NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Should Sixth Grade be in Elementary or Middle School? An Analysis of Grade Configuration and Student Behavior

Philip J. Cook, Robert MacCoun, Clara Muschkin, Jacob Vigdor

NBER Working Paper No. 12471*
Issued in August 2006
NBER Program(s):   CH    ED    PE

Using administrative data on public school students in North Carolina, we find that sixth grade students attending middle schools are much more likely to be cited for discipline problems than those attending elementary school. That difference remains after adjusting for the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the students and their schools. Furthermore, the higher infraction rates recorded by sixth graders who are placed in middle school persist at least through ninth grade. A plausible explanation is that sixth graders are at an especially impressionable age; in middle school, the exposure to older peers and the relative freedom from supervision have deleterious consequences.

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