6th to 8th Grades Suffer From Neglect, Need Urgent Attention, Task Force Says

The middle school years from sixth to eighth grades have been neglected in recent educational reform efforts, and youngsters at that level urgently need attention if they are to succeed in high school, a state task force on early adolescent education said in a report to be released today.

Spurred in part by a slump that began two years ago in eighth-grade scores on a standardized state test of basic academic skills, the 37-member task force of teachers and administrators said students in sixth to eighth grades generally lack a sense of “personal connectedness” to their school program. That lack, the panel said, has contributed to low achievement, high dropout rates and other social adjustment problems.

‘The Neglected Area’

The middle grades have been “the neglected area,” state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, who established the task force, said in an interview Thursday. “It’s where our kids fall behind (because) we have not had a good sense of what we should be doing at that age.”

Schools need to be reorganized, Honig said, to take into account the unique needs of these 11- to 13-year-old students. The majority of students in that age group attend junior high schools, which Honig said generally confront the student with a traumatically different environment from that of elementary school.

“They’re mini-high schools that . . . expect kids to march from class to class six times a day” after six or seven years of having one teacher and one classroom, he said.

In the report, to be formally presented at a symposium on middle-school education in San Francisco today, the task force recommends that schools be rearranged to provide the youngsters with a less-jarring transition to high school. Instead of a six-period day with six different teachers, for instance, students in the middle grades should have fewer teachers and three or four longer periods each day. Teachers also would be assigned a certain number of students to counsel throughout the middle-grade years.

Both changes, the report said, would prevent students from getting lost in an unfamiliar system and allow them to form a bond with one adult who would be responsible for overseeing their progress.

Statewide, eighth-grade students have not made the gains in test scores that other grades have shown. In 1985, while third-, sixth- and 12th-grade students generally improved their scores on the California Assessment Program tests of reading, writing and mathematics skills, eighth-graders declined 10 points in reading and four in writing. Last year brought no significant improvement.

Clustering Grades

The majority of 11- to 13-year-olds in public school attend junior high schools consisting of seventh, eighth and ninth grades. According to the California League of Middle Schools, however, an increasing number of school districts are clustering sixth through eighth grades together.

The task force called for creation of 100 “state-of-the-art” middle schools to serve as proving grounds for a series of major changes. It also recommended requiring middle-grade teachers to undergo special training in the developmental characteristics of young adolescents.