
Let's Go Back to Grouping Students by Ability  - JumpCrisscross
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/03/lets-go-back-to-grouping-students-by-ability/274362/
======
davidroberts
When I went to school, junior high was heterogeneous and I was miserable. High
school was tracked and pretty good. It was divided like the article said, into
Applied Arts, College Prep, and Honors. Applied Arts was where kids who would
likely work or go to a trade school after high school took classes that taught
them skills, College Prep was for kids who would go to a mid-level state
college, then work in a white collar job. Honors was for kids who would end up
at the University of California or a quality private university like Stanford
or Cal Tech.

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.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I don't care for this stuff. I don't think children should be placed into
these tracks; it reinforces many problems. You have kids getting stuck into
vocational trades because some administrator thinks they can't handle it or
perhaps they haven't "blossomed" intellectually, or because of their family or
family's station in life, think that's all they can do.

Sorry, but the "honors if for state college bound and AP is for UC bound"
little formula you have there just makes my eyes roll.

~~~
davidroberts
Not everyone wants to go to college. A lot of people enjoy working with their
hands and are really good at it, and plumbers, carpenters, welders,
machinists, mechanics, and electricians are a lot more useful to society than
yet one more person who squeaked through the state college pushing paper in
some dismal office. And likely happier too.

The idea that a college education automatically leads to a better life than
preparation for honest skilled labor is pretty elitist in my opinion.

~~~
bluedino
Part of the problem is so much of the workforce just isn't good at _anything_.
We have a lot of people who flat out have no employable skills, and without a
degree the only option they have for work that isn't minimum wage is a factory
job-which are long gone.

~~~
lilsunnybee
Yet we don't even give a lot of these people the opportunity to be trained and
find their niche, if they might be best at working with their hands.

------
ruswick
As a current high school student, I can say that the trend away from tracking,
at least in my district, is largely a product of parental indignation: they
feel as though their kids are being systematically disadvantaged or
academically repressed due to some sort of misguided assessment of their kid's
innate ability. It's really pretty intuitive; no one wants to be told that
their kid is too dumb to succeed in the upper-echelons of secondary education.

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...

~~~
angersock
Just a minor comment: I assume you are well read, but one of the biggest tells
of being a clever youth is writing style. George Orwell had some good advice
on the matter here:

<http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit>

I've taken the liberty of rephrasing your post below:

    
    
      I'm in high school; I think that we've stopped using 
      tracking because parents don't like it--nobody wants to
      be told their kid isn't talented. 
    
      I'm not sure this is wrong. Tracking seems to be more a 
      function of wealth and parental guidance than of talent. 
      This being the case, we end up with a system that rewards
      kids with those resources and ignores--or even slights!--
      those without.
    
      Another awful feature of tracking is that it multiplies
      differences over time: because resources are allocated 
      based on test performance, minor differences in scores
      snowball over time--two students with only minor 
      differences in ability may well end up in very different
      classes, with one being trained to get to the next level
      and the other abandoned by the system charged with
      teaching them.
    
      To sum up: the choice of tracks is arbitrary, unfairly 
      spreads resources, and is too skewed in demographics.
    

See? Much more readable.

------
mattsfrey
The only problem I experienced with this sort of system is if you're a smart
kid that missed the jump when it came around because you weren't really
serious about school yet. In my district you were basically judged at the end
of elementary school on your last years performance grade-wise, and that would
determine the rest of your academic future. When I was 10 years old, playing
basketball and running around in the woods building forts took much greater
priority over doing homework and I was a B student, never mind that I could
ace any test without even trying. I was put in the regents classes. The
"honors" kids simply ended up taking a year of condensed classes, and then
were just a year ahead in all the subjects, allowing them to take a plethora
of AP courses for college credit in their junior and senior years. Around 8th
grade I got serious about tech and science and learning, but it was impossible
to be advanced to the honors courses unless my parents were to raise a major
stink which they were too modest to do. So I was just stuck in the "newb"
classes the rest of my career and had to head into college with practically no
AP credits. I think tracking and having different tiers is great, but there
should be flexible mobility throughout the entire journey.

------
bmelton
A lot of this has to do with Obama allowing states to waiver out of the No
Child Left Behind program, effectively repealing it, which is for the better.

