Let's Go Back to Grouping Students by Ability

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/03/lets-go-back-to-grouping-students-by-ability/274362/

by JumpCrisscross • 13 years ago

102 95 13 years ago

bmelton2• 13 years ago

A lot of this has to do with Obama allowing states to waiver out of the No Child Left Behind program, effectively repealing it, which is for the better.

No Child Left Behind pretty much forced teachers into focusing on the lowest common denominator, as the objective was to have 100% pass rating by 2014 or 2015 for all students, and federal monies were tied to that objective.

As we can pretty much all attest to, 100% metric on anything is effectively ridiculous as a required hurdle. While certainly not a bad ideal, 100% is practically impossible.

As a one-time "gifted student", who eventually grew bored of traditional education because there was nobody to challenge me, and it wasn't until I got into technology as a career that my desire to learn was rekindled.

As a parent, I routinely try to find things that my daughter is interested in, even if it seems nonsensical, and try to apply deeper-learning techniques to it, if only to stoke the thirst for knowledge that I hope she never loses.

r00fus• 13 years ago

Surprisingly my state (the supermajority leftist CA) has not waived NCLB [1]. I have no idea what "costs" it would entail, but I see no reason why organization would agree to ludicrously unachievable goals like 100% passage rates - unless folks in that organization wanted it to fail (for political purposes).

[1] http://www.cep-dc.org/page.cfm?FloatingPageID=22

bmelton2• 13 years ago

As I understand it, the only 'cost' to getting a waiver is requesting it (and perhaps assisting with the 'period of review').

That said, I know that there were 'windows' in which to request the waiver, and it's possible that for whatever reason, CA wasn't able to get the paperwork ready in time for the last window?

It's also possibly related to political objectives, but at the same time, Obama is trying to get states away from NCLB, and CA is super liberal, so you'd think they'd have been the first to sign up?

Eduardo3rd• 13 years ago

When I was in the 5th or 6th grade I tested three levels below where I was supposed to be in mathematics. It wasn't because I was brilliant and board, it was simply because I was board and didn't care. Yet, because I was a home schooled student I was able to progress at a normal rate in my other classes without being lumped in with other underperforming students. I eventually found a modicum of enjoyment in mathematics through my love of science and went on to minor in the subject in college.

(I realize this is an anecdotal story, but I still think it has some relevance to this discussion.)

I hope that if the public school system adopts a program of grouping students by "ability" they will find a way to attempt to push underperforming students ahead as fast as possible. Interacting with other kids who were better at math in some of the sciences classes I took helped me improve my skills in math. I don't know if I would have done that if I was in classes full of other kids who were constantly underperforming all the time.

derefr4• 13 years ago

One of the main things I learned by being in a "gifted" program in school, was that it's very rare that someone is truly "permanently ahead." Kids will be early at learning some things, late at learning other things, but by 18 or so the majority of the population will have arrived at a similar skill level in most subjects[1].

This might be an effect of the current education system, not a cause, but I still think it's wrong-headed to put kids permanently into a "teach all the harder stuff RIGHT NOW" class just because they happened to have mastered one or two things early. It may just mean their parents decided to teach them one or two things the other kids' parents didn't; it doesn't mean they're at the developmental stage where they can absorb the more difficult material.[2]

What would help, in my mind, is for kids to be able to learn each subject at their own, separate pace--one "micro-skill" at a time, advancing to the next only when all the micro-skills relied upon as a base for the next micro-skill have been mastered (100%ed). [Think of it sort of like an unlockable "tech tree" of education.] For this to work, a school would need to provide:

A. free access to recorded lectures--not necessarily created by the school, but hopefully taken from the very best presentations of that micro-skill in the world;

B. computerized tests for each individual micro-skill that can be retaken infinitely without score penalty (but procedurally-generated so that this can't be used as a way to cheat), and which, importantly, should also be able to be used as a pre-test to "test out" of having to learn things one already knows;

C. the availability of tutoring/mentoring from others who have just finished learning the micro-skill (not teachers, for whom it's been forever since they learned it; and especially not "peers", who don't understand what they're saying yet.)

This is very difficult to implement, though, when the majority of school-time until at least University (and sometimes continuing through undergraduate studies) is spent in centralized lectures on messy conglomerations of many micro-skills taught in arbitrary order (that is, "courses"), where for each one, the students likely are either "above" or "below" the level.

This format won't be going away any time soon, so these hare-brained "just move them up or down in everything" schemes will continue to be put forth in its place.

---

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_cognitive_development -- basically, there is a reason we don't start mathematics education with set theory, even though it's more "fundamental"--it's more abstract, and abstraction requires faculties that don't develop until later on. The same can be said for teaching kids "real programming" at an early age.

croyd• 13 years ago

"What would help, in my mind, is for kids to be able to learn each subject at their own, separate pace--one "micro-skill" at a time, advancing to the next only when all the micro-skills relied upon as a base for the next micro-skill have been mastered (100%ed). [Think of it sort of like an unlockable "tech tree" of education.]"

This is exactly what the Khan Academy is doing. I believe there's at least one school (not sure if public or private) where they're experimenting with that model. See:

http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_rein...

IIRC, the students in the class take most of the lessons via computer/tablet and move forward once they've answered a certain number of quiz problems correctly. The teacher can monitor the progress of each student, and if one is having difficulty than he/she can get some individual help from the teacher or another student.

barry-cotter2• 13 years ago

but by 18 or so the majority of the population will have arrived at a similar skill level in most subjects[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean

This is not true and suggests that the author has limited experience dealing with the general population. The college going population is not the general one, and even within that population there are huge differences in ability. This is like saying that UC Berkeley and Cal State San Jose are not meaningfully different in their student intake.

derefr4• 13 years ago

I think you're talking about a very different kind of "ability" than I am. Some kids, coming out of high school, will know calculus, or have the ability to play an instrument, or the ability to render the human form in an anatomically-correct fashion. They also might know any amount of trivia--a list of presidents, the names of all the bones in the human body, etc.

