenging situation," says Joseph Bumsted, Ed.M.'82, assistant principal of South Fort Myers High School in Florida. The question is, is this an indictment of the middle school model or of middle schools themselves? While widespread consensus may be hard to achieve on whether middle schools work for the students enrolled within them, most people can agree on one thing: Regardless of one's zip code, there is a healthy amount of trepidation around middle school and the middle school years. So what does this mean for America's public middle schools? Possibly nothing. That suggests to me … that while there is a cost with school transitions in general, the middle school transition is particularly tough." "In middle school, the decline persists as long as they remain in a middle school and even into high school they don't just have a one-time drop. "By grade 10, those students are back up" where they were expected to be before making the transition. "We do find clear evidence of a drop in achievement to high school, but it is one-quarter the size of the drop we see with the middle school transition," he says. And because some Florida students attend schools with grade six through 12 or seven through 12 configurations, he was able to compare the effect of entering a middle school in grade six or seven to that of entering high school in grade nine. West says that Florida's size and diversity allowed him to study the effects of middle school transitions for students of all kinds in urban, suburban, and rural districts. With a mass of Florida data from his prior research projects, West was able to review nine years of results from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), administered annually to students in third through 10th grade. West wondered whether the same patterns would be evident elsewhere and, if so, whether the drop in achievement was temporary or persisted into high school. West decided to take a closer look after he read a 2010 study out of New York City by two Columbia University researchers that "produced compelling evidence that the transitions to middle schools were harmful for students in that setting." That research found that students entering grades six through eight or seven to eight schools experience a "sharp drop" in achievement versus those attending K–8 schools. "If you look at international comparisons, kids in the United States perform better at elementary school than the later grades … so it made sense to look at whether grade configuration influenced this." "Intuitively, I had not expected this to be an important policy lever, but there are a lot of indicators that things are not going well for students in the middle school grades in the United States," says West, who serves as executive editor 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. 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. 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. It was even during this time that West decided he wanted to be a teacher one day. He was lucky to have been the beneficiary of "outstanding" educators in his private K–6 school located within the beltway of Washington, D.C., and the fact that his new school spanned grades three through 12 meant he would avoid making another transition once he reached high school. Still, his transition was pretty mild, he says. Assistant Professor Martin West remembers the "shock" of the new environment he encountered at the larger, all-boys school when he entered the seventh grade. Transitioning from elementary school to middle school can be tough.
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