"Stuck in the Middle"

Here is the overage middle school students report (the top link) by the Out of Youth Coalition and written by the Advocates for Children in NYC. The introduction of the report states:

"New York City does not have a good record of being able to prepare all middle school students to succeed in high school. Leading education advocacy groups in the city, such as the New York City Coalition for Educational Justice, have documented that middle schools have largely been a place of failure for blacks and Latinos with "twice as many White and Asian eighth-graders meetin[ing] the New York State standard in ELA [English Language Arts] than African American and Latino students." Research demonstrates that middle grade achievement is strongly connected with achievement in, and ultimately graduation from, high school. Given that only one in four black and Latino students can expect to receive a Regent's diploma, New York City must make a serious commitment to improving middle school performance."

The report documents specific cases of students who have been held back in middle school for various reasons, as well as statistics seen in my previous blog entry.