![]() ![]() Because we could follow the same children over a period of time, we could do a better job of ruling out the role of influences other than middle-school attendance on educational outcomes. Some of these children attended middle schools and some did not. To provide more rigorous evidence on the effect of middle schools on student achievement, we turned to a richly detailed administrative dataset from New York City that allowed us to follow students from grade 3 through grade 8. Because the studies use data from a single school year to contrast students in middle schools and K–8 schools, most of the available research cannot reject the possibility that differences between the groups of students, rather than in the grade configuration of their schools, are actually responsible for the differences in behavior and achievement. These findings are cause for concern, but there is reason to doubt their conclusions. For the last two decades, education researchers and developmental psychologists have been documenting changes in attitudes and motivation as children enter adolescence, changes that some hypothesize are exacerbated by middle-school curricula and practices. And maybe the private schools have had it right all along. Neither the middle school nor the junior high has ever been popular among private schools, which educated only 2 percent of their 6th and 7th graders in these types of schools in 2007. From 1987 to 2007, the percentage of public-school 6th graders in K–6 schools fell from roughly 45 percent to 20 percent. These new middle schools displaced both traditional K–8 primary schools and junior high schools (which first appeared a century ago and served grades 7–8 or 7–9). grew more than sevenfold, from just over 1,500 to 11,500. Between 19, the number of public middle schools in the U.S. Why the turn against middle schools? For more than three decades, American public education embraced this organizational model. ![]() Now, reformers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Maryland, and New York, and the large urban districts of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, are challenging the notion that grouping students in the middle grades in their own school buildings is the right approach. The middle-school model began to be widely adopted almost 40 years ago. States and school districts across the country are reevaluating the practice of educating young adolescents in stand-alone middle schools, which typically span grades 6 through 8 or 5 through 8, rather than keeping them in K–8 schools. But could middle schools also be bad for student learning? Could something as simple as changing the grade configuration of schools improve academic outcomes? That’s what some educators have come to believe. The very words are enough to make many Americans shudder with memories of social anxiety, peer pressure, bad haircuts, and acne. An unabridged version of this article is available here. ![]()
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