Middle School Transition Paper

I hope that the assumption that the middle schools of Blount County are under-performing is not being made based solely on a comparison with the high schools ' performance and the elementary school 's performance. That would be an unfair and inaccurate assumption if that were the case. The loss of achievement associated with school-to-school transitions from elementary school to middle school and middle school to high school is a well documented occurrence. Studies (Alspaugh,1998 & Rosenblatt, 2008) have found a statistically significant achievement loss associated with the transition from elementary school to middle school at the 6th grade as compared with K-8 schools that did not have a school-to-school transition at 6th grade. This

The body of accumulated research has identified the transition to the middle school as marked by significant declines in the areas of academic, behavioral, interpersonal and emotional functioning. Studies have shown that students in transition middle schools showed statistically significant declines in not only achievement test scores (Alspaugh,1998) but also in grade point average (Blyth, Simmons & Carlton-Ford, 1983; Simmons, Burgeson, Carlton-Ford & Blyth, 1987), self esteem (Blyth, Simmons, & Bush, 1978; Simmons et al., 1987; Simmons, Rosenberg, & Rosenberg,1973), and participation in extracurricular activities (Blyth et al., 1978; Blyth et al., 1983; Simmons et al., 1987). In particular, the decline in GPA has been replicated in meta analyses of multi-school samples. I realize that you, as a former middle school principal are well aware of the fact that the middle school student is a different animal from the elementary school student and from the high school student as

Consider the implications of a "harder" discipline: statistics. The middle school data is drawn from the three middle schools which all contain only three grade levels. I 'm sure the high school data is drawn from the 9th grade academies as well as the high school so you have 4 years of data from the high schools compared with 3 from the middle schools. With the elementary schools you have an even greater disparity because you have not only 4 years of test data (2 - 5) but also most elementary school students have two years prior to any data extraction (K-1) to stabilize and adjust to the transition to elementary school. These extra years at the high school and elementary allow for the effects of the statistical phenomenon of regression toward the mean to ameliorate the effects of outliers and