What the research says about K-8 schools vs. separate elementary and middle schools

On Board Online • April 2, 2018

By Paul Heiser
Senior Research Analyst

A growing number of schools - particularly in urban areas - have embraced grouping students in kindergarten through eighth grade together in one building rather than separate elementary and middle schools.

The trend is due in large part to a body of recent research suggesting that this model benefits kids academically and socially. But a new study strongly favors the traditional model of placing students into separate elementary and middle schools.

The study, published in February in the peer-reviewed Journal of Urban Economics, involves a school district - unnamed in the report - that closed several schools and rezoned those students to other schools with new boundaries. This allowed researchers from New York University, the University of Kentucky and RAND Corporation to compare students on both sides of the new boundaries.

On one side were students assigned to separate K-5 elementary and 6-8 middle schools. On the other, students were assigned to a K-8 school.

Similar to previous research, the study found a dip in math scores of elementary school students in their first year in a separate middle school. However, students in grades three through five performed better in separate elementary schools, offsetting the lower sixth-grade scores. By eighth grade, attending a K-8 school had no effect in math.

In reading, students in separate middle schools made larger gains in seventh and eighth grade, and ended middle school with higher scores than their peers in K-8 schools.

"The adverse effects for elementary students in K-8 schools, combined with the lack of long-term adverse effects for students attending separate middle schools does not provide support for K-8 configuration," the report concludes. "In fact, our results provide some evidence against K-8 schools as a policy."

Multiple prior research studies, however, have found benefits to grouping all students in grades K through eight into a single building:

• According to a brief by Education Northwest, a study of Miami-Dade County schools found that grouping kids from K-8 had significant short-term beneficial effects on achievement, attendance, and suspension rates. In addition, sixth- and seventh- graders showed greater improvement in math and reading compared with the same grades in middle schools. However, the two groups had identical scores in ninth grade, so the effects were not long term.
• A study by New York University's (NYU) Steinhardt School evaluated the effect of attending a public middle or junior high school versus a K-8 school on eighth-graders' academic and psychosocial outcomes. It found that students attending middle schools were more likely to have a negative view of their reading skills and interest levels. The researchers also saw negative effects of middle and junior high schools on teachers' views of student reading and writing competence, although no difference was detected in students' test scores.
• Another study of New York City schools by researchers at NYU found students who moved from K-4 schools to 5-8 schools and students who remained enrolled in a single K-8 school outperformed students who moved to middle school in sixth grade. But they couldn't say why those arrangements were more successful. "Our results suggest that changing school less frequently, changing schools at an earlier grade, a smaller size of the within-school cohort, and the stability of students' peer cohorts are the most likely explanations for these positive performance differences," concluded the study.
• A study from researchers at Syracuse University and NYU found that bullying was less common in schools with a wide range of grades rather than just a few. The researchers frame their findings as a discussion of "top dogs" and "bottom dogs" - students who are the most and least powerful in their schools. "We find moving from elementary to middle school hurts bottom dogs because they lose the top dog status they previously held in their old school," they concluded. They recommend keeping students in the same schools longer, so that children get to be "top dogs" over more classmates and don't become "bottom dogs" until they are better equipped developmentally to handle being the youngest in a building.

How to make sense of these contrasting results? One possibility is that grade configuration isn't all that important. Tom Phillips, the executive director of the New York State Middle School Association says students in sixth, seventh and eighth grades do better when their schools fully implement the most promising practices for middle grades, regardless of the grade configuration of their school.

He told On Board that the key is fidelity in implementing an effective model, adding that a teaming approach seems to work best. This groups students and teachers together in teams in which students in each of the grades six through eight all have the same group of teachers in the core subjects of English, math, social sciences and science, and teachers have time together to plan lessons and discuss student strengths and weaknesses. The middle level model should also have its own dedicated student support system where students and teacher are organized into teams.

According to Phillips, this teaming approach creates consistency and belonging, which are very important to students in the middle grades. There is one set of rules, one set of standards, one group of teachers, etc. It also allows students to be grouped and re-grouped based on need. It also allows teachers to coordinate their instruction, familiarize themselves with the strengths/weaknesses of the same group of students, and create the curriculum across disciplines with units with a single theme.

Another advantage of the teaming model, according to Phillips, is that English, math, social studies and science teachers can design lessons across all four subjects with the same theme. For example, if students are learning about Native Americans, a history lesson can focus on what struggles confronted them and how they organized their civilizations. The math lesson could focus on how much area they would have needed to establish a tribe of, say, 5,000 people. The English lesson could focus on how tribe members communicated, perhaps involving students devise a communication system for this population. Likewise, a unit on the Civil War could include math instruction on how far troops could travel in one day, a social studies lesson discussing what they were fighting about, and an English lesson debating what they learned in social studies.

"The needs of middle school students are very different than those of elementary and high school students," said Phillips. "Adolescents go through more changes from age 12 to 15 than any other time of life except birth to age two. They are beginning to see their world in an egocentric way and questioning their role in it. They are beginning to fight for independence yet still rely on outside help when involved in conflict."