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.

~~~
r00fus
Surprisingly my state (the supermajority leftist CA) has not waived NCLB [1].
I have no idea what "costs" it would entail, but I see no reason why
organization would agree to ludicrously unachievable goals like 100% passage
rates - unless folks in that organization wanted it to fail (for political
purposes).

[1] <http://www.cep-dc.org/page.cfm?FloatingPageID=22>

~~~
bmelton
As I understand it, the only 'cost' to getting a waiver is requesting it (and
perhaps assisting with the 'period of review').

That said, I know that there were 'windows' in which to request the waiver,
and it's possible that for whatever reason, CA wasn't able to get the
paperwork ready in time for the last window?

It's also possibly related to political objectives, but at the same time,
Obama is trying to get states away from NCLB, and CA is super liberal, so
you'd think they'd have been the first to sign up?

------
carlob
A few days ago another article about education from The Atlantic made it to
the front page [0] and the subtitle was: "The Scandinavian country is an
education superpower because it values equality more than excellence." .

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>

------
richardjordan
I have two kids going through the US education system at the moment and I
think about this stuff a lot, having gone through a different system myself.

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

------
SoftwareMaven
I think we should go further and eliminate age-based grades. For every
subject, kids should be grouped with students that are his/her equal. That may
mean one student is with kids two years older in English and two years younger
in Math. Kids shouldn't be able to move forward until they've mastered the
material at their level.

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.)

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I think this has an enormous amount of practical problems in terms of
implementation, class room dynamics, and so on. You really think public
schools should do this?

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I do (and so do the Chinese; it's the way their system works, along with the
teacher following the cohort, which would also be good). I think,
realistically, most students will be within a year or so of their age cohort
in most classes. If somebody falls more than two years behind, they probably
need to be on a different track, anyway (e.g. they likely have a learning
disability).

Teaching becomes easier, because teachers aren't trying to intermingle
challenging content for more advanced learners with simplified content for
less advanced. Instead, they can focus much more tightly on the student's
level. Since teachers aren't dealing with bored "advanced" kids and bored
"delayed" kids, the impact of class size is reduced.

It adds a burden to the administrators, since they would be responsible for
determining the cohorts, but, after watching my wife be heavily involved in
school finances, I strongly believe there are more than enough administrative
dollars floating around to deal with it.

Finally, it's not the end-all solution. But I think it's a better framework
than the current one. Even in the "gifted" program at my kids' school, you can
see (and the teachers do an amazing job of accounting for) that some of these
"gifted" kids might be amazing in math, yet still struggle at grade-level or a
year behind in English. In the "mainline" classes, the inverse might be true,
but those kids don't get the extra benefits of the gifted program since they
couldn't test well enough on the mathematics.

------
Eduardo3rd
When I was in the 5th or 6th grade I tested three levels below where I was
supposed to be in mathematics. It wasn't because I was brilliant and board, it
was simply because I was board and didn't care. Yet, because I was a home
schooled student I was able to progress at a normal rate in my other classes
without being lumped in with other underperforming students. I eventually
found a modicum of enjoyment in mathematics through my love of science and
went on to minor in the subject in college.

(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.

------
Mc_Big_G
I didn't RTFA, but the headline made me think about my experience in 7th/8th
grade when I moved to a new city. In previous years my grades in math were
pretty bleak. When I transferred, they made a mistake and put me in honors
Algebra. I just sort of went with it and it was a nightmare. I had essentially
skipped a year of some essential math that wasn't being covered and we were,
of course, expected to know. The experience was horrifying and I essentially
BS'd my way through the class for the first half of the year. However, at some
point things started clicking and by the end of the year I was good to go. I
continued with honors math in high school, including pre-calc and calculus and
then took every math class known to man to get my mechanical engineering
degree. I now wonder what would have happened if they decided I had "low
ability" based on my previous performance.

------
arikrak
They link to a paper which states that sorting benefits both high and low-
performing students. However, it helps high-performing students more, which
may explain why sorting has been unpopular in the last few decades. People are
so into 'equality' they end up being in favor of results where everyone does
worse if there's a smaller spread, i.e. more 'equal'. This way they can say
they closed the 'gap' or something like that. Helping bright students excel is
almost 'undemocratic'.

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

------
_delirium
I'd be interested in some kind of social and/or psychological measures in
addition to test-taking measures. My own experience as a "gifted" student is
that I did not greatly enjoy or become motivated by being in "gifted" courses.
My 4th-5th grade were entirely tracked, then 6th-8th were tracked more weakly,
and high school varied depending on the course.

