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.”
Differentiated instruction is crap, and it’s not the way things work in successful high schools, in college, or in the workplace. The “level the playing field” mentality DOES succeed somewhat in bringing the bottom up, but it’s at the expense of the kids at the top. I’ve seen it first hand. Rubrics in all subjects are now commonplace, so that the lowest achievers know exactly what they need to do to succeed. And now the top kids know that they need do no more than what’s on the rubric to get a perfect score, and that any extra work, creativity or innovation will go unrewarded.
Other ideas that have been trendy and ultimately failed? The big one when I was in high school was cooperative learning groups. Um, NO. The teacher’s the one getting the salary, so why were they making the kids teach each other? Every kid in the class saw through it; we all knew that the groups were composed of one top kid, one lower kid, and two in the middle. The top kids resented being tapped as teachers, and the lower kids were embarrassed at being the weak link in the group.
I’m NOT advocating a return to tracking. What the best schools do is group by ability, with the option of jumping levels from either term to term or year to year. But why bore a kid who’s ready to move on, and why frustrate a kid who can’t keep up? Colleges and workplaces do things like your co-op– people generally choose a major, courses and a career based on interest and ability, not age; and their friends tend to be those who share their interests and abilities.
The top kids resented being tapped as teachers
I hated this in school and Captain Science did, too. It happened to us frequently.
I appreciate your input on this topic, not just because we agree (though that’s nice, too), but because it’s nice to know that my feelings on our experiences aren’t irrational or unrealistic.
Being the horribly sheltered grade-skipper that I was, I didn’t realize there was controversy over ability grouping until long after we had all thrived under it. In elementary school, we were divided into three groups for language arts, three different groups for math. Sometimes we stayed in our language arts group for social studies (but usually not); we did usually stay in our math group for science.
Of the “lowest” group: one is now a Montessori lead teacher. Another is a Spanish teacher. Yet another is a SAHM – with a degree from Furman in political science. Ooh, one has a degree from SCAD and lives here in Atlanta, doing graphic design and volunteering as an art teacher two days a week.
Of the middle group: one is a graduate student at Tufts. Another’s getting her masters in counseling. Finally, I’ve got one with a BA in psych that works as a LMT.
That’s the girls that went to my high school that have information listed. Yes, later education played a role, but the point is, if you teach the lowest group the appropriate standards, and simply allow the other groups to go further… well, obviously it didn’t hamper my classmates.
And yes, I know it was a private school… but then, people are always wanting to replicate the success of private school in the public system.
Oh whatever. You know that being grouped by ability scarred them for life and they turned to a life of crime. That’s probably why the others aren’t listed.
Nah, that’s just the boys.
The big debate in special ed is inclusion vs. special-ed only classrooms. Personally, I believe that inclusion is great (for most, not all, students) *when there are supports in place for the student*. I cared for two children with severe disabilities who thrived in a Montessori magnet school, where they could truly work to the best of *their* abilities. Anyway, so we all agree that special ed students need extra support in a mainstream classroom. So why don’t kids at the other end of the spectrum? The “support” isn’t going to look the same, obviously, but there needs to be something in place, and I don’t mean extra-credit worksheets.
Also, I got my early childhood ed/early childhood special ed degree in 2003, and we were never taught about differentiated instruction. I get the concept, but I would guess that most of these public school teachers can’t implement it because no one ever showed them how.
The difference between special ed students and gifted students, though, is that with many special ed students, to goal is to bring them up to grade level or teach them in a way that allows grade-level participation. Gifted students are working well above that level and I have yet to see an effective way to teach gifted students at their level in a mixed-abilities classroom. They don’t just do more advanced work — many gifted students think very differently from the normal methods of problem solving. That’s why gifted teachers, like special ed teachers, have to have special training and certification.
I agree–I would have been better off in a non-mainstream setting myself. But if we don’t first acknowledge that gifted kids need and deserve special programming, we can’t talk about what that looks like.
I’ve been teaching since 2001, and the differentiated instruction thing is relatively new– I think the first stuff I heard about it was in 2005 or so. The big problem isn’t just that nobody shows teachers how to implement the new ideas– it’s that when the new ideas are pushed, they’re so NEW they haven’t had a long run of being successfully implemented.
After eight years of teaching, I’ve begun to realize that most of the trendy stuff is developed by “educational consultants” who couldn’t hack it in the classroom. The REAL teachers do go through periods where we daydream about quitting teaching to do consultancy (and triple our income), but personally I couldn’t live with myself.
I can think of one very SMART reason why we would want to level the playing field.
We want to level the playing field because we know, as teachers and parents and grownups, that there is so much that we do not know. Especially where people are concerned.
