Dive Brief:

• Middle schools are eyeing ways to get students more involved in career preparation as mounting evidence indicates that seventh and eighth grade can be a key disengagement point.
• Spark — a nonprofit serving students in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Chicago — offers at-risk students adult professional mentors.
• The program and others like it have attracted attention from startups and digital companies, as well as other nonprofits, interested in investing in education.

Dive Insight:

Research has found that 60-70% of middle school students become chronically disengaged in grades 7-8. A study released by ACT found that students who enter high school without key math and reading skills typically never catch up. Though research into the effect of career preparation on those issues is lacking, middle school-level career prep programs appear to be gaining steam nonetheless. High school is often seen as too late to intervene with struggling students. 

“Although young people physically drop out in high school, they mentally disengage in middle school. That’s where we lose them,” Ayeola Fortune, director of youth success for United Way in Virginia. United Way has also funded projects to help keep middle schoolers on track.

Pairing students with a mentor during the turbulent early teen years may provide them with more guidance and support, keeping them engaged and preventing interventions further down the line. “Developmentally, it’s a challenging age,” Jason A. Cascarino, the CEO of Spark, told Education Week. “We need to meet middle school kids where they are. They are going through the process of identity formation and finding their place in the world.”