Why Capable Students Fail in 9th Grade

“I had to watch my brother every day. He has autism.”

“I felt like the teachers put me in the category of the ‘bad kid.’ They didn’t really want to get to know me."

“In middle school, if you had late homework, they [teachers] would take it late and not knock points off as bad as they do in high school.”

“Nobody ever pulled me out of class to ask me what was going on. You’re the first person who ever asked.”

These are the words of students who had succeeded in middle school but began to fail core subjects when they transitioned to high school.

Parents of these 9th graders expressed similar anxieties about the transition from middle school. “I wasn’t aware of any programs that could help my child.” “I wanted to help but didn’t know where to find help.” “Looking back, none of the services offered to my child seemed to have a lasting effect. My child is having the exact same problems this year.”

A Puzzling Phenomenon

The issue of capable middle schoolers becoming failing freshmen is not unique to the small-city school system where I work in central administration. Educators recognize it’s a widespread problem we must resolve if all students are going to be prepared for college and careers.

Because graduation from high school is now a minimal level of preparation for entry into society, our urban school district has long tracked data on graduation rates and dropouts. In our district, 45 percent of the 8,000 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. About 20 percent are Hispanic and 8 percent are African American. The seemingly inexplicable 9th-grade failures have been frequent, and they often foreshadow delayed graduation or students dropping out of school.

To facilitate the transition from middle school to 9th grade at our two high schools, we have instituted programs to support student engagement, build positive relationships and remediate core subjects — all in pursuit of improving academic performance.

Despite these efforts, a 9th-grade failure rate of about 33 percent annually has persisted across both high schools. Having been a part of the administrative team seeking to address the issue, I focused my doctoral dissertation research on a question I found puzzling: Why were students who were capable, average to above-average students in middle school failing core content subjects in their freshman year?

Study Design

The 20 students who participated in the qualitative study had failed one or more core content subjects in 9th grade despite academic histories in middle school that documented average to above-average academic achievement. I conducted in-depth student and parent interviews for insights into participant perceptions of supports and barriers that interfered with or facilitated 9th-grade success.

The students I interviewed identified several supports they experienced as freshmen. They viewed after-school tutoring as helpful, yet most reported they did not attend regularly. The students believed if they had participated regularly in after-school tutoring, they probably would have passed more courses.

Nearly three-quarters of the students also identified their part in extracurricular activities and sports as a support, and they were aware school district policy mandated a passing grade point average to be eligible for extracurricular activities. Some students indicated they experienced no motivation or accountability once their sports season was over. Grades dropped, and they subsequently failed classes.

The students identified a perplexing structural issue when they reported that intervention classes, designed to provide supplemental instruction to students struggling in mathematics and English, were not made available when they first began to fail early in 9th grade. More than half of the students indicated they were placed in an intervention class in their second year of high school after failing 9th-grade math or English and being classified as a repeating 9th grader. The repetition could have been avoided had students been afforded the opportunity to transfer into the intervention classes.

Students considered the retaking of a class in summer school as supportive, but again questioned why the focused intervention was offered only after a course failure. Sixteen of the 20 students said they passed at least one failed class during summer school, keeping them on track to graduate in four years.

The Barriers

Students identified school-based barriers to academic success as they transitioned from middle school. They pointed, in particular, to the difficult level of high school course assignments and the significantly greater workload and amount of homework expected of them compared with anything they had experienced in middle school.

Teaching practices (the pace of instruction, level of support provided, style of teaching) also were seen as different at the high school. Students’ comments included:

• “The teachers in middle school helped you a lot more if you were struggling. That doesn’t happen in the high school.”
• “The classes were bigger and the teacher didn’t spend time with every student.”

The students referenced their own efforts, personal situations, peers, emotional responses and personal responsibility as barriers. The majority said their own lack of effort affected their academic results. Students used terms such as lazy, procrastination, slack off, didn’t care and zone out to describe their work habits in 9th grade.

Students indicated that once they began to fail early in the school year, they became discouraged and struggled to stay focused. Yet none of the students claimed to know where to seek help or how to connect to an adult in the school.

In addition, parents of failing 9th graders expressed great frustration. They described the communication between home and school as inconsistent or nonexistent. Although parents held high expectations, they found they were unable to assist their child or access appropriate programs. Most expressed concern about the child’s future.

The parents believed various factors contributed to their child’s academic failures, including peer influences, lack of interest or motivation and lack of effort. Conversely, parents saw after-school tutoring and summer school as helpful supports.

Possible Solutions

What can be done to help?

In our district, we started with a better understanding of how struggling students and their parents understood the 9th-grade experience and provided us with substantial information about perceived barriers and supports. We then initiated changes in programs and policies.

The district revised summer school and extracurricular eligibility policies to enable students to have more opportunities to remain connected to the school environment. Students now, upon request, can re-take the portion of the class they failed in summer school without retaking the entire course. This option motivates some struggling students and keeps them on track for graduating within the expected four years.

In addition, revised extracurricular eligibility polices now enable students to continue to practice with their team instead of separating them from the team altogether.

Also, the district launched a freshmen academy to target students at risk of failing with close support, while leaving spaces in the academy available for those students who begin to fail early in the 9th grade. The high schools use advisory programs to connect every 9th grader with an adult. Advisories build stronger adult-student relationships and a stronger sense of belonging and community. Students would remain with the same adviser for their four years in high school.

A district-level committee of middle and high school staff have begun to align practices between the two levels, including homework expectations, rigor of instruction, school-based supports, school-home communication and communication between middle and high school teachers. The district has recognized the need to leave seats in the intervention courses for those students who begin to fail early in the freshman year. Rather than the “wait and fail” practice the district used previously, it now intervenes early on to keep students on the path of academic achievement.

No longer can we pretend these issues do not exist. As educators, we have a moral and ethical obligation to act now to ensure every student moving from middle school to high school is successful.