Why Aren't Schools Grouping Kids By Intelligence Level? | Hacker News Reader

Why Aren't Schools Grouping Kids By Intelligence Level?

10 pointsmcnabj26 comments

As we look at ways to improve and update educational systems, does it still make sense to have kids grouped by age rather than by their level of intelligence? Should less intelligent kids have to be overshadowed by geniuses? Should Geniuses have to wait for dullards who may never catch up? I can't remember all the times I would see the really smart kids in my class play card games while the rest of the class was learning stuff these kids had already mastered. In professional life the better workers get to advance past go, why shouldn't the really smart kids be in the same class that goes as fast as their minds can?

View on HN

> As we look at ways to improve and update educational systems, does it still make sense to have kids grouped by age rather than by their level of intelligence?

You need to learn how democracies work, and learn the political implications that accompany ranking people by intelligence.

First, intelligence is a very poor social measure -- it's an unreliable gauge, it has been abused countless times for political ends, and it's not well understood. Read "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould to find out why.

Second, even if IQ testing were reliable, it would still be politically unacceptable to rank people by IQ -- I mean, more than we already do. Certainly not in public schools -- can you think of why?

People with different IQs pay the same tax rate -- intelligent people aren't taxed at a different rate. And public schools are run on tax revenues. Given that, would it seem fair to tax everyone at the same rate, but then spend more school tax dollars on intelligent kids than average ones?

The final reason is because a democracy like this one tries to honor the principle of equal opportunity. Equal opportunity means the same treatment for everyone, regardless of personal differences including IQ.

How people turn out depends on their differences. But how they are treated in school cannot pay attention to those differences without abandoning democratic principles.

So, little or no attention paid to IQ, in the early grades, in public school. In college, especially privately funded ones, different story. And in adult employment, completely different -- there the rules are different.

We're all unequal, in a bunch of ways including IQ. But in school we should be assured equality of opportunity.

Well, one could always argue that current educational system is much less effective for those with lower IQ and therefore in school only the semblance of equality is assured. This is evidenced by the number of children failing high school. Approximate figures are: 25% for US, 5% for wealthy northern european countries

> Well, one could always argue that current educational system is much less effective for those with lower IQ and therefore in school only the semblance of equality is assured.

Actually, because of special education programs, those with both lower and higher IQs than the average get more attention than in the older system, which tended to focus on the average student. But for reasons I gave earlier there's an effort to maintain balance between resources expended for those above, ad below, the mean. This effort isn't always successful -- I'm speaking of a principle that isn't always a fact.

> This is evidenced by the number of children failing high school. Approximate figures are: 25% for US, 5% for wealthy northern european countries.

That's true but low IQ isn't necessarily the reason. There are other reasons -- a lax attitude toward education, anti-intellectualism in society as a whole, poor social discipline, and others. There are some results suggesting that bright kids drop out of school at high rates -- almost as high as the average dropout rate -- unfortunately the data aren't very reliable.

This study (PDF warning): http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

Says: "Out of all high school dropouts, as many as 20% of them may be gifted (Renzulli & Park, 2000);"

If that were true, then the gifted dropout rate almost equals that for average kids. But when we read the referenced article (PDF warning): http://www.sagepub.com/bjohnsonstudy/articles/Renzulli.pdf

We don't see the quoted figure, only references to other sources for a figure near 20%, but nothing reliable.

I say this because I don't like throwing figures around that have no reliable basis. All I can say is there seems to be some anecdotal evidence that bright kids drop out in numbers nearly as high as average kids.

There's another way to approach this -- we can look at adult achievement, although the link with IQ is problematical. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and many other well-known figures in society are (a) evidently gifted, and (b) dropouts from high school or college.

I have to say I was surprised to discover there's no readily available, reliable IQ breakdown for dropouts. There are a huge number of psychologists, many unemployed or underemployed ...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/09/10/219372252/the-most...

... many of them studying really silly things, but none of them have taken this issue on, in spite of its importance.