None of that knowledge is really representative of being any "better" at anything. They may have just spent less time on the basics, and more time on the advanced stuff. It might just mean they were pushed to take more credits by their parents. They will likely have fundamental gaps (the inability to multiply two numbers in their head, for example) and rely on crutches (like a calculator) to keep up with everyone else in the advanced classes they're forced to sprint through. They might have done it all through rote memorization, and have no clear idea of what any of it means. Recall the refrain of most medical students: "I don't have time for the lesson; just give me the formula."

This is in opposition to the people who are "just better" at the fundamentals: each new thing they set out to learn, they'll learn faster and better, because they'll be building their new knowledge on top of mastery rather than a shaky 60%-and-move-on foundation.

You might wonder about IQ: IQ or "g" is literally the measure of how fast you can recognize and employ new patterns, and therefore how fast you'll master new micro-skills. Kids with higher IQs will do better under time-constraint. But given as much time as needed, and assuming mastery of previous subjects, IQ is irrelevant.

An amusing visual analogy: when you master a micro-skill, you've cleanly filled up a line of blocks in the "well" of your knowledge. When you master enough micro-skills, leaving no "gaps", the knowledge comes together and compresses: you get a Tetris. :)

ubercow13• 13 years ago

Moreover the link has nothing to do with his point.

SiVal2• 13 years ago

basically, there is a reason we don't start mathematics education with set theory, even though it's more "fundamental"

Ah, that brings back memories, because I grew up in the heyday of "New Math". We called September "Set-tember", because every September year after year we started each school year with yet another review of sets: union, intersection, subsets, empty sets. If Set A contains blah-blah and Set B contains foo-foo, list the elements in A union B, A minus B, etc., etc., et cetera.

We were all so sick of sets we could hardly stand it, had no idea why they were seemingly the most important topic in all of math, and couldn't wait to get past sets and, around October or so, find out what we were actually going to do in math that year.

ptaipale2• 13 years ago

Where was this? I had just the same, and I thought it was connected to the heyday of local loony left in Finland, where I live - the school system of German Democratic Republic (as well as the health system) was all the rage here. Maybe it had some good points too, but the focus on set theory for elementary school kids was just weird. My parents would ask me "What is this stuff, and why?" and I couldn't tell them. Neither did the textbook.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

When I was in junior high, just after a grade skip, I was mostly in "tracked" classes. Although I didn't like the grade skip (from fifth to seventh, which put me in a new school while my previous classmates were still in sixth grade at the elementary school), I did like being among classmates who in general were smarter than average. (I still had industrial arts classes and physical education classes with the general school population, and there was only one choir class.)

I hear that now that junior high schools are mostly called "middle schools," there has been a strong middle school philosophy of having all classes for early adolescents be heterogeneously grouped. That doesn't sound like a good educational idea to me. I fully approve of the idea of young people learning to get along with people of all ability levels. I have good friends from my non-tracked elementary school classes whom I am catching up with recently after FORTY YEARS of not seeing one another. (Facebook has helped a lot with that reconnecting.) I have lifelong friends from the tracked classes after the grade skip too, including a childhood best friend after whom I named my oldest son.

Even more important than grouping by ability, methinks, is upping the curriculum standard for everybody. In Taiwan, where my wife grew up, the seventh grade mathematics curriculum includes a good bit of algebra and geometry for everybody--including all the below-average students. I didn't see algebra, even with a tracked math class, until eighth grade in Minnesota, and when my family moved to Wisconsin the next school year, the highest math class in ninth grade was studying the same beginning algebra class from the same textbook I had already had the year before. The countries with the best performance in primary schooling get it in large part by having specialist teachers in the core subjects in elementary school. United States elementary teachers are expected to be generalists, but in practice they devote a lot of time and effort being jacks of all trades but masters of none.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

Let's do better for everybody in school. Let's get a reality check on aspirations by emulating best practice wherever it is found.

One statement in the article especially stood out to me: "Exercises in grammar have declined to the point that they are virtually extinct." I have observed this in suburban schools in the area near where I live. My second son (an aspiring writer since early homeschooling days, who has pursued a lot of knowledge about writing) reports that few of his classmates in the high school classes he now attends have had any instruction in grammar. I have been doing some tutoring for college entrance tests from time to time, and really, really bright young people who need no help at all from me in mathematics have not learned even the most basic grammatical terminology for revising English prose or identifying errors in writing. Ouch.

AFTER EDIT: I see another comment in this thread includes the statement

but by 18 or so the majority of the population will have arrived at a similar skill level in most subjects[1].

That is not factually correct.

http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-notes/2012...

And the reference provided for the statement, about "regression to the mean," illustrates that the statement is untrue, because when I graduated from high school, I was aware that that claimed situation is NOT what "regression to the mean" is about. Most eighteen-year-olds, and plenty of older people, have no idea what regression to the mean is. There is a huge variation in skill level in most subjects among eighteen-year-olds in the United States and most places.

jmj422• 13 years ago

It seems the "level" of education at a certain grade is highly variable in the United States. I grew up in Michigan, who, at the time, was a leader in education in the States, and I was seeing beginning algebra in 5th and 6th grade. We moved to Illinois when I was in High School, and experienced much the same your transition to Wisconsin.

These days, still in Illinois, my 7th grade daughter is doing high school level algebra and some geometry.

For a little context, 7th grade pre-algebra + 8th grade algebra is equivalent to Algebra 9 (she'll start with Algebra 10 in high school). 9th graders can take either Algebra 9 as a freshman then Algebra 10 as a sophomore, and so on, or Algebra 9A as a freshman and Algebra 9B as a sophomore.

Alex39172• 13 years ago

"There is a huge variation in skill level in most subjects among eighteen-year-olds in the United States and most places."

