Making arrangements for everyone

Classroom social engineering means our brightest students are frequently learning less than they could.

Between tests to pass, parents to placate, the inclusion of increasingly disruptive and profoundly disturbed students in regular classrooms, and the impossible mandate that all students succeed, public education is buckling at the knees. Experts charge that schools aren’t meeting the needs of our most talented students, our most disabled students, and nearly everyone in the middle.

The experts should know. Much of the problem is their fault. Thirty years ago they decreed that schools stop grouping students according to ability and achievement, especially at the middle school level. Not coincidentally, that’s when student achievement began slipping, especially at the middle school level.

The reason for the new arrangement had nothing to do with education. The problem was too many minority and “low socioeconomic” students ended up in lower groups. As a result, too few ended up in college prep classes and college itself. Since college is commonly the route to higher-paying jobs and middle class advantages for the next generation, academic grouping was blamed for perpetuating the nation’s social and economic disparities.

Experts responded to this legitimate social concern by outlawing academic grouping. They sorted classrooms so each comprised the full range of abilities and achievement, from gifted to remedial, and everybody in between. They claimed all children would somehow achieve more if they were placed in classes without regard for how much anybody already knew or what anybody needed to learn.

Private tutors can perfectly tailor instruction to their single student. But I can’t teach twenty different lessons simultaneously. If I teach too fast and too deep, I lose weaker students. If I teach too slowly and focus on basics, I lose stronger students. In the end, I teach to the middle and reach out as I go to the extremes. The further apart the classroom extremes, the more problematic teaching becomes and the greater the detriment to my students.

The experts reply I’m just not employing the “best practices.” The snake oil they’re selling ranges from cooperative learning, which amounts to putting students in groups and expecting them to teach each other, to individualized learning, where individual students teach themselves. The trouble is most parents don’t send their children to school so they can be taught by other children while their teacher wanders the room and facilitates.

Brand name cooperative learning has fallen from fashion, but its zombie footsteps echo in renewed calls for “student-centered” classrooms and “team-based learning.” It lurks in “differentiated instruction,” where teachers adjust what and how they teach according to students’ learning levels, or “tiers.”

Competent teachers have always tried to do that. That’s why schools grouped or “tiered” students in classes according to ability and achievement. Now differentiated instruction places students of all abilities in the same class and then expects teachers to instruct each student according to his individual “needs,” often by putting students in groups based on ability. Apparently, ability grouping is legal provided it happens in one room and causes the most inefficiency and chaos.

Coining a new name for a task you’ve made more difficult doesn’t help.

The result of this classroom social engineering is our brightest students are frequently learning less than they could. Ironically, just as we grew increasingly concerned about how American students compare to the world’s brightest and best, No Child Left Behind and its successors, which punish districts when students don’t meet minimum standards, compelled schools to focus classes and curriculum on boosting scores for students at the lower end of the achievement spectrum. This further diverted attention and resources from students who could excel.

Meanwhile, we’re also rightly concerned about the dropout rate. Some states propose solving the problem by increasing the age of compulsory attendance, a move more likely to increase the truancy rate. In a meaningless wave of its magic wand, the National Education Association proposed that we “mandate high school graduation as compulsory for everyone below the age of twenty-one.” Except who exactly would it be compulsory for? If a student doesn’t try, doesn’t work, or doesn’t learn, do we still compulsorily give him a diploma?

Experts undercut efforts to grapple with the dropout problem by prescribing that all students take college prep courses. No child should be denied the opportunity to study algebra because of his race or ethnicity. At the same time, all children aren’t capable of studying algebra, regardless of their race or ethnicity.

Some students of all classes and colors could profit best from vocational and technical education. We’re wrong to deny them ability-appropriate skills and success because it offends some abstract sense of equity.

Experts condemn what they blast as “one-size-fits-all” education. They call on teachers to address the academic needs and abilities of their students as individuals. Then they require for unsubstantiated, doctrinaire reasons that we group them in classrooms without regard for their individual academic needs and abilities.

American children should have a chance to overcome disadvantages, and schools should be responsive to talented students who require extra help to reach their potential. No one should be trapped in a lower group if he has the talent and perseverance to improve and advance.

But overcoming means overcoming. Artificially including a student, disadvantaged or not, in a class he isn’t ready for doesn’t help. It just denies him the fundamentals he needs for meaningful progress.

And that amounts to just another disadvantage.

For him and for all of us.

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.

Thirty years ago they decreed that schools stop grouping students according to ability and achievement, especially at the middle school level. Not coincidentally, that’s when student achievement began slipping, especially at the middle school level.