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.

------
derefr
One of the main things I learned by being in a "gifted" program in school, was
that it's very rare that someone is truly "permanently ahead." Kids will be
_early_ at learning some things, late at learning other things, but by 18 or
so the majority of the population will have arrived at a similar skill level
in most subjects[1].

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.

\---

[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.

~~~
barry-cotter
_but by 18 or so the majority of the population will have arrived at a similar
skill level in most subjects[1]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean> _

This is not true and suggests that the author has limited experience dealing
with the general population. The college going population is not the general
one, and even within that population there are huge differences in ability.
This is like saying that UC Berkeley and Cal State San Jose are not
meaningfully different in their student intake.

~~~
derefr
I think you're talking about a very different kind of "ability" than I am.
Some kids, coming out of high school, will know calculus, or have the ability
to play an instrument, or the ability to render the human form in an
anatomically-correct fashion. They also might know any amount of _trivia_ \--a
list of presidents, the names of all the bones in the human body, etc.

None of that knowledge is really representative of being any "better" at
anything. They may have just spent less time on the basics, and more time on
the advanced stuff. It might just mean they were pushed to take more credits
by their parents. They will likely have fundamental gaps (the inability to
multiply two numbers in their head, for example) and rely on crutches (like a
calculator) to keep up with everyone else in the advanced classes they're
forced to sprint through. They might have done it all through rote
memorization, and have no clear idea of what any of it _means_. Recall the
refrain of most medical students: "I don't have time for the lesson; just give
me the formula."

This is in opposition to the people who _are_ "just better" at the
fundamentals: each new thing they set out to learn, they'll learn faster and
better, because they'll be building their new knowledge on top of _mastery_
rather than a shaky 60%-and-move-on foundation.

You might wonder about IQ: IQ or "g" is literally the measure of how fast you
can recognize and employ new patterns, and therefore how fast you'll master
new micro-skills. Kids with higher IQs will do better under time-constraint.
But given as much time as needed, and assuming mastery of previous subjects,
IQ is irrelevant.

An amusing visual analogy: when you master a micro-skill, you've cleanly
filled up a line of blocks in the "well" of your knowledge. When you master
enough micro-skills, leaving no "gaps", the knowledge comes together and
compresses: you get a Tetris. :)

~~~
Xcelerate
> Kids with higher IQs will do better under time-constraint.

Ehh... I don't agree with this at all. I don't think how fast or slow someone
works has any relation with IQ/intelligence.

~~~
derefr
It's part of how IQ is defined. IQ is literally just "the (population-
normalized) number that comes out of IQ tests", and IQ tests are structured as
a set of pattern-matching/lateral-thinking questions which must be answered
under time-constraint.

Everyone can recognize a pattern or get a lateral thinking puzzle
_eventually_. Adding the time-constraint splits the world into people who can
recognize patterns _quickly enough to employ that pattern-recognition in the
course of their every-day life_ , and those who can't: thus, IQ. Without the
time constraint, an IQ test wouldn't really measure anything at all.

IQ is believed to relate to _intelligence_ because the ability to see patterns
sufficiently quickly gives you a kind of "intuition" for new subjects. It's
like a lubrication against friction: without it, new subjects will be "at
rest" in your mind, and you'll have to give them a push to get your
understanding of them going. With it, they'll just slide down the funnel right
into your brain. :)

More technically, IQ could be seen as a measure for how much of a cost your
brain puts to engaging your type-2 reasoning
([http://lesswrong.com/lw/531/how_you_make_judgments_the_eleph...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/531/how_you_make_judgments_the_elephant_and_its_rider/)).
As expected, glucose, butter, CNS stimulants, and other things that make the
brain think it has more "stored resource" to work with, are measured to
enhance IQ--because they lower the brain's calculation of this cost, and
therefore allow you to engage your lateral-thinking processes more easily and
more often. Likewise, hunger, depression, and other things which raise your
brain's cost evaluations unilaterally, also raise the cost of engaging your
type-2 reasoning, and thus lower your IQ.

~~~
IanCal
"Everyone can recognize a pattern or get a lateral thinking puzzle
eventually."

I disagree, there are tests such as this:

<http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/power.html>

which have no time limit, yet are very difficult. I don't think "everyone" has
the ability to answer all of these questions.

"Without the time constraint, an IQ test wouldn't really measure anything at
all."

It may measure how well you are able to abstract problems.

Whether or not it has much to do with your ability in different disciplines is
another matter, but arguing that it is simply down to timing seems somewhat
silly.

