Why Middle School Can’t Wait: Lessons from Districts Building Pathways Upstream

Middle school is a critical inflection point, one that determines whether students enter high school ready to engage in rigorous pathway work or spend their first two years playing catch up. This is what brought LA-area educators together at the Los Angeles County Office of Education’s Golden State Pathways Program Middle School Symposium, hosted at Doty Middle School in Downey on January 29. The goal was to surface concrete strategies that districts can act on now to build pathways that start strong in middle school and set students up for success through high school and beyond.

Hollenbeck STEMM, Southeast DREAMS, and SOAR Prep Academy are three middle schools across Los Angeles County that demonstrate what this looks like in practice. All three are Linked Learning Certified, but they each use different models—proving that there’s no single formula for success. What they have in common is more important: strong pathway cultures, collaborative teacher teams, and curricula that prepare students for rigorous high school coursework while engaging them in authentic career exploration.

During our first session at the symposium, educators examined how these schools operationalize pathway principles at the middle school level, identifying specific practices they could adapt at their own sites—regardless of size, demographics, or existing pathway structure.

The second session focused on vertical alignment. Dora Marquez, a Linked Learning Instructional Coach with Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), joined me to share how schools in the Boyle Heights community have created pathways that span elementary, middle, and high school. This isn’t about perfect handoffs—it’s about building intentional connections across grade levels so that students experience coherence rather than restarts every few years. In Boyle Heights, this work involves cross-level teacher collaboration, shared pathway themes, and systems that ensure middle school experiences build directly toward high school pathway options.

Vertical alignment matters, but it isn’t easy. That’s why this LAUSD example is such a compelling proof point. If these strategies can work in LAUSD—a large, complex district serving diverse student populations across multiple communities—they can work in your district, too. For those wondering where to start, the Boyle Heights model offers a roadmap: Begin with your feeder patterns, identify natural pathway connections, and create regular opportunities for elementary, middle, and high school educators to plan together.

Career exploration in middle school also requires rethinking what “career pathways” look like. Downey Unified School District’s eSports programming is a case in point. Rather than limiting career exposure to traditional fields, Downey USD has built a standards-based eSports program that engages elementary, middle, and high school students in competitive play while teaching communication, collaboration, and technical skills. At the high school level, students also gain work-based learning experiences by shadowing district technicians. The experience shows how career pathways don’t have to fit a conventional mold. They need to be relevant to students’ lives, grounded in transferable skills, and connected to real-world work—whether that’s engineering, healthcare, or emerging fields like gaming and esports.

The most powerful evidence for starting pathways in middle school came from students themselves. A panel of three middle school and three high school students participating in the Femineer Program described how early exposure to engineering shaped their academic trajectories and career thinking. What stood out went beyond the technical skills they developed; it was the confidence, collaboration, and communication abilities that came from working on complex, hands-on projects. Notably, not all six students plan to pursue engineering careers, but every one of them credited the program with helping them discover strengths, build essential soft skills, and explore possibilities they hadn’t previously considered. This is the promise of middle school pathways: They open doors and build the skills students need to walk through them.

So what can districts take from this work? Three core insights emerged from the symposium that are worth acting on now:

First, middle school can’t be an afterthought. Students who enter high school without prior pathway exposure spend critical time orienting themselves to new concepts and expectations that peers already understand. Districts that invest in middle school pathways—even modest ones—see students arrive at high school ready to engage deeply rather than start from scratch.

Second, vertical alignment is achievable—even in large, complex systems. The work happening in LAUSD proves that with intentional planning, cross-level collaboration, and shared commitment, districts can create pathways that build coherently from elementary through high school.

Third, career exploration needs to be meaningful and relevant to students. Pathways should expose students to a range of possibilities to expose students to the full gamut of career opportunities within an industry. Whether through engineering, esports, health sciences, or other fields, the goal is to help students discover interests, build transferable skills, and develop the agency to make informed choices about their futures.

Thank you to the Los Angeles County Office of Education for convening this symposium and to the educators, students, and district leaders who shared their work. Events like this remind us that the field can be built from real places of strength—there are districts already doing this work well, and their insights and examples point the way forward.