I agree with you there, but I do think in terms of ability (if not skill level) then there is an evening out that takes place over time. (I would say more like 25 rather than 18 though.) On a biological level things like developmental delays tend to wash out over time. Even kids with mild autism tend to become more or less normal after a while. And on a social level people become less dependent on their personalities, which is important since a lot of what is considered ability is actually probably just personality to begin with.

mattsfrey• 13 years ago

The only problem I experienced with this sort of system is if you're a smart kid that missed the jump when it came around because you weren't really serious about school yet. In my district you were basically judged at the end of elementary school on your last years performance grade-wise, and that would determine the rest of your academic future. When I was 10 years old, playing basketball and running around in the woods building forts took much greater priority over doing homework and I was a B student, never mind that I could ace any test without even trying. I was put in the regents classes. The "honors" kids simply ended up taking a year of condensed classes, and then were just a year ahead in all the subjects, allowing them to take a plethora of AP courses for college credit in their junior and senior years. Around 8th grade I got serious about tech and science and learning, but it was impossible to be advanced to the honors courses unless my parents were to raise a major stink which they were too modest to do. So I was just stuck in the "newb" classes the rest of my career and had to head into college with practically no AP credits. I think tracking and having different tiers is great, but there should be flexible mobility throughout the entire journey.

lolnope• 13 years ago

The discrepancy between what's written on the board and what the students copied down on their papers in that picture is bothering me just a bit.

richardjordan• 13 years ago

I have two kids going through the US education system at the moment and I think about this stuff a lot, having gone through a different system myself.

One of the challenges in the US is the lack of a proper examination system that tests what you've learned. There may be problems with O-levels/GCSEs and A-levels in the UK or their equivalents in other European countries, but proper exams - not just multiple choice tests that are little more than proxies for IQ testing - are a good starting point for understanding who has learned what and when. Regrouping kids year by year to ensure that they're getting the best support for learning at the pace they're ready for is a lot easier when you have some standards.

A key problem is that pretty much ANY change is resisted. If it's a change that emulates another country that does better than the US at education the knee jerk reaction is to explain why the American system is so much superior. Yet we continue to fail to educate our kids, churning them out with little knowledge of the world, woeful critical thinking skills, and often lacking the curiosity necessary to seek out self-improvement on either front.

Edit: One more thought that strikes me is the terrible state of tertiary education. Colleges have byzantine admissions systems that favor nepotism and subjective criteria (partially no doubt a factor of no real exam system at 18 that you can base entry on). Many of the top colleges have become - to steal someone else's rather nice phrase - hedge funds with schools attached for tax reasons. They've taken all the money off the table - in that your lifetime expected earnings increase is now approximately equal to the fully costed amount you'll spend gaining the degree, in many cases. That absolutely trickles down a negative impact on the younger levels of education - when things other than what you learn at elementary and high school level have the greatest impact your ability to gain benefit from the college cycle.

tl;dr I agree we should have ability streaming so long as there is a mechanism to rejig the streaming every year to make up for those surging ahead and help those falling behind where they were placed the year before

ivan_ah• 13 years ago

> computer-aided learning might make it easier for them to instruct students who learn at different rates.

Yep. We need this. In particular I think we need to have testing which is adapted to students current knowledge -- more on this here: http://minireference.com/blog/exams-suck/

My only complaint is that being labelled "slow learner" might be discouraging to the students. I would opt for having a "standard" track and a "extra stuff" track, but not a "you are slow" track.

davidroberts2• 13 years ago

When I went to school, junior high was heterogeneous and I was miserable. High school was tracked and pretty good. It was divided like the article said, into Applied Arts, College Prep, and Honors. Applied Arts was where kids who would likely work or go to a trade school after high school took classes that taught them skills, College Prep was for kids who would go to a mid-level state college, then work in a white collar job. Honors was for kids who would end up at the University of California or a quality private university like Stanford or Cal Tech.

I was shocked to discover that there were no Applied Arts at my kids' high school, everyone was being prepared for college whether they liked it or not, and my kids considered college prep as classes for dummies. It seemed like a typical modern euphemism intended to make people feel good without actually improving anything.

I feel sorry for the kids who might have enjoyed metal shop, wood shop, auto repair, graphic arts, or other applied art classes, and who would have gained skills that could bring in decent pay, but who instead drop out of the totally useless (for them) college prep classes and go into low level service jobs or become single mothers.

They still have the tracks, they just have different names. College prep is for students who likely drop out or barely graduate with no skills and be miserable, honors is for students who will likely go to a state college, and AP is for students who will likely go to University of California or a quality private school like Stanford or Cal Tech.

The only change is the names and the fate of the lowest academic track. They are the losers in the current system.

jdmichal• 13 years ago

Germany still has this system for the most part. Clear separation between trade school and University preparation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany

jmj422• 13 years ago

Our high school uses tracked curriculum much like described. Math, for instance has 3 tracks:

1. Algebra 9A; Algebra 9B; Algebra 10; Geometry 2. Algebra 9; Algebra 10; Geometry; < various choices> 3. Algebra 10; Geometry; <choices>; <AP Choices>

Track 3, requires 7th grade pre-algebra and 8th grade algebra. They are equivalent to Algebra 9A and 9B. Our 8th grade algebra even qualifies as "high school math" for qualification for the Illinois Math and Sciences Academy(IMSA).

WalterBright• 13 years ago

I took and loved metal shop, auto shop, and wood shop (I still use the desk I made in it), and went on to Caltech. Engineering is more than just math - it's about making things!

amirmansour• 13 years ago

Amen brotha, but don't tell that to the PhDs. P.S: I'm a PhD student.

sesqu• 13 years ago

And architecture is more than just arts. Perhaps more relevant than the existence of multidisciplinary fields is the low employment of monodisciplinary fields?

dinkumthinkum8• 13 years ago

I don't care for this stuff. I don't think children should be placed into these tracks; it reinforces many problems. You have kids getting stuck into vocational trades because some administrator thinks they can't handle it or perhaps they haven't "blossomed" intellectually, or because of their family or family's station in life, think that's all they can do.

Sorry, but the "honors if for state college bound and AP is for UC bound" little formula you have there just makes my eyes roll.

just2n3• 13 years ago

What problems?

You seem to have a particular worry about administrators deciding the fate of children by thinking they wouldn't challenge them by placing them in the correct track, or that the children would be discriminated against based on their race or social status.

