Let's Go Back to Grouping Students by Ability

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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.)

(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.

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

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.

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.

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[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This one sentence made the entire article worthwhile. :)