The Relationship among Grade Configuration, School Attachment, and Achievement

Focusing on middle grades students' sense of school attachment may be more effective than reorganizing school grade configuration.The This We Believe characteristic "organizational structures" calls for grade configurations that "foster purposeful learning and meaningful relationships" (National Middle School Association [NMSA], 2010, p. 31). Such structures primarily focus on internal mechanisms within a middle level school that promote healthy peer interactions and achievement, such as interdisciplinary teaming and social organizations. However, external modifications, such as school grade configurations, have also been intensely discussed. Ever since middle schools began replacing junior high schools 50 years ago, the same issues and concerns that motivated this change remain unresolved (Cuban, 1992). There still is no consensus as to which grade configuration best serves young adolescents.States and school districts across the country have been reconsidering the practice of educating young adolescents in stand-alone middle schools, which typically span grades 6 through 8, and replacing them with K-8 schools. Now, reformers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Maryland, and New York, and the large urban districts of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are challenging the notion that grouping students in the middle grades in their own school buildings is the right approach (Rockoff& Lockwood, 2010). The research on which these initiatives are based is inconsistent. Recent rigorous studies by Rockoffand Lockwood (2010) and Byrnes and Ruby (2007) have indicated that there are benefits associated with reverting back to K-8 schools; however, others have shown that the grade configuration alone makes little difference (Eccles, Lord, & Midgely, 1991). While there is certainly enough evidence to support the limited scale-up of K-8 schools (e.g., Cook, MacCoun, Muschkin, & Vigdor, 2008; Way, Ready, & Rhodes, 2007), this research base is neither substantial nor conclusive enough to move beyond these small-scale efforts. Moreover, there is still much to be learned about why certain grade configurations may work better than others. This would require one to look into the environmental characteristics of these schools to determine what makes them "work" and whether grade span has anything to do with it.The purpose of this article is to focus on one of these characteristics, school attachment, which has historically received a great deal of attention in the educational research literature (e.g., McNeely, Nonnemaker, & Blum, 2002; Eccles, Early, Frasier, Belansky, & McCarthy, 1997). However, relatively little attention has been given to how and to what degree this characteristic influences the relationship between schools' middle level grade configurations and student achievement. Not only is this an under-investigated area of research, the research that has been be done on middle level grade configuration and its relationship to student outcomes is inhibited by issues related to research design. Many of these studies employ arguments that suggest a comparative framework, but few actually compare students in middle schools to young adolescents in other types of schools (notable exceptions include Weiss & Kipnes, 2006; Rockoff& Lockwood, 2010). However, panel data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K) (Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, 2009), provide an opportunity to do just that and to ask: How does school attachment influence the relationship between a school's grade configuration and student achievement in reading and mathematics? K-8 vs. middle schools reduxResearchers and policymakers, once again, have come to question the rationale behind forming a separate school for young adolescents. Yecke (2006) asserted that middle schools are not fulfilling their original aim, which was to provide a climate that would foster the unique psychological and social dimension of preadolescents and, in tandem, raise the academic rigor that, perhaps, was not found in elementary schools. …