We can design tests to measure “ability” or “intelligence.” But frankly, we often have a hard time even defining what intelligence is, or what raw ability is. It’s hard to test something you can’t define.
Heck, it’s hard to accurately test things you CAN define. (Ever had a rapid strep test? Don’t they always send it to a lab to be sure?)
If we take a student’s temperature on one or two measures and declare them to be of “high ability” or “low ability” there is a fairly high probability that we will get something wrong — either because our tests are flawed or because we aren’t even measuring the right thing.
If we put the “high-ability” students on a high-ability track, tell them they are smart and expect great things out of them, we will probably get good results. Partly because of their ability, yes, and partly because of how we’re challenging them.
If we put the “low ability” kids in a “low ability” track with low expectations, they know it, even if we aren’t telling them. If we don’t challenge them with “high ability” material, they’ll never have a chance to prove that they are “high ability.”
Now what if, by some unimaginable trick of fate, there was a mistake in our assessment of ONE out of the MILLIONS of kids we test in American schools every year? What if just ONE ‘gifted’ kid got accidentally placed in a “low ability” track? What would that kid do?
Would he ask for more homework and beg for a place in a higher educational track? (A track which, the school system assures him, does not exist?) Or would he finish his homework early and spend the rest of the time cutting up? Invent his own code language so he could pass notes to his friends and not get caught? Dream up ways to disrupt class the next time he’s bored?
I think your mis-classified “gifted” kid would be in the principal’s office more often than not. He would probably be both “low ability” and “a troublemaker.”
What if this is already happening? What if our assessments are missing profound levels of ability in students who are labeled “low performing?” A lot of kids in “low-ability” groupings today act exactly the same way a “gifted” kid would act in the same situation. They are bored and they are labelled and they don’t see a pathway out, so they act up, or they doze off.
Now imagine a different approach. Imagine a challenging curriculum for ALL students. And imagine that students are asked to work in small groups to master sections of that curriculum, then share the material with their peers. Imagine that students are encouraged to be good team players, helping each other master portions of the curriculum that are difficult for them.
Actually, you don’t have to imagine. SMART people have done research on this. And every indication is that in the situation I’ve described above, “low-ability” students learn more; “high-ability” students learn more thoroughly and get a chance to develop emotional maturity and people skills; and discipline problems drop precipitously (because everyone is “on task.”) And, you know, in that environment, being SMART becomes something that is valued. “That smart kid, I want him on MY team.I want to be like him.”
So that’s why we want to level the playing field. Because it’s very hard to pick a league champion or a Most Valuable Player at the beginning of the season. Because, no matter how good you are, you can’t score if no one gives you the ball.
As a parent, you may be asking, “What’s in this for Captain Science?” Well, no matter how good he is at STEM, when Captain Science grows up he won’t be doing surgery on himself. He won’t be doing structural tests on every bridge he drives over. He won’t be doing a health inspection of every restaurant in his neighborhood. It behooves us all to spread the wealth of knowledge, because we depend far more than we know on the intelligence and ability of others.
I think you need to read a little about the difference between “ability grouping” and “tracking.” You keep mentioning “tracks” in this comment, but I’m not talking about tracking. Tracking is program-wide, with a child being almost-irrevocably assessed into a certain learning path (like the old high school college prep. vs general ed/vocational tracks), while ability grouping is subject-specific, which children being broken into leveled groups for areas, with frequent reassessment. In each subject area, assessment should be based on the child’s abilities in that subject area.
You also seem to misunderstand how students are assessed for special education or gifted classroom in our county. For special education, the county provides extensive assessment by psychologists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, etc. as needed. In the gifted program in our county, students are reassessed at each 9 week progress report and 18 week semester. Children who are not in the gifted program have multiple opportunities each year to test into the program through various methods — cognitive testing, standardized testing, overall classroom performance, or demonstration of unique qualities that make a teacher suspect the child might benefit from the gifted program. Unfortunately, because that program is only one day a week, the children can’t accomplish anything long term there. This sort of ability grouping works very well — the flaw is the inadequacy of the time period spent there (one day a week won’t do it) and that the rest of the time is spent in a mainstream classroom.
I’m willing to bet that you’re reading articles on this subject that provide confirmation bias. You believe “differentiated instruction” works, so you seek out articles that say that and feel vindicated that they exist. Perhaps you should try hitting websites and forums aimed at parents of gifted students, however, if you’d like to be pointed in the direction of articles that show how differentiated education does NOT work well for many gifted students.
There is no ideal solution to this issue because school is not ideal. There is simply no easy way to teach 20 or even 30 children who have all different interests, abilities and learning styles, without some of them being left behind, left unchallenged and/or bored. Hence home ed is the better choice for most children.
That’s a huge reason why we switched to homeschooling.