Dropout Nation

The transition from elementary to middle school is tough on kids. It occurs at an uncomfortable time in their lives. It introduces them all at once to a different form of schooling. It offers new challenges but seemingly little support to meet them.

In literacy, there’s also an Alice in Wonderland reversal that knocks some off their game. Down the rabbit hole they go and what do they find there? Half as much classroom time for Language Arts, an emphasis on literature (as opposed to skills), and more whole class readings from a single shared text.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of all comes in content area subjects. In these classes, kids raised on fiction are confronted with facts. With a different teacher for every subject, the textbook reading load increases. Content area teachers also present a range of other non-fiction resources for kids to conquer.

Writing changes, too. In elementary school, kids may have written a lot of fiction and other narrative forms. In middle school, the situation is reversed. Kids do much less writing in a downsized, literature-dominated Language Arts curriculum, and virtually all the writing kids do in the content areas is expository or persuasive.

Great Expectations

Though they know it isn’t true, middle school teachers hold the expectation—or just the hope?—that all their kids can perform at grade level. It’s not wishful thinking; it’s survival. With as many as 150 kids to attend to, middle school teachers don’t get to know their students as well as elementary teachers do. It’s also harder to offer individualized support. Many middle school content area classes are taught from a single textbook. If kids can’t read it, teachers have neither the time nor the training to help them.

At the same time, kids who struggle with literacy have just lost half their Language Arts instruction time. The use of that time has changed, too. In elementary school, teachers may have made an effort to match kids with texts they could read and were interested in. Middle school teachers wouldn’t want to deny this flexibility but the demands of curriculum, and the traditions of secondary school culture, leave them unprepared to do so.

Nationally, somewhere between half and a third of kids enter middle school behind in reading. In writing, however, probably more are behind. With less time for Language Arts, and a curricular emphasis on literature, it’s hard for kids to get the help they need to catch up. At the same time, the writing requirements of content area subjects are much more demanding than what kids experienced in fourth and fifth grade.

Content area teachers aren’t reading and writing teachers. They don’t teach literacy; it isn’t what they were trained in. Consequently, kids may struggle with both reading and writing in content area classrooms. They’ll struggle with their grades, too.

For many students, the path to academic failure and dropping out of school begins with a bad first semester in sixth grade. Grade point averages for many kids seem to slip a little in the transition from elementary to middle school. For some, however, they slip to the bottom—and stay there.

Middle school performs a “hard reset” on many kids, especially those with low literacy skills. Less remediation is available at middle school than at elementary, and expectations are higher, so it’s very hard for kids to catch up. Most just try to hang in. A pattern of low performance in middle school follows many kids to high school—where things get even harder.

At the Crossroads

Middle school is a crossroads. Kids who make it in just fine tend to make it out just fine. Kids who don’t, don’t. It’s these kids who are most likely to become our nation’s high school dropouts and it’s trouble with literacy that’s most likely to drop them the hardest.

At the Crossroads

Crossing over the threshold in sixth grade, we know that many of our middle schoolers are behind in reading and writing. While elementary school is survivable under these circumstances, middle often is not.

In middle school, kids have multiple teachers, multiple assignments, and a lot more work to do. They’re also expected to be able to do it on their own—or with a little help from home. For those students who can’t do the work, and especially for those who don’t have help at home, there are few options.

Kids who enter middle school two or more years behind in reading and writing are likely to leave middle school three or more years behind. That may mean entering high school to confront curriculum designed for 14- and 15-year olds with the skills of a 10- or 11-year old.

Opportunities for remediation are typically even fewer at high school than they are at middle school. There is also much less tolerance for skill deficits. By high school, we begin to see kids as grown up. We cut them less slack than we might if they were younger. They look like young adults; we feel they should act like young adults. But if they don’t read and write like young adults, they can’t pull of the act.

For high school students many years behind in reading and writing, one classic novel or one Social Studies research paper can destroy a semester. The pattern of low academic performance that precedes kids into high school tends to follow them all the way through—if they even get through.

Extending Our Ownership

When someone hands off a problem and expects us to fix it, it’s natural to be resentful. But resenting elementary teachers for passing along low-literacy kids to middle school teachers doesn’t help the kids improve. It’s also not a justification for perpetrating the same act on the next group of teachers up the line.

It’s important to recognize that middle school is not a way station where kids bide time until we kick them upstairs. It truly is a crossroads. Kids who don’t cross have a long and sorrowful road ahead of them. So it’s vital that we build a bridge, catch them up, and commit to sending them off with at least a reasonable chance of succeeding in high school.

