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Ability Grouping Worked! Bring It Back!
I started this post in response to a really well thought out and written post currently on the main feed. As I got into my response, I realized I was not going to be able to complete my response within the word limitations allowed at my level of membership. So this is going to be a post of its own.
My whole teaching experience was with kids whose behavior caused them to be removed from general ed classes where they caused disruptions that interfered with the learning experiences of more well-behaved students. For some of the kids I worked with, the mere difficulty of the curriculum and their unpreparedness for it was the cause of their outbursts. Others, though fully capable of doing the work, were dealing with emotional or physiological problems that limited their ability to sit in a classroom with between 25 and 30 other students without doing something to draw attention to themselves. So, given that, I can truly say that I have a fair perspective on the ability of some kids to achieve real academic success and some to be better candidates for more vocational tracts. The absurdity that every kid should have the opportunity to go to college never closed the deal with me. Anyone who has taught at the elementary and middle school level can clearly see that some kids, no matter how much individual attention they are given will never meet the standards we used to associate with a high school diploma, much less be able to go into a college and achieve even higher academic skills.
When I started teaching in the late 1960s kids were placed in groups based on their demonstrated skills in reading and math. Ultimately, that led to one classroom being made up of the slowest kids. That placement wasn’t a death sentence. Kids could make improvements and move to higher-level classes, but as a general rule, what kids demonstrated in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade levels was pretty much what would be the pattern of their academic career. Unfortunately, a large percentage of those kids were African-Americans. That wasn’t acceptable, so the concept of ability grouping was dropped.
When I taught middle school, I would get kids in my classes who came to 6th grade with sub-3rd grade reading levels, with spelling ability even lower, and almost no math facts, much less the ability to perform basic algorithms. If a child has only achieved two years of academic progress in five years of schooling, it is unlikely that he/she is going to make up that deficit before reaching high school. Even with individualized instruction in a classroom with a maximum of ten students and a full-time aide raising the skill levels of one of those students by more than a year in one academic year was nearly impossible. And the kids I worked with were not unusual in terms of their academic skills.
When you place a student with those kinds of skills in a general ed classroom with 25 students and present them with “grade level” curriculum, you are not going to improve their skills to a noticeable level. They are more than likely to be further turned off and to lose whatever skills they do possess and are not practicing. So the integrating of students of widely different ability levels does not benefit the poorer students, and, if the teacher’s attentions are being drawn necessarily to those students, the students of higher ability are being deprived of what they need. Even with as few as ten students, I found it difficult at times to meet the needs of individuals whose skills either exceeded or trailed those of the group. Specialized materials which allowed for individual instruction helped, but there was still a need to give each student individual instruction time apart from the group, and here I am speaking about one subject area, math. When you consider reading, language arts, social studies, and science, all of which require grade-level reading skills, a student who is lagging in reading and math by more a grade level is going to continue to decline academically if he/she is grouped with students who are at grade level or higher.
What I am saying here is not unknown. It is well known to any teacher, but speaking it is heresy or worse. In the current environment of academia we are supposed to believe that all students can be raised to comparable levels of academic skill. In truth, it is more likely that to achieve the goal of comparable levels there has to be a real diminution of higher-level skills. The concept of achieving equity, the equality of outcome is absurd.
We aren’t born equal. Life gives each of us burdens and advantages. Beyond that, there are things innate in us that determine the course of life we choose. I loved academia. I love learning. I loved the classics. I am a reader. I cannot remember any time in my life when I wasn’t involved in one book or another beginning when I was about eight years old and read All About Dinosaurs by Roy Chapman Andrews. I love books. I always have and I always will. On the other hand, I was never a good team player. I never really liked baseball, football, or basketball. I fenced and I SCUBA dived and I rode horses. Later in life, I became a mountain climber and cyclist. That is me, I am an individual, as are all people. Who I am or what I am is not a product of my race or, in many ways, my family background. None of those things I mentioned above were of any interest to my parents, other than reading, or my two brothers. We three siblings went in totally different directions, followed our own interests and talents.
Given that background, I know that college was for me a wonderful experience. It allowed me to explore a wide range of subjects that fascinated me. It wasn’t preparation for a profession. In fact, there was very little I taught as a teacher that I learned much beyond middle school in my own education.
Let me bring this back to what I really want to say. The idea that a school can function like a factory, produce perfect little equal products is idiotic. A manufacturer gets raw material from which he creates his product. There is a consistency to the raw materials which does not exist in the human world. People aren’t equal. They may be equal in terms of their rights. They may be entitled to equal treatment and equal opportunities, but the outcome of those does not guarantee that they will all end up the same, like a manufactured product at the end of a production line.
Donald Trump and I went to Kew Forest School in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York. We had a terrific coach, Charles Delahunt, Dell is what we called him. Dell’s big thing was soccer. He turned out some great teams and some great individual players. I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t that fast or coordinated on my feet. Donald Trump was a great soccer player, far better than I was even though he was two years younger than me. We had the same coach, the same opportunities. He was just better than I was. That is reality. If Dell had spent lots of extra hours trying to turn me into a better soccer player it would have made no difference, certainly not enough to compensate for the inherent differences in our levels of talent. In the end, we each achieved what we wanted from life. I don’t feel any less because Donald ended up as President of the United States and I am a retired teacher enjoying my golden years doing exactly what I want to do.
