The downward spiral began in seventh grade, says Eric Anderson*, who dropped out of high school a year shy of graduation. His small Massachusetts town lacked a junior high, so his district sent him to a larger school in a nearby city. "I didn't fit into any of the cliques there," remembers Anderson, whose grades and self-esteem plummeted. "I totally lost interest in school."
Anderson's story sounds all too familiar to John Alspaugh, Ph.D., an emeritus professor of education at the University of Missouri-Columbia, whose research focuses on school structure. While we may assume that students leave school for personal reasons -- drugs, absentee parents, the wrong crowd of friends -- Alspaugh's work indicates that school district organization affects students' success as well. "If you have two or three elementary schools merging to form a larger junior high school, or several junior highs feeding into a high school, you get achievement loss and an increased drop-out rate," he explains. Alspaugh, who has examined both urban and rural schools, attributes the changes to fracturing relationships between both peers and teachers. This can be especially jarring for pre-adolescents, who crave social acceptance.
