How much hope for new preK-8 schools?

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools will hold the first of its public forums today (6-8 p.m. at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center, 600 E. Fourth St.) on proposals to close high-poverty, low-scoring middle schools and move the students to new preK-8 schools housed at current elementary schools.

Belatedly, here's a link to the Johns Hopkins University study comparing achievement in Philadelphia K-8 and middle schools, which Superintendent Peter Gorman handed out to the school board recently. The hard copy the board got was 56 pages, and this journal article sent by CMS is 35, but as best I can tell from a quick scan, it covers the same key points.

Interestingly, the copy the board got had lots of yellow highlights on pages 6 and 7 (pages 3 and 4 on the link), where the researchers summarize other studies that have found higher test scores, better attendance, more satisfied parents and stronger neighborhood ties at K-8 schools. The highlighted sections also note apparent benefits from avoiding the transition to a new school in sixth grade, when academic performance often slumps. That's a point CMS leaders have emphasized in pushing for the local changes.

But if you keep reading, the researchers note that those studies were small and not highly rigorous; the Johns Hopkins crew set out to do a more sophisticated analysis of how much advantage such schools really have and what factors are linked to those benefits.

Keep reading even further, past a lot of stuff that's tough going for those of us who aren't  researchers or statisticians, and you get to some conclusions that seem to undermine the premise of CMS's plan. These researchers found that the advantages of merging elementary and middle-school grades are relatively small when other factors are accounted for, and that "a district is not likely to replicate the K-8 advantage based upon size and school transition alone if its student population is predominantly from high-minority and high-poverty backgrounds."

The study also warns that the cost of converting to K-8 schools can be high: "(A)dministrators must ask themselves if such a massive reform is truly worth the resources given the likely impacts. They must also compare it to other possible reforms and decide if with K-8 conversions, they are getting the best possible 'bang for their buck' in terms of reform finances."

I assume CMS leaders are asking those questions, since they distributed the study. I'm still playing phone tag to get their answers. More on that in the very near future.