Just a quick FYI: this isn't 1850. There are solutions to problems like these. For one, we can provide aptitude tests. This would allow schools to decide which track is right for a student in an objective way. If a parent disagrees with the placement, they could request a certain placement, too. It's not meant to be segregation, it's meant to serve as teaching to students at a level that's challenging to them, but not unfair. Everyone is NOT created equal, and some excel at different things. To package everyone into the same exact track is ignorant at best, but probably just stupid. In fact, it's unlikely you'd have any student wholly within a single track. It makes more sense for some to take much more advanced courses in a subject that they excel at and in lower tracks for other subjects.

And honors/AP separation is approximately correct. But AP has become even simpler since I was in HS (8 years ago). I looked up the AP exams I took to find that they have been simplified. The AP AB CS exam for instance no longer exists because it was deemed too difficult. I got a perfect score on it, and I ended up getting a math degree because I went to a state school and the CS curriculum was trivial for me. Having later taken Stanford courses and taught myself the curriculum used at MIT, they would've both been good fits. The only reason I didn't pursue either was the cost.

davidroberts2• 13 years ago

Not everyone wants to go to college. A lot of people enjoy working with their hands and are really good at it, and plumbers, carpenters, welders, machinists, mechanics, and electricians are a lot more useful to society than yet one more person who squeaked through the state college pushing paper in some dismal office. And likely happier too.

The idea that a college education automatically leads to a better life than preparation for honest skilled labor is pretty elitist in my opinion.

altera• 13 years ago

There is nothing wrong about being plumber, car mechanic or carpenter. Many of those people make more money and have better life than dummy with title and student loan.

jrs235• 13 years ago

When I was in high school, students could choose what elective classes they wanted to take.

"Honors" classes were limited though to those students that had excelled in the regular courses. Honors classes meant more involved projects and work loads. Instead of reading and discussing one book a month, an honors class might read and discuss two books a month. However, no students was forced into taking the honors classes if they didn't want to.

Our school also offered AP courses in numerous subjects to anyone that wanted to take them. Some of these courses required coming in an hour before the regular school day start time in order to partake in. At the time, our school district also paid for the AP exam costs for any/all students who wished to take the AP exam.

The decision and choice is in the students hands. If the student has the desire or ambition to take more challenging courses they can and get to choose to do so. Likewise they could choose to take wood shop, metal shop, art courses, engine shop, etc it that's what interests them.

smileysteve• 13 years ago

I disagree not with your argument, but the assumption that your argument makes.

We've recently seen the Learn to Code phenomenon, but HN has also had articles "Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Build" and "Don't Learn to Code, Learn to Farm". With the expectation that the majority of Americans drive cars regularly, there is no reason that the majority should have no experience diagnosing issues or doing basic maintenance. Similarly with shop or electronics, we deal with physical objects all of the time, basic craftsmanship should not be seen as a relegation to the not college bound. The same with basic circuits, most all have phones and computers nowadays; a screen replacement, or just knowing how badly your screen is broken should not be something you just give up on. Emergency preparedness is another example, it benefits society if it's not just scouts, jrotc, and ETs that know how to treat people for shock.

Don't make vocational tracks, but realize that to be educated people should understand at least some of the concepts of the things that they use in every day life.

Gleaming2• 13 years ago

I enjoyed metal shop and even woodworking shop, but that didn't stopped me to go to college. In fact, I found those classes to be more important in life than other well established and respectable subjects, such as english and literature.

It isn't a either/or thing. And it shouldn't be.

Alex39172• 13 years ago

It certainly seems like a good idea until you spend thirty seconds thinking about why it was such a terrible system in the first place:

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/the-most-im...

If there is new evidence suggesting ability grouping works better for everyone then that's interesting and certainly worth looking at, but highly unlikely since it contradicts the last 5 decades of research.

Regardless, by coercing states into evaluating their teachers with VAM the DOE has effectively made ability grouping illegal since the tests aren't vertically scaled.

boas• 13 years ago

My high school had a good response to the criticism that tracking is elitist or that it prevents students from switching tracks. Rather than the school deciding your track (regular, advanced, AP), the student decided which level they wanted to take for each class. In the first week or two, if it was too challenging, the student could simply move down a level.

ptaipale2• 13 years ago

The counter-argument to that is that kids take a lower track than they could well handle, if they have talent but are a bit lazy, or come from disadvantaged backgrounds (socioeconomic class where parents have no academic ambition, or perhaps no interest in their kids' school at all). This is not entirely rubbish, although I do think that some different tracks would be a good idea.

When I went to school, there were e.g. three different levels of maths in junior high here; with my kids, everyone in the age class followed the same curriculum in maths, languages etc. This leads to a differentiation of schools - since you can't select more ambitious classes within one school, parents try to get their children to elite schools where the academic level is higher and there are fewer distracting "students".

arikrak• 13 years ago

They link to a paper which states that sorting benefits both high and low-performing students. However, it helps high-performing students more, which may explain why sorting has been unpopular in the last few decades. People are so into 'equality' they end up being in favor of results where everyone does worse if there's a smaller spread, i.e. more 'equal'. This way they can say they closed the 'gap' or something like that. Helping bright students excel is almost 'undemocratic'.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18848

_delirium• 13 years ago

I'd be interested in some kind of social and/or psychological measures in addition to test-taking measures. My own experience as a "gifted" student is that I did not greatly enjoy or become motivated by being in "gifted" courses. My 4th-5th grade were entirely tracked, then 6th-8th were tracked more weakly, and high school varied depending on the course.

I much preferred the subset of courses that were mixed, which I found more rewarding on many axes, at least once I got to high school (I don't know whether I would've preferred a non-tracked 4th grade). The non-tracked courses were more rewarding in terms of socializing and friendships. I also found they played better to my own strengths, which are aligned more towards trying to help out fellow students who were having trouble with material in one way or another, rather than competing with them. In "gifted-only" classes, I found more people were overachievers more interested in outdoing me than swapping strengths. I found I learned best myself when I had opportunities for informal tutoring, which happened more in the mixed-skill classes, where someone actually was interested in me helping them.

