

Why Aren't Schools Grouping Kids By Intelligence Level? - mcnabj

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&#x27;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&#x27;t the really smart kids be in the same class that goes as fast as their minds can?
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lutusp
> 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.

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brianchu
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.

~~~
throwaway344
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.

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japhyr
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...](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/](http://www.competencyworks.org/)

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gjmulhol
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.

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EnderMB
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.

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recroad
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.

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tempthrowaway
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.

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thejteam
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.

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anywherenotes
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.

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rholdy
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.

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ArbitraryLimits
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.

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kec
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.

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runjake
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.

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david927
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.

~~~
caw
> 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

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nyan_sandwich
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.

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stevoo
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

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jangel
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.

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jaachan
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.

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bstx
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.

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

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psteve710
Singapore is already doing that looong time

