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E-mail Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2010 > July > 12
Monday, July 12, 2010
Dumping K-8 schools bucks a trend (and not in a good way)
In today’s paper, Margo Rutledge Kissell writes that Dayton Public Schools is moving toward 7-12 high schools with K-6 elementary schools. The editorial page also weighed in on this issue, cautioning Superintendent Lori Ward not to get distracted by issues that won’t have a deep impact on academics.
The core question for those who want the district to improve should always be the same — will this help kids learn better? Unfortunately, the evidence says the answer to that question is most likely “no” when it comes to moving away from K-8 schools.
Let’s start with a quick history lesson.
Shortly after the Gail Littlejohn-led Kids First team took over the city school board in 2001 and passed a school construction bond issue in 2002, the board announced it was going to dump middle schools in favor of K-8 elementary schools. Littlejohn and others theorized 7th and 8th graders would benefit by being grouped in smaller numbers across the elementary schools. It would give the kids a chance to to be role models, by serving as “upperclassmen” and allow them to get more individual attention.
Littlejohn was adamant at the time that the research showed K-8 was a benefit to middle school age kids. After some research, I was skeptical. There were some studies back then showing mild gains for middle school kids in K-8s, but the gains weren’t dramatic. The research didn’t seem like enough of a slam dunk to assure K-8 was better.
But there was no arguing this point — the district’s middle schools were terrible. In 2000 I had spent a full day shadowing an honor student at the now-closed MacFarlane Middle School and came away stunned by the level of chaos and the lack of learning going on. If K-8 got the kids out of that environment it could only be good.
But the K-8 experiment hasn’t been completely smooth. It has brought more challenging discipline issues to elementary schools. Certification problems abound, as some elementary school teachers don’t have the right background to teach middle school content. For kids ready for advanced, high school level work, it was sometimes hard for them to get it in an elementary school. These factors, along with some construction advantages of grouping kids by 7-12, are driving the district away from K-8.
But will 7-12 schools help kids achieve better? One of the top middle school experts in the country says K-8 is a better bet.
David Hough is a researcher at Missouri State University who initially set out to prove middle schools were the best place for kids age 10-14.
“Much to my surprise, they were not,” he said.
Hough now is managing editor of the Middle Grades Research Journal and since 2004 has carefully tracked data from across the country on how kids in that age range perform on academics, discipline and attendance in various grade configurations. Over the past 10 years, study after study has found only small differences in student performance, but the differences that do exist all favor K-8 schools.
“Kids are attending at higher rates, fewer behavior referrals and achieving higher in K-8 more than any other,” he said. “That research has been consistent since 1991. Nearly every study you will find, and there’s been about a half dozen good ones since 2006 with different methods, say the same.”
Those findings have helped persuade several districts, like Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York City, to move toward the K-8 model.
Hough has several theories about why K-8 is better. Generally, he said, elementary school teachers tend to take a more “nurturing” instructional approach that is student-focused. At older grades, teachers tend to be content specialists who expect students to work more independently. Middle grade kids, Hough believes, still need a more nurturing approach.
Also, parent involvement in schools dramatically drops off when kids move beyond elementary school. Parents of middle grade kids stay involved longer when their kids stay in elementary schools, Hough said the research shows clearly. This benefits the kids when it comes to the attendance, behavior and academics.
DPS should be looking at this data. Instead, chief academic officer Jane McGee-Rafal was quoted in the story saying she can find research “that supports almost anything.” That dismissive attitude won’t help. If she doesn’t know Hough’s work she hasn’t done her homework.
NOTE: A typo in David Hough’s comment was corrected after this was initially posted.
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DPS hopes 7th-, 8th- graders at high schools will help academic scores
By Margo Rutledge Kissell
Dayton Public Schools officials and parents will be closely watching what happens at the new Belmont High School when it opens in 2011-12 with students from seventh through 12th grade.
Depending on how things go there, other Dayton high schools could see a similar change in grade configuration. Former Dayton Superintendent Kurt Stanic has said “the goal is to make all of them 7-12.”
“It’s something that’s being looked at,” said Jane McGee-Rafal, the district’s chief academic officer, noting the change would help with continuity of instruction during the critical transition between eighth and ninth grades.
District officials hope that bringing seventh- and eighth-graders into a more rigorous academic environment will raise their poor academic performance.
Only 40.7 percent of seventh-graders across the district were proficient in math on the last state report card and the situation was even worse for eighth-graders: 32.3 percent were proficient in math, 20.4 percent in science and 12.5 percent in social studies.
