MORE THAN 15 years ago, Robert Gaudet, then a senior policy analyst at the University of Massachusetts’s Donahue Institute, who had extensively studied school performance across the state, offered a pronouncement that was jarringly blunt, but backed by plenty of evidence.

“Middle schools are the great disaster of the education system,” he said. 

US school systems have increasingly been moving away from a structure that includes stand-alone middle schools, drawing on research suggesting students don’t do well in that setting and that it’s better to reduce the number of transitions between schools that students experience over the K-12 span. The middle school debate may be a settled question in education research, but it’s a different story when it comes to what’s happening on the ground. 

Holyoke, whose long-struggling school system was put into state receivership in 2015, is moving to end its system of K-8 schools by bringing back 6-8 grade middle schools next fall. The change would put it in league with Cambridge, which scrapped its K-8 model a decade ago in favor of a return to separate K-5 elementary schools and middle schools. 

Anthony Soto, the state-appointed receiver overseeing the Holyoke schools, said the district’s move to K-8 schools two decades ago hasn’t worked out. 

“I think the K-8 model could work, but in order to work it would have to be well-planned,” he said. Soto said the change in budget-strapped Holyoke wasn’t accompanied by the added academic resources needed for students in the higher grades of K-8 schools. And with declining district enrollment, he said it was also challenging to provide a rich curriculum for middle school grade students when they are dispersed across several K-8 schools rather than under one roof at a middle school. 

While Cambridge and Holyoke are going against the grain, the state’s largest school district is following broader trends and eliminating stand-alone middle schools from its portfolio. 

In 2019, the Boston School Committee made it official policy that the district would work toward a system of K-6 and 7-12 grade schools or K-8 and 9-12 grade buildings. Under either model, the district was “offering BPS students educational experiences that require fewer transitions,” according to the new policy. 

As part of that ongoing move, a set of high school reforms unveiled last week included plans to incorporate seventh and eighth grades into Boston’s vocational high school and a similar expansion to add seventh and eighth grades to the Margarita Muñiz Academy, a dual language high school in Jamaica Plain. 

Meanwhile, Holyoke is reconfiguring its use of school buildings to have separate middle schools in the fall. Last week, the city council signed off on a bond authorization to build one new middle school. The changes come after years of pressure from parents, primarily because they don’t want their children in the youngest grades in the same building with 13- and 14-year-olds. 

In Cambridge, the changes were also driven by practical considerations as K-8 schools saw a big dropoff in enrollment starting in sixth grade, a pattern that argued for consolidating middle school grade students into separate schools. 

When it comes to student learning, however, Marty West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said there is overwhelming evidence supporting the elimination of stand-alone middle schools. That includes research he published a decade ago showing that students transitioning to a separate middle school experience a sharp drop in academic performance compared with those who remain in a K-8 school. That same performance falloff is not seen with the transition to high school in ninth grade. 

“Stand-alone middle schools have some real disadvantages,” said West, who is also a member of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. “All else being equal, minimizing the number of school transitions seems to be a good thing. It also seems that school transitions are harder for students in early adolescence.”

West acknowledges that circumstances could argue for separate middle schools. “I do not think there is one optimal grade configuration for every school system in the United States,” he said. “At the same time, I raise my eyebrows when I see districts like Holyoke, or Cambridge before it, actively moving in a direction that research suggests can be challenging.”