Bye-Bye, Junior High?

The downward spiral began in seventh grade, says Eric Anderson*,
who dropped out of high school a year shy of graduation. His small
Massachusetts town lacked a junior high, so his district sent him to a
larger school in a nearby city. "I didn't fit into any of the cliques
there," remembers Anderson, whose grades and self-esteem plummeted. "I
totally lost interest in school."

Anderson's story sounds all too familiar to John Alspaugh, Ph.D.,
an emeritus professor of education at the University of
Missouri-Columbia, whose research focuses on school structure. While we
may assume that students leave school for personal reasons -- drugs,
absentee parents, the wrong crowd of friends -- Alspaugh's work indicates
that school district organization affects students' success as well. "If
you have two or three elementary schools merging to form a larger junior
high school, or several junior highs feeding into a high school, you get
achievement loss and an increased drop-out rate," he explains. Alspaugh,
who has examined both urban and rural schools, attributes the changes to
fracturing relationships between both peers and teachers. This can be
especially jarring for pre-adolescents, who crave social
acceptance.

Swayed by researchers like Alspaugh, educators across the country
are rethinking traditional schooling sequences. Last fall, Philadelphia's
school board announced a five-year plan to convert most of the city's
middle schools into kindergarten through eighth grade schools and small
high schools. Cincinnati reports better attendance and fewer discipline
problems since replacing its junior highs with K-8 schools several years
ago. And a successful pilot program convinced Cleveland officials to
dismantle their 25 middle schools and set up K-8 schools instead. School
districts in states including Colorado, Connecticut and New York are
debating whether to follow suit.

Anderson, who earned his high school credits at a community
college, thinks the K-8 model makes perfect sense. And he should know:
He's now teaching junior high school. "It's such a rough age," he says.
"Kids need all the stability they can get."

* Name has been changed.