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January 16, 2006

Baltimore Sun

K-8 Shuffle Might Not Be Cure-all for Schools

Experts, data suggest turnaround in city is far more complex

By Sara Neufeld
Sun reporter

The school closure and restructuring process under way in Baltimore is likely to result in the elimination of many city middle schools and the downsizing of the rest.

School system officials say students in sixth through eighth grades in the city's combined elementary/middle schools score higher on state tests than their counterparts in regular middle schools. So they are looking at the possibility of keeping thousands more children in their elementary schools through eighth grade.

But a computer analysis of test scores by The Sun and interviews with educators and middle school experts suggest that turning around dismal middle school achievement is far more complex than reconfiguring grades.

"It's kind of a convenient reform to talk about: 'Is K [kindergarten] through eight or six through eight a better structure?'" said Mark Conrad, principal of the charter Crossroads School, the only city school serving grades six through eight that made adequate progress on state tests last year. "It comes down to what we're doing with kids and our ability to meet their needs."

Proponents of schools that teach kindergarten through eighth grade say they provide a more nurturing and personalized environment than middle schools, leading to fewer disciplinary problems and better academic performance. That is the same logic that is driving Baltimore to break large high schools into smaller ones.

Meanwhile, the state has told the city school system it must close schools because it has space for tens of thousands more students than it has enrolled. System officials say they are using the opportunity to reconfigure buildings to better meet academic needs.

Benjamin Feldman, the system's research, evaluation and accountability officer, says the changes will offer a chance "to do something innovative and bold."

Baltimore now has 29 K-8 schools, four running independently as charter or startup schools. While some, notably Roland Park Elementary/Middle, in one of the city's most affluent neighborhoods, have very high test scores, others score as low as most Baltimore middle schools.

System figures show that 39 percent of sixth- through eighth-graders in the city's K-8 schools passed last year's state standardized test in math, compared with 16 percent of their peers in middle schools. In reading, 60 percent passed in the K-8 schools, versus 35 percent in middle schools.

Still, more than half the K-8s run by the school system - 13 of 25 - had a failure rate of 80 percent or higher on at least one state test last year, The Sun analysis found. At Steuart Hill Academy, for example, 89 percent of eighth-graders failed the math test. Nearly a third of the K-8s - eight of 25 - had a failure rate of 90 percent or more on at least one test.

By comparison, results were even worse at the city's middle schools. All but two of the 21 middle schools had at least one failure rate of 80 percent or higher, and nearly half had at least one failure rate of 90 percent or higher.

Around the country, troubled urban school systems, from Baltimore to Philadelphia to Milwaukee, are looking to K-8s to improve student discipline and test scores. However, some education experts have expressed criticism.

"This is not a movement that is sweeping the country," said Hayes Mizell, a leading expert in middle school education. "There are large urban school systems where relatively new superintendents conclude that the middle level is dysfunctional, and they see the potential of a sweeping change to K-8 as one way to, in effect, start all over again."

The Baltimore school system released proposals last month that call for closing eight of the city's 21 conventional middle schools and creating at least 13 K-8s, and possibly dozens more, according to a Sun review of system documents.

K-8 conversion was an option proposed for 65 city schools, The Sun found. At 13 schools, it is the only option under consideration. The remaining middle schools would be downsized, usually to about 600 pupils.

Plans for high school restructuring released Jan. 7 assume that several middle schools will shut down, with the students moving to elementary school buildings. Some small high schools would then move to the vacated middle school buildings.

Flordella Eafford, whose son attends Highlandtown Middle, said she would welcome the opportunity to have him finish middle school at a K-8, which she thinks would offer more support. While classes in K-8s are not smaller, fewer children are in each grade, making it easier for teachers and principals to know everyone. K-8s also eliminate the need for a child to transfer to a new school at an awkward, emotionally vulnerable age.

"If they close [Highlandtown] down and let the kids go to a different school, I think they'll get a better view of what school is supposed to look like," Eafford said. Highlandtown is one of the schools that appear headed for closure.

