Portions of the curriculum in Delaware’s public middle schools will likely be getting a new look in the 2024-25 school year after 10 schools test some pilot programming in the year ahead.
Educators say the objective of the Rethinking Middle Grades project is to create more “equity- and student-centered exploration programming” for grades 5-8. In other words, they want students to start thinking about their futures sooner, so they’re better prepared for high school and beyond.
The pilot programs will impact about 6,000 students next year.
“We want students to better understand who they are and get a head start on thinking about what they’re good at, and what they want to do,” says Paul Herdman, president and CEO of Rodel, the Wilmington-based education-centric foundation that is one of the key backers of the project.
Taking this approach, state Secretary of Education Mark Holodick says, “will help students avoid some of the typical first-year challenges [of high school] like increased anxiety, lowered self-image and negative peer pressure.”
“Even in fifth and sixth grades, some kids are moving toward dropping out. If we don’t meet them early, we’re going to lose them. If they feel connected to school, they’ll feel connected to their future,” says Gene Montano, director of secondary curriculum in the Capital School District.
“Our students want real life,” adds Brian Johnson, a business education teacher at Cantwell’s Bridge Middle School in the Appoquinimink School District.
Montano and Johnson are members of a steering committee of 30 educators, parents, students and business leaders that have spent more than a year identifying standards and goals that they want students to achieve before completing eighth grade. Those goals include increasing career awareness and self-awareness and developing the ability to make informed choices about their education.
Educators involved in the project say it’s important for middle schoolers to achieve these objectives because the transition into high school is an important pivot point in their lives.
“There are a lot of choices that students and families will be faced with. We want to start conversations as early as possible, to expose middle schoolers to a variety of college and career options in a way that is not overwhelming,” says Rick Jakeman, associate secretary of workforce support in the state Department of Education.
The transition from middle school is especially significant in Delaware because, with the state’s school choice option, eighth graders don’t automatically feed into a specific high school. Also, Delaware’s Career Pathways programs offer high school students the opportunity to focus their education on any of two dozen occupational areas, but Pathways options vary from school to school.
More than half of the state’s public high school students are now enrolled in a Pathways program, and the goal is to reach 80 percent by the 2024-25 school year, Herdman says.
However, he adds, Rethinking Middle Grades isn’t primarily about funneling more students into Pathways. Rather, the goal is to set students up so they’re more likely to succeed in high school.
Funding for the $1.6 million project comes from part of the $50 million Delaware received for jobs training through the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and grants from foundations and businesses. Each of the participating schools – three charters and seven regular public schools – is receiving $100,000.
Although the pilot programs in participating schools will be launched just five months from now, it’s not clear what all of them will look like, nor is it clear to what extent the pilot programs might be adopted at other middle schools in the state in the future.
“It could be a stand-alone class, or hybrid, or things to add or adjust to an existing class,” says Mark Baxter, Rodel’s senior program director, who has been coordinating the steering committee’s work.
Rather than creating a standard curriculum, the committee has been developing standards. It’s along the lines of ‘by the time they finish middle school, a student should have experienced this and gained that,’” Baxter says.
“It’s not going to be one size fits all, you have to do this,” adds Sally Maldonado, head of school at Kuumba Academy, a K-8 charter in Wilmington.
But, no matter what the school, the pilots will have some common components. They include:
- Helping students understand their own strengths and interests.
- Showing students connections between what they’re learning in every subject area and careers in the adult world.
- Giving students a greater awareness of what they will have to learn in high school to prepare for the careers that most interest them now.
- Expanded use of project-based learning that incorporates teamwork and community involvement so students get accustomed to working together and recognize that their work can have an impact beyond their school’s walls.
While elements of project-based learning and the career and technical education that is integral to Pathways at the high school level will be incorporated into the updated curriculum, that does not mean that existing pieces of the middle school curriculum will be discarded.
At Kuumba Academy, Maldonado says, the plan is to extend components of the school’s “Passages” class, now required for eighth graders, to all students in grades five through eight. Passages covers a lot of topics that are important to prepare students for high school – helping them understand their strengths, how they might be applied to their future careers, and what they should consider studying in high school to advance toward those objectives.
Starting these discussions in fifth grade, she says, will help students understand the relevance of what they’re learning to their futures and may help to get parents plugged into the high school selection process when students are in seventh grade.
High school selection is important for Kuumba students since more than half of them live in the Wilmington portion of the Christina School District, which means that they would be assigned to one of Christina’s three high schools in the Newark area unless they exercise their choice option or enroll in a private or Catholic high school. Vocational-technical high schools are popular with Kuumba students, and so is the Cab Calloway School of the Arts, a magnet school in the Red Clay district, Maldonado says.
“We want to make sure students understand what they’re interested in and how that fits with high school selection,” Herdman says. For example, a student interested in a career in medicine might not be able to take all the necessary courses at a vocational-technical high school, but the vo-tech school might offer training in health professions that don’t require a four-year college degree.
The timing of the pilot program is also fortuitous for the Capital School District, Montano says, because a restructuring this fall will create a Middle School of Innovation and a Middle School of Excellence on a new campus that will house both schools. Lessons that include career readiness topics will be integrated into the curriculum for sixth through eighth grade, he says.
Capital’s pilot will involve teachers in all subject areas, not just those who focus on career classes. “All teachers and staff have to know the students personally, help them see what they can do, help them know where they can go,” Montano says.
Johnson, the Appoquinimink teacher, says it’s important to personalize instruction, and doing that doesn’t have to be difficult. For example, he says, an exercise in a financial literacy unit might be something like “Bob wants to buy a house in Idaho. What steps must he take to do that?” The exercise becomes more meaningful to the student, he says, if the wording is changed to something like “What do you have to do if you want to buy a house in Middletown?”
After the one-year pilot is completed, educators will assess the impact of the new programming and other middle schools will have the opportunity to incorporate new practices in their buildings.
“I don’t think that all of a sudden there’s going to be an entire middle school reform,” Baxter says, “but I think the impact is going to be huge.”
“I’m looking forward to the opportunity to network with other schools,” Kuumba’s Maldonado says. “We’re all learning together.”
Participating schools
Seven district middle schools and three charter schools are participating in the Rethinking Middle Grades pilot project.
The district schools are: Redding and Meredith in Appoquinimink; School of Innovation and School of Excellence in Capital; George Read in Colonial, and A.I. du Pont and Stanton in Red Clay.
The charter schools are: Las Americas Aspira Academy in Newark, Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence in Georgetown and Kuumba Academy in Wilmington.
(Note: Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence was given permission to delay its opening one year this week by Delaware’s Dept. of Education)