They weren't always the same sorting of skills, either. I would guess I was in the "upper" part of the mixed-skill classes in most of those I took, but I had some useful experiences when some of the same people I helped out in a science course in turn helped me out in an art course, which I wasn't great at. At least half the intrinsic joy of learning something, imo, is being able to share it with someone who doesn't (yet) understand it as well as you do.

chinpokomon• 13 years ago

By 4th grade, I wasn't excelling in school, despite demonstrating considerable ability and intelligence when not in an academic setting. I was selected to join the GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) and suddenly school became more interesting. I moved to another part of the country and was enrolled in that area's GATE type of programming. By the time I went to Junior high, I was taking honors classes and this was when I started to shine academically. Unfortunately when I started the 9th grade, I spent one quarter as a high school freshman before I moved again and was put back in a middle school. Completing my 9th grade, they opened a 9-12 grade high school and with most of my peers became sophomores where I had to prove myself all over again, but I applied myself and graduated 6th out of a class of 600.

I believe the inconsistent curriculum between different school districts, and wildly different styles of teaching made this experience more difficult than it should have been. In hind sight, had I not been moved around so often, I would have probably skipped a grade or two.

It is also a product of the schools that I went to that you went to 4 years of high school. I know people who completed all of their high school credits by the time they were juniors and who got out of high school early. Had I known this was even possible, I could have easily met all my credits and left early as well.

I now think that the education system is inherently flawed. There is no reason to think that all students should progress through school at the same rate, but for me I was presented no alternatives. Grade levels do not adequately identify any student's potential any more than they identify what subjects or material they should be instructed. My reading comprehension has always been strong, while my spelling ability is only adequate at best. Without ubiquitous spell checkers of today, some might have considered me illiterate; hardly a fair assessment of my reading level yet early on in my education those concepts were seen as expressly linked.

I personally think one room school houses have value we no longer acknowledge. Allowing older students to impart their knowledge to younger students is a form of interactive learning that would enforce ideas for those older students. Allowing students to learn at their own pace, and not at the pace of their grade level would allow students who grasp certain subjects to drive through those quickly and receive additional instruction for those areas they may not be as advanced. I believe that while some who knew me in high school would say I excelled in school, the truth is somewhat misleading. I was kept back from excelling in certain subjects by majority curriculum requirements.

I don't know that I have the solution, but I think the current system is only capable of producing average students.

pippy• 13 years ago

Grouping children by ability is fantastic for the majority of students. The reality is trouble kids distract the entire class, as well as stealing teaching time that could be used on everyone else. It's imprudent to remain politically correct at the detriment of the majority of learners.

Grouping by _occupation_ however is foolish, we don't know what the economy will look like tomorrow, let alone what jobs will be ready when the kids leave school. Also capability isn't restricted by occupation, there are plenty of brilliant individuals who choose trades over intellectual pursuits.

In many ways NCLB hampers the performance of public schools which in turn tarnishes their reputation. By focusing on conformity instead of individual ability it's difficult to actually group children effectively.

Mc_Big_G• 13 years ago

I didn't RTFA, but the headline made me think about my experience in 7th/8th grade when I moved to a new city. In previous years my grades in math were pretty bleak. When I transferred, they made a mistake and put me in honors Algebra. I just sort of went with it and it was a nightmare. I had essentially skipped a year of some essential math that wasn't being covered and we were, of course, expected to know. The experience was horrifying and I essentially BS'd my way through the class for the first half of the year. However, at some point things started clicking and by the end of the year I was good to go. I continued with honors math in high school, including pre-calc and calculus and then took every math class known to man to get my mechanical engineering degree. I now wonder what would have happened if they decided I had "low ability" based on my previous performance.

SoftwareMaven2• 13 years ago

I think we should go further and eliminate age-based grades. For every subject, kids should be grouped with students that are his/her equal. That may mean one student is with kids two years older in English and two years younger in Math. Kids shouldn't be able to move forward until they've mastered the material at their level.

It is asinine that a high school student is not able to read or perform basic arithmetic. But, hey, they get to play with their friends every year for 12 years.

(This is said as a father of four very diverse kids, including one who suffers from a mental illness, two who are in gifted/honors programs, and one who never really aligned with the education machine and failed to thrive as a result.)

dinkumthinkum8• 13 years ago

I think this has an enormous amount of practical problems in terms of implementation, class room dynamics, and so on. You really think public schools should do this?

SoftwareMaven2• 13 years ago

I do (and so do the Chinese; it's the way their system works, along with the teacher following the cohort, which would also be good). I think, realistically, most students will be within a year or so of their age cohort in most classes. If somebody falls more than two years behind, they probably need to be on a different track, anyway (e.g. they likely have a learning disability).

Teaching becomes easier, because teachers aren't trying to intermingle challenging content for more advanced learners with simplified content for less advanced. Instead, they can focus much more tightly on the student's level. Since teachers aren't dealing with bored "advanced" kids and bored "delayed" kids, the impact of class size is reduced.

It adds a burden to the administrators, since they would be responsible for determining the cohorts, but, after watching my wife be heavily involved in school finances, I strongly believe there are more than enough administrative dollars floating around to deal with it.

Finally, it's not the end-all solution. But I think it's a better framework than the current one. Even in the "gifted" program at my kids' school, you can see (and the teachers do an amazing job of accounting for) that some of these "gifted" kids might be amazing in math, yet still struggle at grade-level or a year behind in English. In the "mainline" classes, the inverse might be true, but those kids don't get the extra benefits of the gifted program since they couldn't test well enough on the mathematics.

ruswick• 13 years ago

As a current high school student, I can say that the trend away from tracking, at least in my district, is largely a product of parental indignation: they feel as though their kids are being systematically disadvantaged or academically repressed due to some sort of misguided assessment of their kid's innate ability. It's really pretty intuitive; no one wants to be told that their kid is too dumb to succeed in the upper-echelons of secondary education.

