Historically, middle schools have been known to struggle with meeting the needs of middle school students. It is often believed that the school culture itself is a factor in the decline of grades. Improving the culture and atmosphere of middle schools is a necessary step to increasing grades and overall student well-being, and almost everyone agrees this step begins with the administrative team.

Maurice Elias, director of the Rutgers University Social-Economical Learning Laboratory, summarizes the popular thought process regarding this issue by saying, “A safe and friendly school environment is particularly crucial for 11 to 14 year-olds” (2015). Currently, my daughter is in middle school. She is always saying, “Mom, some of the things people say in middle school are so inappropriate.” I am truly grateful that we can have honest and open discussions about various topics that come up in school, but I’m worried. Yes, the TikTok challenge with the vandalism took place at our school, but for me, I think it’s the hidden culture of ‘everything is fine’ in middle school when the world knows it’s not. I think Middle School needs a reset! I feel like with middle school, we took some things that are working in elementary and blended them with what they will need to model in high school, but this is the wrong approach. I would love to re-design middle school based on student needs, aspirations, and engagement! I would also love to hire creatives to rethink access to content because I want students to love middle school and not think of it as a ‘mean girls’ divided culture, where teachers do what they can in their spaces. We must do better! Determining if this better culture will improve student performance is the goal of the study performed by Dr. Valentine. There are several factors that determine if a school culture embraces students and modifies the culture based on their needs.

What Six Factors Predict Student Performance and Outcomes?

When thinking of your middle school, consider these six factors and outcomes to identify if your school is working towards improving its culture.

1. Are teachers and leaders involved in the transformation? Does your school have collaborative leadership?

2. Are teachers working together across grade levels and curriculum subjects? Teacher collaboration is key and it’s necessary to build systems of support in every inch of the school.

3. Are teachers participating in professional development that will continue in the classroom? If your school is using different vendors, diverse schools of thought, and struggle with a specific school focus then your team can get easily confused.

4. Does your staff and faculty support each other? Is there collegial support? Many times, the teacher’s lounge is a space for venting. Our school was excited to get a new LGBTQ center, students were excited about it and some are indifferent but many times educators expressed their concerns in the teacher’s lounge, in the halls, and in their classrooms, students didn’t feel comfortable expressing their opinions and thoughts. (Students Could name the teachers and students who were in support and who were indifferent to this change.)

5. Does your school have a shared vision? Is there a unity of purpose? If you ask your teachers, “What are our goal this year? What are we striving for? and they cannot tell you then they don’t know and we are not working towards a unified purpose or vision.

6. Does your school have community and business partnership to connect students to their future opportunities or their passions? I worry that middle schools struggle with this one. Many times parents don’t know what’s happening in middle school and they continue this trend hoping to fix problems internally. Yes, I believe once we allow others to support our middle schools, we will find that it will be messy at first but we can create solutions to ongoing frustrations that continue to happen every year and build on a new vision together. So yes, in middle school we need more learning partnerships.

Bonus: Do we need diverse ways of measuring student performance? Yes, I know students will be tested but how else can we quantify student growth? I think we need to include more Asynchronous learning. I believe we can better tweak our lessons to meet individual students’ needs. I get a little frustrated when year after year the whole school knows something is not working but it continues to remain in the school. I know we can do better.

Well, the analysis shows that there is not a statistically significant relationship between Valentine’s six factors and student performance. (Student performance for all questions was measured based on standardized test scores in reading, mathematics, and language arts.) AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) for middle schools constitutes that a school “Achieve[s] 95 percent student participation rate on statewide tests… [and] demonstrate growth in the percentage of students scoring at the proficient or above the level in English language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics on statewide tests” (California Department of Education, 2020). Using a binary logistical regression showed that the six factors of middle school culture did not accurately predict a school’s AYP. However, there is a remarkably high number of middle schools that do not meet their AYP, so, unsurprisingly, these factors did not match up. Even though there is no clear connection between said culture and predicting AYP scores; something must be done to transform the next generation. In summary, this is not to mean that a beneficial middle school culture should not be cultivated, but simply that a school’s culture is not useful for predicting a school’s student performance, AYP, or accreditation status.

 References

Adams, J. (2015, July 28). Taking aim at the ‘middle school plunge’ with a positive culture. Webpage. https://edsource.org/2015/taking-aim-at-the-middle-school-plunge-with-a-positive-culture/83159

Adequate Yearly Progress (2020, September 24). California Department of Education. Webpage. Retrieved 2021, July 3 from URL: https://www.cde.ca.gov/re/pr/ayp.asp

Engagement by school level: Nais High School and Middle School students. NAIS. (n.d.). Retrieved October 22, 2021, from https://www.nais.org/articles/pages/research/engagement-by-school-level-nais-high-school-and-middle-school-students/.

Swindler, Nichel Holland, "Middle School Cultures and Student Achievement" (2009). Dissertations. 1030. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/1030