For students entering middle school, the first day is more than new books and class assignments. It’s a time of physical, social and academic transition.
So what are parents supposed to do to help students navigate this tumultuous time?
Keep communicating and encourage students to get involved, local principals suggest.
A 2011 study from the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University found that students in Florida experienced a significant drop in math and reading achievement when they entered middle school. The study’s authors address the study in an article for EducationNext.
The database above includes all public middle schools for the Patch communities in Ohio. You can search for your local school to see how it performed academically on last year’s state report card. The database includes overall ranking, the number of academic indicators—like 7th grade math scores or building attendance—that a school is eligible for, the number of academic indicators it met, the percentage of academic indicators it met, whether the building met Adequate Yearly Progress and the Performance Index score. Adequate Yearly Progress addresses how well subgroups of students perform on tests, and Performance Index is based on how well all students do on state tests. The higher the index, the better the scores.
Check out this article for navigate the middle school years.
*The information in the above database can be found on the Ohio Department of Education's website.
For this particular project, we just looked at public schools with physical locations in our Patch cities.
I know there are a lot of factors sitting behind performance on standardized tests, but this report card doesn't exactly paint a pretty picture. How are the math and science scores so low in 7th and 8th grades? *Disclaimer, I'm a father of a three year old who moved into the area 2 years ago.