Although, in my personal opinion, tracking is probably detrimental inasmuch as success in high school is determined by sheer effort and monetary resources (and to a much lesser extent by academic ability.) Most people are capable of sufficiently completing most AP courses, but either don't have a desire to work for 4 hours per night on top of 10 hours at school, or aren't even offered the opportunity to take them. Because of that, tracking (like most other paradigms in k-12 education) rewards people with high income and supportive parents that compel their kid to take on more responsibility, and ends up artificially excluding potentially qualified students based on a test they took when they were literally 10 years old and is defined largely by wealth anyway.

On top of this, tracking involves a disproportionate allocation of resources whereby the "smart" kids get the most time poured into them, artificially increasing their test scores to a greater extent while leaving the less-qualified students out to dry. Malcolm Gladwell articulates this quite well in Outliers (which everyone ought to read). So, an arbitrary difference when one is 10 becomes a massive dichotomy when individuals are 18 because the kids on the higher track are given access to superior resources, while the kids who aren't are perpetually disadvantaged. Tracking takes minute differences in intelligence and, based largely off of one's circumstances and not innate ability, exacerbates those differences through unfair allocation of resources.

Tracking is largely arbitrary, enables disproportionate appropriation of district resources, and is needlessly exclusionary.

Just my two cents...

angersock• 13 years ago

Just a minor comment: I assume you are well read, but one of the biggest tells of being a clever youth is writing style. George Orwell had some good advice on the matter here:

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

I've taken the liberty of rephrasing your post below:

  I'm in high school; I think that we've stopped using 
  tracking because parents don't like it--nobody wants to
  be told their kid isn't talented. 

  I'm not sure this is wrong. Tracking seems to be more a 
  function of wealth and parental guidance than of talent. 
  This being the case, we end up with a system that rewards
  kids with those resources and ignores--or even slights!--
  those without.

  Another awful feature of tracking is that it multiplies
  differences over time: because resources are allocated 
  based on test performance, minor differences in scores
  snowball over time--two students with only minor 
  differences in ability may well end up in very different
  classes, with one being trained to get to the next level
  and the other abandoned by the system charged with
  teaching them.

  To sum up: the choice of tracks is arbitrary, unfairly 
  spreads resources, and is too skewed in demographics.

See? Much more readable.

lutusp• 13 years ago

> Unfortunately, the efforts and philosophies of otherwise well-meaning individuals have eliminated the achievement gap by eliminating achievement.

This one sentence made the entire article worthwhile. :)

Kudzu_Bob5• 13 years ago

Grouping students by ability is, and will always be, an inherently racist undertaking.

dinkumthinkum8• 13 years ago

You've got to be joking. I mean, I'm not at advocate of what the article is proposing but this is crazy. It is always inherently racist?

Kudzu_Bob5• 13 years ago

Whenever ability tracking is tried in any multiracial society, it always, and I mean always, results in markedly different outcomes for various racial groups. Is that not, ipso facto, racism?

makomk• 13 years ago

Yes. The whole "inherent ability" thing is bullshit - even if it does exist, schools don't actually group by ability, they group by (a) how well kids do on tests at a young age and (b) how good the kid's parents are at convincing the schools to put their kids in a higher set, both of which have as much to do with race and socioeconomic class as they do with actual ability.

scotty79• 13 years ago

Do they mean grouping kids by ability as opposed to grouping them by age, or grouping them by age as usual and then further dividing them into groups by ability?

mckoss• 13 years ago

Schools using Khan Academy have the ultimate in "tracking" - each student has a customized class geared exactly to his or her current abilities.

carlob• 13 years ago

A few days ago another article about education from The Atlantic made it to the front page [0] and the subtitle was: "The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence." .

I tend to agree with the other article rather than with this one: I tend to think that we often underestimate the power of positive peer interaction. A student that is momentarily better at math can tutor one of his classmates, while later during the day the roles could be inverted for biology or grammar.

What is really happening is that equality has become a race to the bottom, where as the article says: the overall quality of education has plummeted and the only acceptable form of testing is by multiple choice.

A little anecdote: my girlfriend has studied in France, she's been to a generalist high school (as opposed to professional) and it was generally well known that if you didn't want to be in a class where the lower class, troubled kids were, you had to choose German as a second foreign language, because the trouble kids largely went for Spanish.

This goes to say that even a fairly egalitarian system will be gamed, and that the dynamics involved often involve wealth and social status (let's call it class) rather than raw brainpower. And even raw brainpower is largely a function of social standing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399143

DividesByZero2• 13 years ago

No, let's not go back to that, it's a bad idea an systematises socio-economic, behavioural and other problems.

In my research of educational systems while building Geddit, I've found that American education, and the systems of many other countries, seem to have some kind of disease regarding 'standards'. High standards, falling standards, who cares? What are the learning outcomes of students? Standards are for manufacturing tolerances and audit requirements, not for the development of children. This sort of thinking is mired in 200 year old practices from the industrial revolution, where education's role was to provide assembly line workers and assembly line managers. No wonder so many education abstractions in terms of grouping and teaching students still resemble those found in mass manufacturing!

I have found some interesting glimpses of an alternative. Finland's educational system was developed some 50 years ago when that country faced great decisions for the future of its society amidst the cold war. Finnish schools place equity above all else - teaching is designed such that no student falls behind, and problems are resolved communally, in-class. The choice to try and do things like carpentry, or applied arts is left up to the student after they've been given a taste.

This equity is acheived through differentiation - teachers are trained for it. When I visited the Joensuu teacher training highschool (kind of like a teaching hospital but for education rather than medicine - real students, real classes, trainee and senior teachers), differentiation was at the core of all teaching methods and skills. The needs of individual students are incorporated into the whole. And before you cry 'but Finland is so homogenous', a quarter of most classes at Joensuu are made up of the children of immigrants.

This approach produces outcomes that 'tracked' or 'standardised' systems cannot hope to match. Most students go on to university or skilled 'apprenticeships' - this in turn supports the Finnish economy so that it may support this high level of education.

This paragraph is particularly vile:

"Unfortunately, the efforts and philosophies of otherwise well-meaning individuals have eliminated the achievement gap by eliminating achievement... (and following examples)" I have seen this said so many times but never once witnessed it first hand in the course of my research. Acheivement is not eliminated except where the teacher is simply incompetent.