I feel like I am going a long way out of my way to come back a short distance correctly. The children that come to school are all different. Some of them will be turned on to learning no matter what their backgrounds. Others will find nothing that grabs them, particularly now that industrial arts classes like Metal Shop, Wood Shop, and Gas Engines are no longer part of the curriculum in a lot of schools. The entire concept of “equity” is bankrupt. It isn’t grounded in reality. I have known a lot of people who were mediocre students in school who became very successful when they matured to adulthood. I have known a few who were worse than mediocre and have also succeeded. I have known some who were stars in the classroom but failed miserably as adults. A person’s academic career is rarely an absolute indicator of where they will be as adults. Trying to create equity by dragging everyone down into the same pool of mediocrity helps no one, and may just ruin the chances of a few who might change the world. End of rant!
Published in General
The original rationale when I was in grade school was that the smarter students were expected to help the slower students, by example and by actual tutoring. As best I recall this turned out to be of only small benefit to the slower students while greatly holding back the brighter students.
That about describes it. The “slower” kids were supposed to be motivated by seeing more successful students achieve. However, what actually happens is that slower students are unable to get the teacher’s attention or positive feedback and find other ways to get that attention. Some of the brighter kids get sucked into the action and the general effect is to reduce the amount of instruction time and increase the amount of disciplinary time which could include the time it takes a teacher to write a referral to the Vice Principal and send a kid to his office.
The averaging effect of trying to meet the needs off all of the students causes the teacher to lower the expectations and classroom standards to meet those of the lowest common denominator, you know, Leave no child behind! This ends up benefiting no one. I have little experience in the elementary grades, but in middle school it is a disaster. By that time slower students have already developed attitudes and behaviors toward education that do not benefit from placement with more motivated students. Most of the higher performing students would rather not have to deal with the disruptions and resent those who create them or they participate by feeding into the disruption out of simple boredom. Long term thinking isn’t a characteristic of most middle schoolers.
IQ testing is done by school psychologist, and, generally only if the child becomes a focus of concern. That is a term used when child has demonstrated some level of differentiation academically or socially in either a positive or negative direction. The child is then evaluated by the psych which involves a lengthy process of testing and gathering of information from the child’s records and current teachers. A staffing conference is then held to which the parent is invited to discuss a more appropriate placement for the student if such is determined to be the need. Not all children are tested or evaluated. That would be nearly impossible. Once an evaluation has been done, the child needs to have a re-eval every three years. Social workers are always depicted as having an excessive number of cases, far more than is reasonable to maintain. School psychologists have a similar problem with evaluations and reevaluations. In my school the number of students who had been assessed for various reasons numbered in the hundreds. Our psychologist who had three schools he was responsible for was like a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest.
That is reminiscent of the Obama administration’s push to force all communities to take their “fair share” of Section Eight housing: The “cycle of poverty” would be broken as the chronic welfare recipients learned better life skills from the successful middle class neighbors. The reality, of course, was that little or no learning took place but the neighborhood suffered increased crime and disorder.
That was the same rationale given by the entire generation of educators who opposed our advocacy (they were younger and mostly teachers when we began in the early 2000’s but now are ages 40-55 and many have become school administrators. Some ended up with advanced children themselves and saw the light but others are still out there stubbornly doing all they can to de-emphasize and minimize separate advanced classes for high ability students whenever possible.
It’s as if Progressive bien pensants think that high achievement is of no importance but to gain status. Who do they think will design and build planes that don’t fall out of the sky, satellites that work for decades, cars that don’t break down every week? How will they find physicians who don’t misdiagnose and surgeons who don’t kill every other patient?
In Florida there is much more gifted testing and resultant identifications because there is a legal requirement that the needs of identified gifted students be met. Too much to go into to tackle the justification for different strategies for gifted students here, but we successfully advocated for a hybrid model for gifted and talented students districtwide (we have too small a total population of students, 12K in a 1000 sq mile rural county, to justify or afford a magnet school). Created a protocol similar to what you describe for your schools’ gifted students, Eugene.
So what we instituted at the elementary level was one (or two, depending on the population of high ability students) classes of students who already were performing above grade level according to achievement tests, or could also be underperforming identified gifted students if they agreed to keep up with the work in the advanced class. A key element was that each teacher agreed to take gifted endorsement classes to better understand the needs of the gifted students within the class. It worked very well and enabled some low income kids with great potential to be in a motivated peer group.
Gradually, though, as I moved on when my kids got older, the anti-advanced academics administrators shrank the two class schools per grade level to one, making the program much more elitist and shaming kids who were in the class one year but barely didn’t make it the next. I saw notes from the AA committee this fall and noted they now plan to eliminate the previously required gifted endorsement training. Without effective parent advocacy (which turned out to be much rarer than I’d thought when I started) everything gradually settles back into mediocrity in a small town bureaucracy without much competition.
