December 12, 2012

Policy Briefing Recap: Strategies to Improve Outcomes for Middle School Students

From left to right: Eduardo Mora, Michael Selkis, Calvin Hastings

On December 5, 2012, CCC held a Policy Briefing, “Keeping Middle School Students on Track for High School Graduation,” which brought together educators, parents and advocates to learn about the strategies being used to identify struggling middle school students and the successful interventions helping these students stay on track for graduation.

The middle school years are critical to children’s academic achievement, as they lay the foundation for high school success or alternatively, can be the years when students begin to disengage from school, putting them at risk for dropping out.

The Policy Briefing illustrated how school leaders can use data and youth engagement strategies to both better support individual students and bolster school-wide practices that generate positive student outcomes.

Panelists included:

• Calvin Hastings, Senior Director for Middle School Quality at the New York City Department of Education (DOE):  Calvin Hastings spoke about DOE’s Middle School Quality Initiative and related efforts to improve literacy outcomes among 6^th through 8^th graders city-wide.  He also explained how the DOE is working to embed the concept of college and career readiness, often associated with high school, into the middle grades.

• Michael Selkis, Director of School Development and Support and Director /Network Leader, FHI 360:  Michael Selkis leads the FHI 360 network, which provides instructional support to 22 NYC schools in four boroughs. He talked about early warning tools for identifying struggling middle school students and used the research by Dr. Robert Balfanz at Johns Hopkins University as an example of how schools identify and respond to both the individual needs of students and the needs of the school as a whole.

• Eduardo Mora, Assistant Principal of the Arts Academy, New School for Leadership and the Arts (MS 244, Bronx):  Eduardo Mora spoke about his middle school’s work with FHI 360, their use of early warning indicators, and the decisions his school has made regarding resource allocation to support this critical work.

To learn more about Dr. Balfanz’s research on early warning indicators among middle school students, read this brief (pdf) from the National Middle School Association.

Watch this video clip from the PBS series, “Frontline” to learn more about MS 244’s work to identify at-risk middle school students and provide them with the interventions needed to keep them on track.

Tags
middle school, Education

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