A recent Education Week article written by Sarah Sparks affirmed for me the value of BCD’s structure as a PreK-9 school and the developmental appropriateness of how we configure middle school (grades 4-6) and upper school (grades 7-9).  The article asserts a supportive statement about our advisor program in grades 4-9, wherein each student has a dedicated teacher that meets with them regularly to help them navigate program expectations while attending to the social dynamics of their class.

“While policymakers and researchers alike have focused on improving students’ transition into high school, a new study of Florida schools suggests the critical transition problem may happen years before, when students enter middle school.  The study, part of the Program on Education Policy and Governance Working Papers Series at Harvard University, found that students moving from grade 5 into traditional middle schools (grades 6-8) show a “sharp drop” in math and language arts achievement in the transition year that plagues them as far out as 10th grade. “I don’t see eliminating the transition at the high school level as important or beneficial as eliminating the transition at the middle school level,” said Martin R. West, an assistant education professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a co-author of the study.

The onset of puberty can exacerbate normal transition problems for younger students, according to Patti Kinney, an associate director of middle-level services at the National Association of Secondary School Principals, in Reston, Va. “You’re looking at students making a transition during a time when tremendous physical, cognitive, and emotional transitions are going on at the same time,” Ms. Kinney said. “There’s a wide variety of maturation among different children at that level.”

A NASSP book, Breaking Ranks, on improving student achievement in middle grades calls for schools serving those grades to provide each student with a “personal adult advocate” to help him or her understand the changing academic requirements and social dynamics. “It is easy for those who don’t work regularly with middle-level students to forget that 6th graders are only five or six years removed from their teddy bears,” Breaking Ranks notes, and “those who do work with middle-level students sometimes forget that, by the time students leave ‘the middle,’ the rigors of college are only four short years away.”