~~~
derefr
You're still implicitly assuming a time-constraint, though: the amount of time
the person is willing to put into the problem before giving up. Presume
someone puts in _years of thought_ to a single lateral-thinking problem, and
yes, they'll get it. Anyone will get it, if just by raw brute force, testing
over every possibly combination of properties of the system that might have an
underlying correlation. Most people just aren't willing to do that.

Given a finite amount of patience (or, _equivalently_ , a time-constraint,
which sets "patience" to a known quantity instead of allowing it to vary per
individual), we can give a person an infinite stream of unit-sized lateral-
thinking problems, and then see how many will be solved correctly before they
"hit the wall." This is then a measure of their ability, in general, to
recognize patterns quickly enough to put these insights to use: IQ.

------
pippy
Grouping children by ability is fantastic for the majority of students. The
reality is trouble kids distract the entire class, as well as stealing
teaching time that could be used on everyone else. It's imprudent to remain
politically correct at the detriment of the majority of learners.

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.

------
Alex3917
It certainly seems like a good idea until you spend thirty seconds thinking
about why it was such a terrible system in the first place:

[http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/the-most-
im...](http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/the-most-important-
graph-in-education.html)

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.

------
tokenadult
When I was in junior high, just after a grade skip, I was mostly in "tracked"
classes. Although I didn't like the grade skip (from fifth to seventh, which
put me in a new school while my previous classmates were still in sixth grade
at the elementary school), I did like being among classmates who in general
were smarter than average. (I still had industrial arts classes and physical
education classes with the general school population, and there was only one
choir class.)

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...](http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-
notes/2012/08/22/high-school-students-not-prepared-for-college-career)

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.

~~~
jmj42
It seems the "level" of education at a certain grade is highly variable in the
United States. I grew up in Michigan, who, at the time, was a leader in
education in the States, and I was seeing beginning algebra in 5th and 6th
grade. We moved to Illinois when I was in High School, and experienced much
the same your transition to Wisconsin.

These days, still in Illinois, my 7th grade daughter is doing high school
level algebra and some geometry.

For a little context, 7th grade pre-algebra + 8th grade algebra is equivalent
to Algebra 9 (she'll start with Algebra 10 in high school). 9th graders can
take either Algebra 9 as a freshman then Algebra 10 as a sophomore, and so on,
or Algebra 9A as a freshman and Algebra 9B as a sophomore.

------
ivan_ah
> computer-aided learning might make it easier for them to instruct students
> who learn at different rates.

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.

------
dangravell
The choice between streaming and not is essentially the choice between wide
disparities in educational achievement and not.

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.

------
lolnope
The discrepancy between what's written on the board and what the students
copied down on their papers in that picture is bothering me just a bit.

------
mckoss
Schools using Khan Academy have the ultimate in "tracking" - each student has
a customized class geared exactly to his or her current abilities.

------
Havoc
Yes definitely. Due to the setup at my school kids were split into 3 groups
from the year ~15 onward for math classes. Great. In the final year, for
reasons beyond the scope of this post, the 3 groups were combined again.

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.

------
boas
My high school had a good response to the criticism that tracking is elitist
or that it prevents students from switching tracks. Rather than the school
deciding your track (regular, advanced, AP), the student decided which level
they wanted to take for each class. In the first week or two, if it was too
challenging, the student could simply move down a level.

~~~
ptaipale
The counter-argument to that is that kids take a lower track than they could
well handle, if they have talent but are a bit lazy, or come from
disadvantaged backgrounds (socioeconomic class where parents have no academic
ambition, or perhaps no interest in their kids' school at all). This is not
entirely rubbish, although I do think that some different tracks would be a
good idea.

When I went to school, there were e.g. three different levels of maths in
junior high here; with my kids, everyone in the age class followed the same
curriculum in maths, languages etc. This leads to a differentiation of schools
- since you can't select more ambitious classes within one school, parents try
to get their children to elite schools where the academic level is higher and
there are fewer distracting "students".

------
sageikosa
These are the types of thesis statements I prefer to completely undercut. How
about instead of "us" doing things to students, we roll-back the state control
of the education system and let people that want to learn, learn what they
want.

------
scotty79
Do they mean grouping kids by ability as opposed to grouping them by age, or
grouping them by age as usual and then further dividing them into groups by
ability?

