From Bubbles to the Pond: High School Transitions of Muslim Adolescents from American Private K-8 Islamic Schools to Secular Public High Schools

Abstract

The transition from middle school to high school disrupts continuity in adolescents' lives and forces them to make various adjustments. Research spanning the past thirty years consistently shows that students' academic, personal, and interpersonal functioning suffers after making such a transition. The research further highlights that some combination of three sets of factors shapes such transitions for various groups of students: (a) magnitude of changes between the feeder and receiving schools, (b) adolescents' personal and background characteristics, and (c) their positioning in the national socio-political discourse. This study extends high school transition research to a rapidly growing, but largely overlooked, private feeder school and the student population whose identity has emerged as the new "other" in the current national political discourse.