Watch Out for 6th Graders

I recently attended the Model Schools Conference in Washington, D.C. The major players in educational research were there, stressing their mantra for today's public schools: RIGOR, RELEVANCE, RELATIONSHIPS. Any teacher worth his/her salt knows that mantra instinctively.

What was new information, however, was something I just touched on in July: failure in school begins to manifest itself in the 6th grade. Sixth grade - who knew?

Prior understanding of potential drop outs said that the ninth grade is when failure begins to set in, after a person is in high school. The 9th grade has always been looked upon as a transitional year. Grades are usually low for freshmen and many a senior has rued their lack of serious approach to school when they find out it takes making 6 straight A's to get a C average out of the 6 straight F's they made in the 9th grade.

It has also been a strongly held assumption that attendance began to lag during the freshman year. This is the year most people attempt to skip school, cut class, run from the truancy officer, and call in sick for themselves.

But current research shows that a person's potential risk for failure at school actually begins in the 6th grade. This is the key transitional year from elementary school to middle school or junior high. Four key indicators of potential danger are:

>Attendance problems
>Behavior problems
>Math failure
>English failure

These are problems that do not normally self-correct. In other words, it takes some strong intervention from the school and on the home front to fix a potentially dangerous problem.

If you don't view this as a problem, statistics show you are wrong. For people trying to work their way up the social ladder, entry into the middle class nowadays is easiest through access to post-secondary education (not just college, but training and vocational programs, too). By not taking the above problems seriously as a parent, you are running the risk of limiting your child's personal and financial success.

The great thing is, when addressed in the 6th grade, there is plenty of time to turn the problem around. Parents are tempted to say, "Oh, it's just a phase and it will run its course." Maybe it will, but maybe it won't. Sixth grade year is no time for parents to go on auto-pilot waiting for little Johnny to grow up. It's time we started watching out for 6th graders to make sure we set them up with the best possible foundation for success.