Eighth-Grade School Form and Resilience in the Transition to High School: A Comparison of Middle Schools and K-8 Schools

We examine a set of academic and social outcomes in 9th grade, comparing middle school attendees with those who attended K-8 schools. Previous research with these data has shown that there are few differences in 8th-grade outcomes by school type. Here we extend these findings to determine whether school form influences student outcomes in the first year of high school. The results reveal several domains in which attendance at a middle school results in worse outcomes (e.g., greater rates of course failure); however, we find that a large portion of the difference by type of a student's 8th-grade school is accounted for by differential rates of attendance at the district's magnet schools. That is, our results indicate that type of school attended during the middle grades is significantly and positively related to magnet school attendance and thereby on the academic outcomes in the 9th-grade year.