But I don't think the case can be made that those to the left of the IQ average are being unfairly treated, compared to the average or the gifted. I think they're all being treated equally badly. :)

Students in public schools are routinely ranked by intelligence. There's the entire concept of "class rank," in which students are in fact put in ranks by their GPA (a proxy for intelligence) and from which a valedictorian is chosen. Then there are standardized tests, which are fairly analogous to IQ tests.

I think it's a rather serious overreach/stretch to link this to the broader workings of democracy.

The difference from GPA/Standardized Tests is pretty clear. As those metrics are used inside the age group, competing exclusively with people born within a year or so of them.

There is a model of education called "competency-based education", or "competency education". The core idea is to let students move on to new material when they have mastered the current material, not when they have put a certain amount of time into a class.

This model does not focus on intelligence. It sets out learning targets for every student, and then lets students make progress at their own pace.

Ideal high school version: A student enters high school, and there is no notion of 9th-10th-11th-12th grades. As a new student, you are given a list of all possible things you could learn. With a teacher, you map out everything you will need to learn, to become a well-rounded person and to prepare you for what you want to do after high school. When you complete this map of learning targets, you are finished with high school. Finish in two years, fine. Finish in six years, fine.

There are many practical issues to sort out in this model, but it is being done. When it is done well, it addresses many issues in education that arise from schools being these places where people are "stuck" for four years at a time.

Sources, for anyone really interested in this:

"Making Mastery Work" is a study of a number of schools that have been implementing competency education. It looks at the commonalities in the different schools' approaches to competency education, and how they differ.

http://www.competencyworks.org/resources/making-mastery-work...

The CompetencyWorks site in general is a great resource for anyone interested in this model of education.

http://www.competencyworks.org/

No teacher is willing to tell a parent that their child is a dullard unless the kid is completely off the bottom of the scale. Parents will try to bully teachers into bumping their child into a higher class. Unfortunately, as with so many things, school placement is more about people management than execution toward quantitative metrics.

The other, more complicated issues are around resource allocation. In an ideal world, the children that are not in the high-achieving group are given extra support. Realistically, these groups would probably be neglected as failures. This creates a cycle of poor performance which could impact a child for the rest of his or her life. A good corrollary to this is the idea of high- and low-performing schools. The idea of bussing kids from a low performing school to a high performing one to mix up the classes might not make sense at the outset. If only someone would give better resources to the low-performing school, maybe they could turn it around. Those schools become neglected and mired in teaching techniques designed for high-performing schools, and nothing gets solved.

It is a truly complex set of issues.

You're assuming that a school is capable of separating the smart kids from the dullards. The big flaw in your idea is that you're labeling kids who really don't know what they want to do yet, or aren't really happy with their surroundings. A kid that struggles in school isn't necessarily struggling because they can't do the work.

I really didn't like school. I only got on with a handful of kids, I was awkward, I was anxious, and most of my teachers would have put me in the "dullard" category. However, I did enough to get myself into college, and then ended up at university, and even landing a Masters place at a top 10 university in the UK. If I compare myself to some of the smarter kids I knew when I was at school, I probably did better academically and financially.

HN is always so focused on how education is flawed, and how a university education isn't really needed, yet I'm willing to bet that very few people on here have any experience on the other side of education. My girlfriend is a teacher, and I can safely say that teaching kids isn't even remotely as easy as it seems.

This is how it used to work (and maybe even still does) in parts of the subcontintent, (e.g., India, Pakistan). There are divisions for each grade - e.g., there's 8A, 8B, 8C, and that's how the kids - by "intelligence". If you're in a B class and do well, you might move into the A class for the next higher grade next year, and so on. It could work the other way too.

It's a horrible system where everyone in a B or C automatically feels inferior, and so do their parents/family. Sure, you can change the name to be something more acceptable than A, B and C, but it's going to be tough to get away from the underlying concept that one kid is better than the other.

I support that education should suit the person's interest and strengths, but "grouping kids by intelligence level" is highly subjective no matter what purpose-specific metric is used.

