Our Mission

Middle College High Schools are secondary schools, located on or close to college campuses across the country, educating underserved students who have the potential to benefit from a rigorous academic curriculum offered within a supportive and nurturing environment. Middle Colleges allow high school students the opportunity to earn a high school diploma and transferable college credits upon graduating. In keeping with Middle College National Consortium's design principles, and with funding by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2002, many of our member schools became new or redesigned Early Colleges, allowing students the possibility to earn as much as two full years of transferable college credit or an Associate's degree.

The mission of the Middle College National Consortium is to

• Promote a national perspective on the Middle College model that guides member schools' practice and the support for new Middle Colleges.
• Drive educational reform at the secondary and post-secondary levels.
• Provide leadership and support for members.
• Organize opportunities for those in the educational arena to work collaboratively.

By

• Providing technical assistance for Middle College start ups as well as those that have grown and matured.
• Hosting annual professional development conferences, digital convenings and other opportunities that address current needs and trends.
• Ensuring communication between secondary and post-secondary institutions.
• Building and expanding membership through outreach and inclusion.
• Contributing to the core of educational knowledge through research, data collection and analysis, and collaborative discourse.

So that

• Middle Colleges can develop and sustain a successful model of collaborative education that expands students' future opportunities.

Shared characteristics of Middle College High Schools include, but are not limited to

• Formal collaboration between the high school and the college that is demonstrated by the location on or close to a college campus and inclusion in the organizational structure of the college.
• Integration into the college, with faculty and students sharing educational resources.
• Coordination of college and high school schedules and calendars.
• Authorization to grant a high school diploma.
• Being a small school, yet being large enough to sustain their own unique classes and programs.
• Heterogeneous grouping of students.
• Implementation of collaborative, project centered, inquiry based curricula.
• Expanded teacher role in school governance.
• Incorporation of peer review and other support structures for faculty's professional growth.
• Ongoing embedded professional development, particularly in the areas of Literacy, Numeracy and 21st Century Skills.
• Exploring collaborative professional development opportunities provided by annual regional conferences and online communications.
• Student outcomes measured by multiple assessments, including performance based assessments.
• Empowerment of students through formal leadership roles in school governance through guidance programs such as peer counseling, in academic support services such as peer tutoring, and through MCNC's Student Leadership Initiative.

The following succinctly charts our ongoing theory and plan of action:

Middle College School Development Theory of Action