We can do this by taking some of the following actions:

• Providing sufficient instruction time for literacy. Kids who struggle with literacy need more time for reading and writing, not less. Two periods a day—one for reading, one for writing—gives kids who are behind a chance to catch up. Literacy is the foundation of all other academic subjects. Investing in a solid foundation is a smart investment, well worth losing an elective.

• Take a skills-based, as opposed to a literature-based, approach to literacy. While it’s important for kids to read the classics, it’s more important for them to learn to read. Spending six weeks on To Kill a Mocking Bird is a waste of time if most students can’t read it. Low-literacy kids desperately need intense skills-based instruction focused on raising ability levels, not traditional literature-based instruction focused on exposure to classic literature.

• Raising the reading levels of low-performing students. For low readers, we must take a very specific path that dramatically accelerates their growth. This involves large amounts of reading time, in school and out, in books that match their independent reading level. It also requires an emphasis on reading fluency. We may begin low-performing kids with fiction but at the middle school level we must transition them to academic non-fiction as soon as we can.

• Providing comprehension instruction in the text forms kids need for middle school success. In traditional Language Arts classes, kids typically encounter only three types of texts: novels, plays, and poetry. Unfortunately, these forms show up rarely, if at all, in Social Studies, Science, and Math. Understanding non-fiction can be very different from understanding fiction. Who better to help kids learn the differences than their Language Arts teachers?

• Providing Language Arts instruction in expository, persuasive, research, and other informational writing forms. Some Language Arts teachers do some of this already, but not nearly enough, especially for kids who struggle with literacy. Even though this emphasis alters the traditional Language Arts curriculum, the change is necessary to respond to student needs.

• Allow students to receive guided help in Language Arts on work they are doing in the content areas. Why can’t kids work on a Social Studies report during Language Arts time? Why can’t kids get help with their Science reading from the best reading teaching they have? Kids who need a lot of literacy support in middle school need it from their literacy teacher. Content area teachers can and should support Language Arts methods to some extent, but they don’t have the experience or time in their curriculum to help kids learn to read and write. At the same time, the best way for kids to improve their content area skills in reading and writing is by getting help in the context of doing content area work.

• Teaching kids effective study skills. Studying is a funny thing; everyone just assumes that everyone else know how to do it. We ask kids to learn tremendous amounts of information but we don’t teach them how to read it thoughtfully, write it down in an organized way, and memorize it effectively when they study it. For kids with low literacy skills, explicit instruction in these areas is extremely important.

• Sharing key literacy practices across the curriculum. In a skills-based Language Arts curriculum, kids will learn new skills. Why shouldn’t they be encouraged to use them in other classes? Content area teachers don’t have to take the lead in teaching these skills. But it will help kids tremendously if they know they can use the reading and writing skills they’ve learned in Language Arts across the curriculum.

• Consider an eighth grade retention policy. We can be almost certain that kids with “D” and “F” grades in middle school will have the same lack of success in high school. We also know that kids with such low academic performance are at high risk for dropping out. So why send kids on to high school when we can predict in advance that a significant number will fail? Perhaps we could create a special “bridge” year devoted to intense study in reading, writing, and math with the goal of improving eighth graders’ readiness for high school.

Struggling with literacy is tough at any age, and it only gets tougher as kids ascend through the grade levels. Kids who don’t keep up in elementary school fall farther behind in middle school. And the gap between grade level and skill level grows with each year that passes.

The bottom line is this: kids with significant literacy problems are prime candidates for dropping out of high school. But the reverse is also true: kids with good literacy skills are prime candidates for high school success.

This means we can reduce the dropout rate by concentrating on literacy skills at the middle school level. If we wait until high school, things get very complicated. It’s hard to give kids extra classes in literacy because this takes opportunities away from amassing required credits in other subjects. At high school, there are fewer resources for helping low-performing kids. Strong social stigma also attaches to being tracked.

Middle school is an interesting time; it’s like a free warm-up period. Classes don’t count toward graduation, so if kids head for high school with a different mix, the consequences are minimal. Math is probably the only subject where sequential coursework is truly vital. Kids are also new to a multi-subject day, so altering the mix of subjects, especially if it keeps some kids with the same teacher for more than a single period, could be very helpful.

Each of the changes presented here represent significant alterations to the typical middle school structure. As such, they are difficult to implement. But sacrificing large numbers of students to a traditional structure is inconsistent with what that structure was created to achieve. The function of middle school is to transition kids out of elementary school and prepare them to succeed in high school. If the traditional model needs to be reorganized to accomplish this goal, it’s worth the effort.