My Education Reform Wishlist: #1 – ability grouping.

Most of you didn’t read this blog when I was still in high school, but I can summarize every comment I ever made on the experience by saying that I thought it was incorrigible and I hated it. This is a grudge I should stop holding, but I haven’t yet because I can’t help feeling that I was cheated out of my chance to learn and thrive and feel comfortable in a system that says it is designed to let children learn and thrive and feel comfortable.

For a while, I thought this was a me-specific problem, but I’ve found over the past few years that it isn’t. There are a huge number of kids who hate public school. They don’t all hate it for the same reasons as me, but they have other reasons that are legitimate and important and need to be thought about. Public school is problematic for multiple groups of people in multiple situations. Some of these people are like my little sister, who is frustrated because she had to do four hours of homework a day in the fourth grade because she has pretty severe ADHD and rote memorization doesn’t come easily to her. Others are like my little brother, who came here from Vietnam when he was four years old and has been written as off as “dumb” by his teachers because of his inability to read at grade level, a problem he has because he didn’t even speak any English until he was halfway through preschool. Others are like my neighbors and classmates, who were treated like free peer tutoring all through elementary and middle school because they were ahead of the game.

I’ve written a lot about the problems that I see in American public schools, so much so that I might start to look like I’m down on the  idea of the public school system. In truth, I’m not. I honestly think that public school is one of the best things that has ever happened to America and that every child deserves a free, easily available education. We need public school – most people do not have another choice for primary and secondary education besides public school. Even though I had the privilege to leave when I wanted to, I recognize that my situation is not the norm (and in full honestly, I wouldn’t have the privilege either without some pretty hefty scholarships and abnormally trusting parents).

So, to off-set the massive amount of complaining I do on this blog, I’d like to write a post series on all the things that I think American public schools could do to improve themselves. I don’t know how practical any of these things are ’cause I’m not a fiscally responsible tax-payer nor an education reform expert, but they all sound wonderfully groovy and groovy is a thing that I think anything that takes up seven hours of your day should be.

Ability Grouping

If you are seven years old and you go to an American public school, you are in second grade. It makes no difference if your IQ, educational background, and social development match second grade standards. If you are cannot read a full sentence because you have an un-diagnosed learning disability and you are seven years old, you are put into second grade. If you can read at an eighth grade level because you are highly gifted and you are seven years old, you are put into second grade. Because schools are crowded with kids of certain ages (it’s a weird phenomena, but there are always some grades that are disproportionately crowded), there might be 30 children in your class, all of whom read and think at different levels.

This is fine, in theory, but your overworked teacher is desperately trying to make sure that everyone passes at a baseline level so she pays little attention to the learning styles and educational backgrounds of each student and instead teaches the entire class at a level that schools have arbitrarily deemed to be “second grade.” For some children, this is excruciatingly dull: they will learn nothing all year. Their boredom will make them become unmotivated and convinced that school is a waste of time. Their grades will drop as they focus less and less on their work. For other children, this is an incredibly time-consuming challenge that never rewards them with the positive feedback that children so desperately need. Instead, it convinces them that they are stupid and cannot learn as well as their classmates even if they try their best. They too are at risk for losing motivation and feeling that school is a waste of time.

Schools have tried to fix this with special-ed and G&T programs, but I don’t think it’s enough because it doesn’t reach the whole population. For every kid who has a diagnosed learning disability, there are five kids who have learned to mask their problems by cheating or picking up the slack with long, grueling homework sessions at home.  For every over-achieving perfectionist, there are five kids whose high intelligence is turning up everywhere besides their math homework.

The reason that public schools put children together based on age is social development. Of course, this is faulty too: just as no one develops academically at the same rate, no one develops socially at the same rate. It’s like expecting every star student to also be a star athlete or expecting everyone who reads at an eighth grade level to kick a ball at an “eighth grade level” (I don’t think that exists, but you catch my drift). Those things aren’t correlated to each other. Similarly, academic ability is not correlated to social maturity. My little sister is drawn to younger kids; she’s in fifth grade and some of her friends are in the first and second grades. I get along well with people both younger and older than myself, but not people who are my exact age. There are a lot of factors that go into social maturity – emotional IQ, regular IQ, the intangible “culturedness” that goes along with personal and familial background, sense of humor, hobbies and interests, social skills development – but most of these factors have less to do with age than they have to do with maturity.

For this reason, I think schools would do well to get rid of age-grouping all together. If children were grouped purely on the basis of ability, I theorize that they would feel much more satisfied with school and perform better. This would change the way that schools function in several ways. If I had infinite cash and all the power in the world (which, as a narcissistic teenage blogger, I sometimes pretend that I do), this is how my system would work:

1. Children coming into the system at four to seven years old would be assessed by a panel of counselors, teachers, and administrators through parent interviews, intelligence testing, and a portfolio-ish collection of drawings and writings (which, as any good educator should know, demonstrates WAY more than their ability to draw or write)
2. They would then be grouped into classrooms of around ten to fifteen children who had the same academic abilities, which would not be designated by numbers, letters, or implicitly judgmental adjectives, but by more cuddly terms (perhaps team names would be fun? I would have liked to go through third grade as “the Lions” or “the Shooting Stars”)
3. Breaks throughout the day including phys ed, art/music/theater education, and unstructured free-time would provide “overly” active children (you know, the ones branded as ADD “behavior problems” or most boys)  with a chance to unwind. More importantly, they would provide children with a chance to socialize with those who are at the same place as them emotionally and socially, if not academically.
4. Reassessments of individual children through portfolios of their schoolwork (and maybe a chance for parents to give feedback) would be done at the end of every year so as to account for developmental bursts or regressions.
5. For this reason, standardized testing would be made obsolete. A school that is vigilant and careful in hiring teachers and creating curriculum has no need for the overfed watchdog that is the state test.

Stay tuned for more posts of this nature and let me know what your thoughts on these ideas are! I think I’d actually be open to guest-posts in this series if anyone is interested, so if you are, please leave a comment or email me.

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Tags: ability-grouping, age-grouping, education, elementary school, G&T, learning disabilities, middle school, public school

• 22/10/2011
• musings, school
• 6 comments