Dayton Board of Education President Jeffrey J. Mims Jr. points to Stivers School for the Arts as the district’s shining example of where this grade configuration works already.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to say this is working over here and this is not working over here,” he said.
Mims noted the Council of the Great City Schools, a national organization comprising 66 of the largest urban public school districts, including Dayton Public, found many eighth-graders are not prepared for a number of areas, including science, math and music.
“We’re saying to young people, we want you to be competitive and win in all areas,” he said, “yet we’re sending them there without proper tools to be prepared and competitive.”
Like Stivers, the middle school students at Belmont will be separated from the high school students during the day, but parents remain divided on the issue.
Melissa Derksen doesn’t like the idea of adding seventh and eighth grades to the new Belmont High School.
“I think it’s too much,” Belmont parent Derksen said.
Belmont will move to the 7-12 grade configuration after construction is finished in late 2011.
Derksen, who has a 13-year-old daughter, worries there will be too many students in the school, the curriculum may be too challenging and the younger students will be interacting with older ones at social events, including football games.
“My 13-year-old is interested in older boys and I’d like to keep her away from them,” she said.
Another parent, Michelle Buchert, doesn’t have a problem with the change because her own high school was set up that way.
“It was fine,” Buchert recalled of her experience at United Junior/Senior High School in the small town of Armagh, Pa., in the early 1990s. “If anything, I didn’t have to learn a school over again.”
Buchert’s son, who will turn 7 soon, likely will go to Belmont when he reaches the seventh grade.
The move could mean changing some of the elementary schools, now prekindergarten through eighth grade, to prekindergarten through sixth grade.
It hasn’t been determined which of the current elementary schools Belmont would pull from because only 300 seventh- and eighth-graders would go there, officials said. But possible schools include Cleveland, Orville Wright, Ruskin, Horace Mann and Eastmont.
Those 300 students will join 645 high school students at Belmont, where the younger students will be in a separate wing with staggered bells.
The wing added about $5.5 million to the Belmont construction project, which will total nearly $20 million, said John Carr, the district’s chief construction officer.
While Belmont’s funding is in place, expanding the 7-12 configuration would depend on funding availability, officials said.
Dayton Public is not alone in trying the junior/senior high format.
“Every school district has different reasons for configuring schools the way they are,” said Patti Kinney of the National Association of Secondary School Principals in Reston, Va.
Kinney, associate director for middle level services, said some urban districts , as well as many small rural districts faced with limited resources, use the combined format. “It’s really a matter of looking at the practices that are going on as opposed to the grade configuration,” she said. “What’s important is what are they doing in the seventh and eighth grade?”
Former Superintendent Kurt Stanic, who recently finished his two-year stint with the district, was a proponent of the 7-12 configuration.
One major benefit Stanic cited is having certified high school teachers available to teach more advanced material in math and other subjects to seventh- and eighth-graders. At the current preK-8 level, there is a more generalized approach.
Ohio eighth-graders can earn some high school credit in core subjects when they’re taught by high school teachers.
“By having a dual format, that will allow us to do some of that,” Jane McGee-Rafal, Dayton Public Schools’ chief academic officer, said.
As part of the 7-12 configuration, the district also has been looking at “campuslike settings” where eighth-graders are taught by teachers at a nearby high school. That occurred at Meadowdale High School last year.
“We’ll be exploring more of that,” McGee-Rafal said.
Drew Allbritten, executive director of the National Middle School Association, called Dayton’s 7-12 step “a retro move,” referring to the junior/senior high combo that was popular before many districts moved away from it 30 years ago in favor of middle schools. During the last decade, Dayton Public moved from middle schools to the preK-8 configuration.
David L. Hough, managing editor of Middle Grades Research Journal at Missouri State University, said their research indicates the K-8 structure leads to better student achievement, behavior and attendance.
“What research we have from the last two decades demonstrates K-8 “elemiddle” schools outperform any other grade structure that there is,” he said.
McGee-Rafal said she can find research “that supports almost anything . For us, it’s a matter of practice.”
That practice has been the success at Stivers, which changed to the 7-12 format in the mid-1990s and is ranked by U.S. News and World Report as among the best public high schools in the country.
Another nationally recognized school, Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, also operates under the 7-12 design.
Cincinnati Public spokeswoman Janet Walsh said the district has three 7-12 schools. From time to time, officials have explored the idea of trying to convert more to that format, but that’s been complicated by the district’s facilities master plan and cost issues.
“Where possible, we might explore it,” Walsh said, “but to make wholesale changes we would want a strong case that actual grade configuration leads to better results.”
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, School Construction, Teaching and Learning
