I’m a supporter of the Southern Poverty Law Center and their magazine for educators, Teaching Tolerance. A recent post on ability grouping in the Teaching Tolerance blog, however, has me scratching my head over educational philosophies that damn separating students by ability (or, to be PC, “performance”) in order to best teach to those children’s needs. The post’s author begins crying upon receipt of the notice of her child’s level placement, not (she says) due to where her daughter placed, but because “[her daughter] and her little homeroom peers worked really hard to get to know each other and create a new and shared community during those first weeks of school, and now they’d be divvied up for sizable parts of their day.”
Now, I will be honest in that lack of adequate ability grouping was a major cause of our flight from public school. Differentiated instruction, which some comments to the post suggest as an alternative to ability grouping, often fails a child like Captain Science, mainly because too many teachers fail to understand what really constitutes differentiated instruction. In theory, it means providing ability/achievement-appropriate ways of accessing the curriculum, which is actually a great idea. Unfortunately, most teachers seem to interpret differentiated instruction significantly differently, viewing the goal as being to “level the playing field,” doing the very thing that differentiated instruction-proponent Dr. Carol Ann Tomlinson specifically stipulates is not true differentiated instruction: “assignments are the same for all learners and the adjustments consist of varying the level of difficulty of questions for certain students, grading some students harder than others, or letting students who finish early play games for enrichment.”
That’s not to say that differentiated instruction, done correctly, doesn’t work — it’s to say that I have little faith in the ability of most public school teachers to appropriately implement differentiated instruction in their classrooms, especially when dealing with a wide ability/achievement disparity like one has with a mix of below-level, at-level, and highly gifted students. Captain Science’s wretched teacher from last year was a stunning example of someone who believed herself to be using differentiated instruction, when in reality, she was punishing the gifted and/or high achieving students and those students who were working below grade level by assigning the same work for all of them and applying different standards in grading. My mother worked in public schools for over a decade and reports a similar experience with differentiated instruction in classrooms at those schools — a great idea in theory, but nearly impossible to enact adequately in a class of 20-30 students of vastly different abilities. Differentiated instruction in the wrong hands turns into institutional mediocrity.
What, then, is the solution? We would have been very happy if we had been offered a truly ability-grouped classroom, where Captain Science could have been taught with other gifted students and allowed to work as far ahead of grade level as he could go. Of course, our school system didn’t offer gifted-only classrooms, both for budgetary reasons and because, as we see above, many parents react strongly (and tearfully) to the idea of ability grouping. I think that those parents are also probably NOT the ones whose children are at the far ends of the ability spectrum and are, therefor, the ones whose children are the least likely to need an ability-grouped classroom.
So…if ability grouping is as bad as the parent in this Teaching Tolerance blog believes, how shall we group students? It seems to me that most school systems and parents can only understand one particular means of grouping children, which stands out in the author’s original statement: “[Her daughter] and her little homeroom peers.” “Peers” is an ugly little word in education, because it places the highest value on parity of age, rather than ability, interest, or learning method. Unfortunately, calendar age is often a poor indicator of where a child is physically (early or late bloomers?), emotionally (ready for independence or still needing lots of support?), and academically (a strong early reader or a late reader? Takes to mathematical concepts readily or struggles?).
Homeschoolers, on the other hand, place a lot of emphasis on the importance of age-mixed interaction, an idea to which I (someone who was schooled k-12 in public school and whose child attended public school for two years) was initially resistant. Having seen my son interacting with a wide age range at co-op, however, and through teaching my mixed-age writing class (ages 7-12), I’m now fully on board with the idea of ability/interest-based peerage, rather than age-based peerage. It works! Captain Science has friends of many ages through the co-op, but when dealing with children his own age, he tends to gravitate towards other gifted students, who share his quirky way of looking at the world. In his public school classroom, he had little choice as to his social circle, because he was always in an age-segregated class, even at lunch, recess, and “specials” like PE and music.
Had Captain Science been in a gifted classroom all day, every day at public school, we would have been much more likely to keep him there. Ability grouping would have spared him the boredom, frustration, and extra work that poorly implemented faux differentiated instruction forced up on him every day. Now that he and I are homeschooling, Patchfire and I have intentionally “ability grouped” Captain Science and Eclectic girl for science lab, because they both need a partner who can keep up with them. Imagine what could be accomplished with a group of children like those two, with a teacher or mentor who understands that type of child and can urge them to develop their full potential.
Ultimately, I wonder why the hell we would ever want to level the playing field. What is it we’re so concerned about? Sparing the feelings of the students who aren’t in the “top” ability level? Fabricating a sense of age-based community at the expense of individual needs and abilities? I, for one, think it’s time to take our kids out of the “esteem”-protecting bubble wrap and listen to the words of Joan Crawford (only in this instance, please — spare the wire hangers; it won’t spoil your child): “Age is just a number. It’s totally irrelevant unless, of course, you happen to be a bottle of wine.”