Schools attempt this sort of thing all the time, but on a small scale. When I was in school I suffered through an incredible array of tactics. I was held back in kindergarten... moved to the "gifted" school afterwards... then officially diagnosed with dyslexia around the 4th grade. Through middle school I was still in the gifted program, but I refused to work almost across the board. This lead to my placement in classes for students with disabilities, where I effectively became a second teacher in the room. These moves took place constantly, each placement clearly not being the right fit. The impact that it did have was humiliating. The gifted program saved my life, I really cannot imagine how screwed up the average "normal" students experience is, but being singled out and placed among students that could barely function was deeply painful for me.

Its taken me a very long time to undo these lessons. To learn that my ability was not confined to their definitions has taken years of success and self determination. I really cannot imagine just how many students are truly beaten by this, how many creative and intelligent minds are directed towards self doubt and self loathing. I do feel that being placed into the gifted program saved me from the public school experience, but I also know that the collateral damage is very real.

In a school setting, intelligence has two components: one is what you already know and the other is how fast you learn it. A proper intelligence based grouping has to account for both. If you have an algebra class with a 13 year old and an 18 year old the 13 obviously learns much faster and will blow away the 18 year old. Likewise, it makes no sense to put two fast learners in the same class if one is learning calculus and the other algebra. Interestingly enough, if you do it right it generally reduces to age groups further divided by learning speed.

Making it more difficult... at younger ages 5-7 there is very little correlation between what you know and how fast you learn. My wife observed this as a kindergarten teacher. And making it even more difficult... sometimes something "clicks" and learning speed increases. Or you hit a brick wall and it decreases. The number of groupings increases rapidly and ultimately it becomes easier to lump everybody together and hope for the best.

I'm not saying this is a good system. Just the most practical given the way schools are currently set up. A better way is a model where teachers act as rotating tutors giving students 1-1 help as they need it to move on to the next level.

In high-school I went to - Edward R Murrow, in Brooklyn, back in 90's, we had non-regents classes for really poor students (I took bio non-regents), regular classes for regular students, and there were AP courses for smarter students. It was possible to take AP Calculus (smart) and non-regents Biology (not smart) and regular English (average).

My daughter is in 3'rd grade. There are only 7 students in her class, and they get individually assigned different homework, based on their abilities.

Back in Russia, I finished 5 grades, and we had a "smart" class, and a few regular classes for each grade.

So basically I already see separation by IQ or similar in classrooms.

Putting kids with different age groups will create issues. Although it could be that an eight year old is just as mathematically advanced as a ten year old, the ten year old is very likely to be a lot more advanced socially. Could probably manipulate 8 year old into whatever - I'm just talking about embarrassing them, nothing horrible. The social discrepancies are probably going to create more issues, than solving the "I'm too smart for my age group" issue.

Lets assume that a school can properly separate kids based on intelligence, (which they can't) and that separating kids based on intelligence is a good idea (which it isn't). You will still run into a couple problems if you wanted to try something like this:

1) Kids that don't make it into the "Smart" class will think they are stupid. That is probably one of the worst things you can do to a kid.

2) Having their Kids in the "Smart" class will be much more important to the parents of borderline kids than anyone else. If a school is politically pressured into putting a kid into the "Smart" class that doesn't belong (and this will happen all the time), and that kid struggles to keep up, he's going to feel like he's stupid (see #1).

3) Kids look for any opportunity they can to bully each other. Doing something like this would make it really easy for them to identify which kids to bully because you're defining two different social classes for them. Whichever is larger will bully the other.

PS. Don't call kids dullards.

Because the purpose of school isn't to teach technical skills, it's to indoctrinate the next generation. Dumb kids have to buy into the prevailing cultural mythos also just as much as smart kids do, or society will crumble.

It so happens that part of the cultural mythos in America today is that schools _aren't_ supposed to indoctrinate anyone, but that's beside the point.

