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How?
By audhill | January 19, 2008
In my experience, classes that are heterogeneously grouped (or, in the case of an advanced group, include unable students) create slower moving classes that disadvantage better students and brings down the level of education overall. I know this is true in the middle grades, where most of the literature read is 3 or 4 years below grade level to support students that can’t read well. I know it’s true in math where students who need basic math computational skills are dragged through a curriculum they can’t understand in the hopes that they will catch up if they are exposed conceptually. I know it’s true in the content areas where we routinely choose text books that are below reading level so that students who have reading difficulties can read the texts.
Those who maintain that the research shows that heterogeneous grouping benefits children, rarely mention and often don’t even know that much of the research demonstrating the benefit of heterogeneity measures social benefits rather than academic ones and that significant research exists that documents the benefits across the board of homogeneous instruction . Because some value social benefits over academic ones, they ignore and obscure a documented decline at the top and no movement at the bottom (those scoring a 1 on the state tests) ( My district has 5 or 6 years of a decline in 4s and rises in 2s and 3s on the NCLB tests in language arts.) It benefits the 2s and some lower 3s, but it should suprise no one that students who are not working at the pace they are able to lose momentum and teachers who teach to the middle provide fewer challenge for the top and less remediation for the bottom.
It should suprise no one to know that differentiation is unequal to the task of consistently creating work that is appropriately challenging for students of widely differing ability or preparedness. It is not merely a matter of classroom management or creating more intricate instruction to meet all needs. Differentiation depends on the concept that every child’s needs can be served by a simple tweak up or down. With such wide disparities, a tweak is not nearly enough.When you have a student reading on the second grade level in the same class with a student at PHS (post high school) level, the entire body of work is nearly always inappropriate for one or another group. Our better students often spend large parts of their school careers in classes where they know everything that is being taught to them before they enter. Enrichment often takes the form of diy projects which usually means extra work and at your seat work that will free up the teacher to work with the bottom. Work that would actually challenge requires more teacher interaction than a system with a significant bottom percentile can afford.
Similarly, bottom students who need focused time on below grade level skill work, often spend their time drowning in teach to the middle assignments and texts that they simply can’t manage. Or patronized by happy work assignments that teach them nothing, but give them a sense of at least accomplishing something. And, then… since the test is always with us, loads of tax dollars are spent on homogeneously grouping those same kids after school and in summer academies in a misguided effort to try to shore up what we are unwilling to address during the school day: different levels of ability or readiness often need different content and differently structured classes. We give lip service to challenging them all equallybut we know it’s not happening. Advocates turn a blind eye (unless it’s their own children on the chopping block); Compliance and complicity allow it to go on.
It sounds equitable and compassionate to keep students of widely differing ability together all day, although it isn’t. But, we can’t simply afford to put children in homogeneous groups all day long, either. Children who are disadvantaged end up never catching up, reinforcing a class based system where some children are successful by birth and others are not. Also, when children who are behind only work in homogeneous groups, they get a skewed idea of what good work is and an even more skewed idea of their entitlements relative to other more able or prepared children. We must agree that every child has the right to see and participate in what’s possible.
If every child has the right to run the race they are ready for among other children who are equally capable and ready to run the same race AND every child has the right to participate in an enriched curriculum and be exposed to the highest level work and standard… if differentiation (certainly as it is practiced and taught) is a pleasant fantasy)… where do we go as an educational system?
2 Responses to “How?”
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February 15th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
That’s what we’re trying to figure out, isn’t it? Being the parent of an exceptionally bright and capable child and an advocate for those who have the experience of being disadvantaged, I hear what you are saying and I agree, in large measure.
Like many problems we confront, the simple answers won’t do. Throwing students together or keeping them separate are two extremes; somewhere in there is the balance we need to create conditions that support growth and learning for each student.
And, it is so much more complex than how we group our students (and I know you know). Where are the dollars to pay for highly skilled individuals to teach in public education or to fund the needed innovations? How do we expect students to make the grade in math if their math teachers cannot pass an 8th grade standardized mathematics test? Or English if their teachers cannot correctly edit their compositions (thank goodness I’m not a teacher, eh)?
Your students are lucky to have you, many others don’t have the luxury of a competent and creative teacher. They get the teacher with only 5 more years until retirement or the one who graduated in the bottom third of their college class (and that, unfortunately, is where the majority of teacher fell when graduating from college).
And then, teachers get other teachers who were good at navigating through and being part of a bureaucracy as their bosses. Principals and superintendents often have little formal business training, though they run organizations with diversified holdings (school systems and individual schools are in the businesses of feeding, transporting, protecting, educating and providing a host of social services to/for the young people they serve). They are also responsible for financing those operations.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really think there is any one group upon which we can lay blame, except of course, for the American people who keep saying they want a change in education but don’t really want to ante up and fund the change.
Off the soapbox. Time for sleep.
February 16th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
There is more than one elephant in the room, of course. But, in my view, there is no progress as long as society can’t decide what schools are for. Are they primarily a means to educate children or primarily a means to remediate inequity? These two equally laudable, but very different goals do not always lead to the same destination and where they do not, it is important to know which end we serve.