Detractors say K-8s have several drawbacks compared with regular middle schools. A common trade-off is a smaller range of classes and extracurricular activities. Elementary school principals do not always have expertise in preadolescent development and advancing academic content. Parents of young children can be wary of having them in the same building as middle school students.

"Sometimes the middle school children, they're all really rowdy, they're fighting the teachers, the principal, the substitutes," said LaShawn Holmes, whose daughter is in first grade at one of the existing K-8s, Rognel Heights Elementary/Middle. "How can our kids be safe in that?"

Then there's the matter of resources.

Waverly Elementary used to send its graduates to sixth through eighth grades at Roland Park, the city's top K-8 school. Three years ago, with Roland Park overcrowded, system officials promised the Waverly community a facility comparable to Roland Park if it kept its middle school students at the elementary.

Today, middle school pupils at Waverly Elementary/Middle have neither a computer lab nor a library, said Wallace Robertson, president of the Waverly Improvement Association.

"When they get to high school, they're going to be further behind because they don't have the preparation," Robertson said. "It's like driving a Rolls Royce and suddenly stepping down to a Volkswagen. Where's the comparison?"

By closing schools, Feldman said, the system will have more money for the schools that remain.

Officials say it is premature to discuss how and when reconfigurations will occur. The school board is expected to vote on the matter this spring.

School system spokeswoman Edie House said decisions will be driven by public input collected through the consolidation process and by recommendations of a panel in the system's academic division that is studying middle grades reform.

Doug and Martha Mac Iver, researchers at Johns Hopkins' Center for Social Organization of Schools, have studied a mass conversion to K-8s in Philadelphia, finding promising results in an early review. They wrote in a recent paper: "The simple fact of significantly fewer students in grades 6 through 8 at these new K-8s ... may reduce the middle school behavioral 'chaos' factor so dramatically that it is possible for more learning to occur...and more individual attention can be paid to students struggling."

However, in an e-mail to The Sun, Doug Mac Iver called the differences between the two types of schools "modest." He said a school's curriculum and support for teachers are just as important as size and grade configuration.

Paul S. George, a professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and another middle school expert, said there is insufficient evidence on which to base policy judgments about the effectiveness of K-8s over middle schools.

"I believe human beings are always more productive in stable relationships, and a K-8 school might produce that," he said. "But making a big move like that on unstable evidence is risky business.... We have these small K-5 elementary schools that are safe and warm and personal, and we're going to fill them up with troubled middle school kids? That's worrisome."

While not opposed to dismantling big, impersonal middle schools, George said he fears the move to K-8s "is a publicity move in a lot of places."

Mizell, a senior fellow at the National Staff Development Council, said K-8s might result in more parental involvement, because parents generally are more involved in elementary schools than middle schools and are more likely to stay involved in a school they know.

But he said school systems would be well served to keep their focus on school leadership and ways to meet pupils' academic and emotional needs.

"It's not so much the grade configuration," he said. "It's what you do with the grade configuration.... Like most things in education, it's tempting to talk about it in simplistic terms. But once you start peeling the layers away, it's a lot more complex than it looks."

Bob Heck, Roland Park's PTA president, said it isn't the grade configuration that makes the school successful. "It's a strong principal, a great core curriculum, parental involvement," he said. "All of that forms a nurturing environment. How many Baltimore City schools have nurturing environments? I imagine it's below 50 percent."

At Crossroads, pupils have made gains on state tests despite starting middle school far below grade level. Conrad, the principal, said the focus is on creating meaningful relationships, academic and personal, between teachers and students, and on making curriculum relevant to children's lives. Eighth-graders, for instance, are working with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which manages Hubble science operations, to design a scale model of the solar system.

The charter school's largest classes have 25 students, compared with 40 at some city middle schools. Teachers have the freedom to design lessons creatively and time to collaborate. Parents get positive feedback on their children's progress, in addition to alerts about problems, and are made to feel welcome at school.

"We can change grade configurations, we can make schools smaller," Conrad said, "but if we don't change what happens in the classroom, if we don't find ways for teachers and students to interact in a way that brings powerful learning, we haven't done anything."