Grouping kids by perceived intelligence could actually be a net harm in the socialization aspect of school. Public schools are currently a more or less heterogenous mix of everyone in the community. Splitting by perceived intelligence would homogenize groups of kids, probably along economic lines (college educated parents likely to be more involved in their kids education, more able to afford tutoring and such than blue collar or poverty level parents)

You're also assuming that grouping "smart" and "dumb" kids together harms both parties. In my experience the opposite is often true. Being forced to help someone understand a difficult concept often leads to new insight and deeper understanding. Similarly the kids who have trouble understanding a concept have access to the quicker students for help whereas in a homogenized class the only help would be the instructor, who has to divide their attention among all students.

I have a bunch of thoughts on this subject, but I'll just say that intelligence is not an indicator of performance, motivation, and thus, success. So an intelligence group model of education makes little sense to me.

This scientifically-studied disparity is briefly discussed in Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit. An excellent read.

Grouping children by age is silly, of course, but maybe it's preferable to grouping "by level of intelligence". Why? First, you need to teach to the level per activity. A child that excels at reading may be slower at math, one that is good at math might be poor in art. And each child will have a different response to different teaching methods.

What we're looking for is individualized learning, where possible.

For example, I think it's crazy for teachers to lecture, when the best lecturers for any field can be found on-line. Why listen to someone drone on about the Battle of Hastings when you can have a professor who is passionate about exactly that doing the talking? Children should have the ability to explore topics and listen to lectures individually, moving at their own speed, and then come together to do group activities in class.

> First, you need to teach to the level per activity.

This can be accomplished.

Imagine you have a set of similar students by age, say Kindergarten - 2nd grade. Imagine that you have 4 classrooms and 4 teachers, each with a particular subject (math, science, reading/writing, geography/history). Each teacher teaches the same subject at multiple levels. Then you just send the student to the skill appropriate class.

If you were to take classes above your age determined grade, it'd basically be like skipping a grade. If you're at your age level for learning, there's no difference. But for everyone in between they get a mix of more advanced learning where they need it.

I may or may not have had first hand experience with this model

Right. Teaching depends upon age level - attention span, available concepts to build on, interests. I have dealt with boys for years as a Scout leader, and age matters a lot when determining the teaching approach.

There are a number of obstacles between where we are and a world where intelligence is taken as seriously as it should be.

See most other comments around here though; the reason IQ is not used more often is that intelligence denialism is rampant. One reason is that as some comments demonstrate, egalitarianism and democratic principles are incompatible with IQ realism. It's pretty clear that intelligence segregation is going to turn out in practice to be racial segregation, so it's simply not going to happen in a society that has defined itself against such practice.

Well, although schools might not say they do, some actually do. I know a teacher of a private school and there school has different classes marked from with letters A, B, C, D The stronger students go into the higher letters and the weaker to the lower one.

This helps improve both the strong and the weak. But i believe that the same should be done in all schools. It might be harder to actually implement is state schools, as the delinquents will all be grouped in one class, thereby completely killing the class performance and any chance of the other students in that class in improving

While I'm not against your proposal per se, the way you call the low-achieving kids "dullards who may never catch up" is a red flag that you don't really understand what puts these kids there in the first place.

This grouping may benefit the geniuses, but the system isn't really holding back the geniuses. They succeed despite the system, not because of it, whereas the system is failing those lagging behind. Implementing this plan on an American school system without addressing the laggards would just be shuffling around the furniture.

In the Netherlands, we do group by intelligence, got a whole group of systems for kids age 12 and up. Seems to work well.

Still grouped by age too, though you can move up or down a class if that suits you. Grouping by age doesn't always work, as age is a big factor in what kind of people you feel comfortable around.

They do that to some degree in Germany, which has a 3-tier secondary education system ought to group students based on their (perceived) academic aptitude. It has however been accused for being biased toward social status.

We live in a society people! Dullards and Dunning Kruger Dullards alike.

Singapore is already doing that looong time

Reply on news.ycombinator.com