Yup. But our program can’t completely disappear because those parents who very much want and expect that status for their kids won’t stand for the elimination of the “advanced” elementary class. So there are kids who still have classes with excellent teachers with the passion, experience and training to encourage them to thrive.
Indeed. And so we have very good schools for the children of the ruling class, and very bad schools for ordinary people. The children of the elites will learn calculus, advanced chemistry, Shakespeare, and music. The children of the working class and the poor will learn how to be pawns of the ruling class.
My hero in education was our local string teacher. (I wrote about him here.) When kids are fired up to learn, they will achieve great things. And quickly.
Our regional orchestra brought students together who wanted to learn a string instrument. The kids were of all ages and abilities and they had all kinds of family backgrounds. As education goes, it was the most exciting phenomenon I have ever seen.
Because of what I saw there, I would reorganize education completely and have it revolve around students’ interests rather than their age.
Talent is only part of high achievement. At the middle school and high school levels, kids can achieve great things with a lot of hard work and average talent. The string teacher I wrote about used to give that speech all the time to the kids. His doing so kept doors open to everyone in the program for as long as those kids chose to try. And it kept the kids practicing.
The task at hand in middle schools and high schools is to keep the kids working and trying as much as we can. Education should be thought of as inspiration. Let’s face it, the student has to do the work. :-)
I love grouping kids by how far they are on a clearly delineated continuum of learning. Creating and offering as many advanced learning opportunities as we can.
I’m not a fan of IQ testing for kids except in extreme circumstances, and then it should be done privately outside the public school. I would not let my kids be tested in our schools. I told my kids that if they were curious about it, when they turned eighteen, they could take the tests. But I did not want an IQ test score hanging over their heads throughout their childhood.
The test wouldn’t have affected how I felt about my kids anyway. If the tests had said they were not very bright, I would have laughed and said that was ridiculous. And if the tests had said they were all geniuses, I would have said, “I know that.” :-)
I like Howard Gardner’s “Nine Types of Intelligence” concept. I could work with that. :-)
It only benefits their ego. It does no one any material good if the entire next generation is incapable of maintaining (or creating/innovating) electrical and plumbing solutions.
I’m sure even the stupid ones want running water and HVAC systems.
Effective parent advocacy would only come from parents with kids that qualify. There’s that wolf and sheep dinner problem…
And social promotion policies are devastatingly harmful to those they supposedly help.
There are many citizens who are so stupid and ignorant that they have no idea: (1) The poorly educated proles. (2) The severely educated elites.
I would agree, but, statistically, the majority of kids who are retained end up dropping out of school before graduation. Back in the late 1980s I was part of a group of teachers who put together a summer program to give students who had failed one or more basic skills courses an opportunity to make up their deficit during the summer. Seattle Public Schools had run out of money and couldn’t fund summer school programs. We found funding from the Gates Foundation and other charities to pay for the program. We set very strict protocols, kids had to attend everyday of summer school. Behavior standards were as strict as any private school. The kids all took classes in Math, Language Arts, and Social Studies, an hour each per day. Student who misbehaved or were absent were expelled from the program. We had remarkably few expulsions. Classes were small, no more than 15 students. All the teachers were highly experienced and successful. We ran the program for three years, then Seattle Schools took it over. I taught in that program for one more year. The protocols that we established were, pretty much as expected, dropped. The success of the program we had started ceased to exist. After one summer I decided to not participate again. I do think that the students who attended our original program had a far better chance of making it through high school. I think there was some follow up data, but I never really got into it. I doubt that the success rate of the district’s program accomplished the goal.
When I started teaching in Seattle in 1969 the schools were superb. In the early years we had Junior High Schools, not middle schools. The grades in that were 7,8, 9. My school had a wonderful music program and a terrific Industrial Arts program which included Mechanical Drawing, Wood Shop, Metal Shop, and Gas Engines. Wood Shop was for 8th graders, Metal Shop and Gas Engines were for 9th graders. In the latter two shop classes they could build a go-cart frame in Metal Shop and rebuild a lawn mower engine to power it in Gas Engines. It was a very motivating class for a lot of kids who might not have stuck with school without it. The high schools had classes in vocational areas like Dry Cleaning and Construction. In the latter class they actually built small buildings.
When the financial pinch came they eliminated all of those classes, including the music program. Sometime in the early 1980s the switched form the Junior High School format to the middle school, 6,7,8. This, to my way of thinking was a serious error. Eighth grade is, perhaps the most difficult period in a child’s life. When there were 9th graders over them they tended to be less obstreperous. When they were the upper classmen a natural damper was removed. Without the shop classes the only really motivating program was gym, and without the older kids we lost the varsity teams that many of those kids wanted to participate in. The rationalization that every kid was going to be given a “ticket” to go to college was complete nonsense. Ask almost any of those boys what they wanted to be and they would tell you, a professional athlete. That was their only ambition. In all my years of teaching I only saw two of our students make it to the pros, and only one made past his first year. The second was dumped when his total indiscipline caused his coach to drop him even though it was 7 feet tall.
Why would anyone expect a child to tutor another child?
Even if there was value in such a thing, it would be a short part of a day to explore study habits, not as part of teacher designed instructional time.