Tracking has one advantage - it's cheaper and easier. You have natural economies of scale when you treat education like piece work at a manufacturing plant and have separated assembly lines. It seems Americans are always reaching for the cheaper, 'more efficient' solution to fix the problem of their underfunded schools than actually funding them properly.

btilly• 13 years ago

US schools do not, on average, seem that underfunded to me. Look at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_ifn.asp to verify that the USA averages more per student than most industrialized countries. Even if you correct for GDP, the USA is not that bad.

That said, money is distributed very unequally. There are lots of very underfunded schools - with many in California. See http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/acrossstates/Rankings.a... to see why.

DividesByZero2• 13 years ago

'On average' is a meaningless assertion in a country where the gap between rich and poor is so large. (GINI 0.38 after-tax in 2010).

henrikschroder• 13 years ago

It's always a great surprise when you discover that your own socialist european nanny-state country has been doing something in a lot more free-choice and free-market way than the US. :-D

Grouping high-school students after ability is a great idea, but why would someone else choose which track to put a student in? How the hell did you guys end up in that system? Why not let the kids and their families choose freely?

When I went to high-school in Sweden in the early 90s, we still had an ok system. Elementary school (grades 1-9) was the same for everyone, and you went to the school closest to where you lived. But for high-school, everyone had to make a choice. There's open enrollment, so you got to pick a school, and you had to pick a programme. There were a few "theoretical" programmes - arts, humanities, economy, science, and technology - that most schools offered, and a whole slew of vocational programmes that varied greatly between schools.

And the different programmes would give you different eligibility for university later, if you took science or tech, you'd be eligible for anything, but if you took the humanities programme for example, you wouldn't qualify for engineering college or med school, and if you took a vocational programme, you wouldn't qualify for any university education.

But complementing this was a system of "adult high schools", where you at any time could take classes to bring yourself up to a higher level programme, and they were typically evening classes. So if you chose the high-school programme to become a construction worker, and changed your mind, you could always later take evening classes, get a science programme high school degree, and do something else, got to university, get another career, whatever.

And this system worked pretty well. The kids who were just fed up with school after elementary got to choose something vocational and be happy not having to learn more German or algebra or biology, and you could always try the science programme if you wanted to, and if it didn't work out, if it was too hard for you, you could choose another programme.

But then, of course, we went the same way as the US, and our politicians bought into the idea that EVERYONE MUST GO TO COLLEGE, and therefore all the vocational programmes got more theoretical, and the lower-level theoretical programmes got a bit more science and math. And the results after a decade of that is that it's a complete failure. Because the kids that are tired of school, the just flunk it, instead of completing a vocational programme. And the ones in the lower-level theoretical programmes flunk as well, because they can't handle the extra math and science. And the universities are furious, because they see that the quality of the high-school graduates that apply are falling year over year, because the system has just produced a lot more graduates that are "eligible", without actually giving them the required education.

Gleaming2• 13 years ago

Please don't group kids by ability. This will only end up dooming the kids not placed in the smart group to a life of lower expectations and not having access to proper education and opportunities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

The thing is, teachers don't actually group kids by ability. Even if they really try, the only criteria teachers are able to uphold is their own arbitrary and whimsical personal preferences. It's a blind bet, that's it. Once you accept that teachers group kids by ability, you are giving a blank check for him to play favourites with their pet students, and doom the kids they didn't pick to a life of lower expectations and not having access to opportunities they might actually be able to take advantage of, more than the so called smarter kids.

I'm talking from personal experience. When I was a kid, I started by being the smart kid who didn't applied myself. Then, around 7th grade the teachers downgraded me to the loser kid who was never going to amount to nothing in life. Between 12 to around 17 was also the socially awkward nerd who didn't fit in school, and being in class with all those kids who were stranger to me led to a whole lot of anxiety, which forced me to prefer skipping school instead of attending class. As a result, my grades tanked, I started getting Fs, and I even flunked 10th grade.

The teachers didn't cared, because to them that was expected. They had divided the class in the fast-track group, the ones expected to go to college, become doctors and succeed in life, and the loser group, the ones doomed to failure and even not actually finish highschool. As I was placed in the latter group and expected that I would never amount to anything in life, they didn't gave a sh*t if I flunked a year or not. To them, that was expected, because I was placed in the loser group in the 7th grade.

Thankfully for me, in spite of the teachers segregating the students by their perceived potential for success, the national school system rejected that concept and gave all kids the same opportunities, in spite of any favoritism on behalf of the teacher body. Therefore, in spite of my social awkwardness (which I managed to outgrow), I was able to do well in national exams and in college admission tests.

This was a shock to my teachers, and this led to a heartbreaking and soul-crushing experience: after acing the national-wide math test (best performing kid in my highschool), which was completely unexpected by any of my teachers, I had the head teacher of my school summoning me for an interview essentially to try to get me to admit and confess I cheated on the test, because to him it was impossible for a kid not on the fast-track group to outperform his pet students. After all, my success in the national exams meant they screwed up, because it was proof their pet-picking policies marginalized talented kids, that kids could succeed without their magical guidance, and that their teaching skills were questionable (kids who were groomed by them were performing worse than marginalized kids). When they realized that I actually did study for the exam and my grade was actually based on nothing more than the work I put into it and some talent as well, the strangest thing happened: the head teacher of my school started telling me to my face that in spite of my grade I would never amount to anything in life and I was doomed to fail. That's what you get when you let teachers pick favorites.

Thankfully, I managed to enroll in college in mechanical engineering. That was a shock to my highschool teachers, as some of their pet students didn't even managed to get accepted themselves. At undergraduate level I was an average student, mostly because I've managed to grow a thicker skin and therefore avoided the whole socially awkward teen experience. Even then, I still felt compelled to skip classes and as a consequence fail some courses. In spite of that, when I enrolled in my masters I finally managed to pick subjects I was actually interested in (structural analysis and computational mechanics). The best part of it is that I finally got a teacher to actually believe in me, in spite of my limitations. That teacher happened to be my master's thesis counselor. He accepted me as a student in spite of my low grades, and he actually believed in me. As a consequence, I went from the kid on the bottom of the class to the best performing student in my graduation year, receiving the top marks in school in computational mechanics courses, and be awarded with a national prize for students in that field. Fast forward a couple of years, I'm now a research assistant in my country's (and one of the world's) top engineering schools, and I'm a member of an european research project in my field of expertise.

