Abstract
We use statewide administrative data from Florida to estimate the impact of attending public schools with different grade configurations on student achievement through grade 10. To identify the causal effect of structural school transitions, we use student fixed effects and instrument for middle and high school attendance based on the terminal grade of the school attended in grades 3 and 6, respectively. Consistent with recent evidence from other settings, we find that students moving from elementary to middle school in grade 6 or 7 suffer a sharp drop in student achievement in the transition year. We confirm that these achievement drops occur in non-urban areas and persist through grade 10, by which time most students have transitioned into high school. We also find that middle school entry increases student absences and is associated with higher grade 10 dropout rates. Transitions to high school in grade nine cause a smaller one-time drop in achievement but do not alter students’ performance trajectories.
Highlights
Among the most basic questions facing policymakers in any education system is how best to group students in different grades across schools
Administrative data indicate that Florida middle schools spend less per student, have larger student-teacher ratios, and have much larger cohort sizes than K-8 schools, we find little evidence that these differences account for their negative effect on student achievement
These results confirm that our overall findings are not driven by unobserved district characteristics and raise the possibility that the negative effects of middle school entry are only notable in urban settings, an issue we address
Summary
Among the most basic questions facing policymakers in any education system is how best to group students in different grades across schools. Recent findings from New York City (Rockoff and Lockwood 2010) indicate that entering a middle school causes a sharp drop in student achievement that persists through grade 8 It remains unclear whether this pattern is evident in other settings and whether the negative effect of middle school attendance persists into high school. The most convincing evidence comparing middle (or junior high) and K-8 grade configurations comes from Rockoff and Lockwood (2010), who develop the identification strategy that we apply in our analysis.1 They control for student fixed effects and instrument for middle school entry with the terminal grade of the school students attended in grade 3.
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