Confronting Challenges and Engaging Success; Ninth-Grade Academies

Background: Too many freshman students struggle during their first year in high school, which can result in their dropping out of school. Ninth grade academies, in which ninth grade students are clustered together for one year, have been one way high schools have sought to support students’ success.

Purpose: The purpose of this quantitative mean comparison study was to compare academic achievement at one high school with a ninth-grade academy to a similar school in the same district that does not have a ninth grade academy.

Methods: The study used a series of independent samples t test to compare ninth grade students’ average test scores for Algebra I, Biology I, and English I between the two similar campuses over the span of five years.

Findings: The schools had similar performance in Algebra for all five years. In Biology, the school with the ninth grade academy outperformed the traditional high school all five years and significantly outperformed the traditional high school in four out of the five years. In English I, the school with the ninth grade academy significantly outperformed the traditional high school all five years since 2013. There was a trend of steady increases over the five-year period, but no increasing in the difference in the scale scores between the two schools for English I.

Conclusion: There were significant differences in the mean scores between the two schools over a five year period with the school that implemented the ninth grade academy scoring higher in most years, for most of the subjects. However, the data suggest that the extent to which the ninth grade academy impacted scores on state testing was moderate. The gap in performance between the two schools remained unchanged over a five-year period.