Now, I managed to have some academic success in spite of being side-tracked, and subsequently railroaded, by teachers who were firm believers in the "let's group students by ability" bullshit philosophy. But I was one of the lucky ones, who managed to avoid all the failure traps laid out by the teachers who placed bets on their pet students. But what about all the kids who weren't as lucky as me? I vividly remember a couple of kids I befriended in middle school who shared the same interests and social issues I had, who were smarter and who were more talented than me. They didn't managed to overcome the traps set out by those teachers, and ended up failing at life, vindicating the self-fulfilling prophecies of the "let's group students by ability" teachers. If they actually received the same opportunities as everyone, I believe they could easily outperform both me and the entire group teachers were grooming for success. But they didn't. And now they are stuck in menial, low income jobs.

So, please think about it.

losvedir• 13 years ago

Wow, that's a very compelling story. Thank you for sharing.

bromang4• 13 years ago

The streaming can and should be done through aptitude tests and competitive examinations. Your story is quite unfortunate but there are better ways of separating pupils by ability.

dangravell• 13 years ago

The choice between streaming and not is essentially the choice between wide disparities in educational achievement and not.

Let's stop talking about personal experience and get real. Let's talk objectively instead. Pretty much ALL the research since the war has shown that streaming results in higher achievement for high achievers, and lower achievement for lower achievers.

If you're happy with those disparities, that's fine.

I am not, personally.

api• 13 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeXoOkU5PjQ

Partitioning probably works because it groups kids such that in each ability group they are at or near the region of maximum Shannon information density in the feedback they're receiving.

mrcactu5• 13 years ago

we say grouping students by "ability" but don't we just wind up grouping students by correlated variables like gender, race, socioeconomic status, geographic location ?

the equality of education and allocation of other resources is not homogenous and it would be wrong to assume it was.

in these hard times, we notice more the disconnect between the topics we are learning in school and the jobs/careers they are supposed to prepare for.

sageikosa• 13 years ago

These are the types of thesis statements I prefer to completely undercut. How about instead of "us" doing things to students, we roll-back the state control of the education system and let people that want to learn, learn what they want.

sps_jp• 13 years ago

I must applaud today's teachers. As the parent of two young children (5 and 8), I was surprised by the pace of learning expected of kids today. The problem is that not all kids learn at the same speed due to several factors, most importantly in my opinion is parental involvement. I was very proud when my son showed exceptional aptitude for reading and above average ability in math very early on. However, this also exposed several issues with the regular public school system. Teachers and schools are evaluated (at least in Florida) by how much they improve standardized test scores year over year. The bi-product being teachers understandably feel compelled to spend the majority of their time focusing on the slower learners. My heart broke when my son repeatedly came to me and said he was bored in class and wanted to be more challenged. He was in kindergarten. His teacher was incredible, and truly cared for each student. She recognized that something needed to be done for my son and recommended that we have him tested for gifted or possibly find a school with programs for advanced children. The problem is that gifted programs in Florida do not officially start until second or third grade, and I cannot afford a private school.

My wife and I began searching for other options. Thankfully we found something that I don't think enough parents know about, a charter school. A charter school is a public school that has a separate board from the county school board. This allows them some freedoms in education that a regular public school cannot implement. Other differences include less funding from the county (for charter schools), required parent volunteer time (in the case of my kid's school, 20 hrs per family), and the inclusion of programs that are being cut from most public schools (art, PE, music, and Spanish).

The charter school my kids attend has individualized learning plans for each student. Basically at the beginning of the school year (as well as each quarter) teachers assess each student individually in reading, writing, and math. Students are then grouped within the classroom with other students of similar ability. This allows teachers to focus on each group and meet their educational needs rather than marginalizing the lesson for the entire class. Yes, this adds a lot of work to the teacher's everyday planning, but the benefits are tremendous. The kids learn to work together when they are not the current focus of the teacher, and teachers have a better pulse on each student. Fast learners are continually challenged, and slower learners are given more focused attention. Best of all, the students, teachers, and parents are all invested in the school.

Parents, be an advocate for your child's education. The regular public school system is broken in America, but there are options other than private school.

Havoc• 13 years ago

Yes definitely. Due to the setup at my school kids were split into 3 groups from the year ~15 onward for math classes. Great. In the final year, for reasons beyond the scope of this post, the 3 groups were combined again.

I folded a vast number of paper planes during maths that year...

You really can't expect a teacher to stand in front of a class so diverse & expect results on all fronts. Its impossible.

programminggeek• 13 years ago

I am less concerned with tracks and more concerned with pacing. The problem with lumping everybody together is that nobody learns at the same pace. So, the pace is slowed to the minimum required to keep everyone moving forward. That is the effect of wanting no child left behind. In effect, progress for all is slowed by all to allow for progress of a few.

If we allowed for a system where all students could learn at their own pace, test scores would go up simply for the fact that everyone would be allowed and encouraged to go further, faster. Also, many students could potentially learn more before they graduate or even have bachelor's level knowledge before the age they "go off to college".

I was an "honors kid" and it was a little depressing to spend months every year re-learning what we learned the previous year and slowly creeping forward on the material the rest of the year. So, I taught myself the things I cared about at home and in my free time - I would read books like "Teach Yourself C in 21 Days" for fun. At one point I wanted to build my own operating system, so I was teaching myself Assembly... for fun.

Obviously I'm a computer nerd, but people are nerdy about all kinds of things. Let the music kids go as far as they can in music, let the athletes go as far as they can with athletics. Let the writers write and the business people learn business. If schools nurture and encourage individualized learning, students will learn to excel in the areas that they care about.

I was nerdy enough to do it on my own, most people aren't. School as I experienced it is basically broken.

Let's Go Back to Grouping Students by Ability

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