But a disturbing exception is the lowest-achieving students in middle school, whose reading scores have suffered greatly. “A student who enters middle school with weak decoding or fluency not only struggles in English. Unique Middle School Intervention ChallengesMiddle school reading intervention is uniquely hard because the gaps are longer term, the texts are more complex and responsibility becomes less clear, Mills explains. In middle school, educators often have to repair parts of the foundation while students are already expected to read complex grade-level material. As a former seventh-grade English teacher, several factors contribute to the drop in reading proficiency for struggling students in middle school, according to Laura Yeager, principal at Frederick Elementary.