------
mrcactu5
we say grouping students by "ability" but don't we just wind up grouping
students by correlated variables like gender, race, socioeconomic status,
geographic location ?

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.

------
Gleaming
Please don't group kids by ability. This will only end up dooming the kids not
placed in the smart group to a life of lower expectations and not having
access to proper education and opportunities.

<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.

~~~
bromang
The streaming can and should be done through aptitude tests and competitive
examinations. Your story is quite unfortunate but there are better ways of
separating pupils by ability.

------
chinpokomon
By 4th grade, I wasn't excelling in school, despite demonstrating considerable
ability and intelligence when not in an academic setting. I was selected to
join the GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) and suddenly school became more
interesting. I moved to another part of the country and was enrolled in that
area's GATE type of programming. By the time I went to Junior high, I was
taking honors classes and this was when I started to shine academically.
Unfortunately when I started the 9th grade, I spent one quarter as a high
school freshman before I moved again and was put back in a middle school.
Completing my 9th grade, they opened a 9-12 grade high school and with most of
my peers became sophomores where I had to prove myself all over again, but I
applied myself and graduated 6th out of a class of 600.

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.

------
sps_jp
I must applaud today's teachers. As the parent of two young children (5 and
8), I was surprised by the pace of learning expected of kids today. The
problem is that not all kids learn at the same speed due to several factors,
most importantly in my opinion is parental involvement. I was very proud when
my son showed exceptional aptitude for reading and above average ability in
math very early on. However, this also exposed several issues with the regular
public school system. Teachers and schools are evaluated (at least in Florida)
by how much they improve standardized test scores year over year. The bi-
product being teachers understandably feel compelled to spend the majority of
their time focusing on the slower learners. My heart broke when my son
repeatedly came to me and said he was bored in class and wanted to be more
challenged. He was in kindergarten. His teacher was incredible, and truly
cared for each student. She recognized that something needed to be done for my
son and recommended that we have him tested for gifted or possibly find a
school with programs for advanced children. The problem is that gifted
programs in Florida do not officially start until second or third grade, and I
cannot afford a private school.

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.

------
DividesByZero
No, let's not go back to that, it's a bad idea an systematises socio-economic,
behavioural and other problems.

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.

~~~
btilly
US schools do not, on average, seem that underfunded to me. Look at
<http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_ifn.asp> to verify that the USA
averages more per student than most industrialized countries. Even if you
correct for GDP, the USA is not that bad.

That said, money is distributed very unequally. There are lots of very
underfunded schools - with many in California. See
[http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/acrossstates/Rankings.a...](http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/acrossstates/Rankings.aspx?ind=5199)
to see why.

~~~
DividesByZero
'On average' is a meaningless assertion in a country where the gap between
rich and poor is so large. (GINI 0.38 after-tax in 2010).

------
programminggeek
I am less concerned with tracks and more concerned with pacing. The problem
with lumping everybody together is that nobody learns at the same pace. So,
the pace is slowed to the minimum required to keep everyone moving forward.
That is the effect of wanting no child left behind. In effect, progress for
all is slowed by all to allow for progress of a few.

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.

------
henrikschroder
It's always a great surprise when you discover that your own socialist
european nanny-state country has been doing something in a lot more free-
choice and free-market way than the US. :-D

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.

------
api
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeXoOkU5PjQ>

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.

------
lutusp
> Unfortunately, the efforts and philosophies of otherwise well-meaning
> individuals _have eliminated the achievement gap by eliminating
> achievement_.

This one sentence made the entire article worthwhile. :)

------
Kudzu_Bob
Grouping students by ability is, and will always be, an inherently racist
undertaking.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
You've got to be joking. I mean, I'm not at advocate of what the article is
proposing but this is crazy. It is always inherently racist?

~~~
Kudzu_Bob
Whenever ability tracking is tried in any multiracial society, it always, and
I mean always, results in markedly different outcomes for various racial
groups. Is that not, ipso facto, racism?

~~~
GuiA
> it always, and I mean always

It doesn't care what you mean when you don't have the evidence to back it.

~~~
Kudzu_Bob
All you have to do to shoot me down is cite a single instance to the contrary.
Just one.

~~~
amba00
Burden of proof is on you to prove your ridiculous theory.

~~~
Kudzu_Bob
It's called the Achievement Gap, not my "ridiculous theory." Google it.

