Multiage classrooms: another flat tire

Most of us are familiar with the expression “reinventing the wheel.” Education experts practice their own version. Rather than reinvent successes like the wheel, educators continually reinvent the flat tire.

Back in the 1970s, reformers exalted self-esteem, empowered students to choose their own curriculum, relaxed discipline standards and discontinued letter grades. Then, after A Nation at Risk warned that these reforms had precipitated a “rising tide of mediocrity,” the same reformers attempted to solve the problem by exalting self-esteem, empowering students to choose their own curriculum, relaxing discipline standards and discontinuing letter grades.

A 1978 education school text celebrated cutting-edge schools where “failing grades were eliminated” by outlawing Fs. Fifteen years later, in 1993, when achievement had slipped further, reformers were still prescribing “schools of the future” where “students never fail.” Today, after another 25 years, politicians and education officials, when they’re not mouthing platitudes about higher standards, still guarantee “success for all students — no exceptions, no excuses.” Standards-based grading scales eliminate Fs and the possibility of failure, even as they crow about the rigor their new standards are delivering to classrooms. Need any help changing that flat? Educators coin lofty names to dress up their recycled pipe dreams. Multiage education, for instance, places students from more than one grade in the same classroom. Boosters condemn multiage skeptics as old-fashioned and resistant to change, which is ironic since putting more than one grade in the same room is what used to happen in one-room schoolhouses, which is about as educationally old-fashioned as you can get, unless you count sitting around in tunics like Socrates and Plato.

The impetus behind many multiage plans is budgetary. Saving money by reducing staff can seem reasonable, especially if enrollment is declining. Suppose a school loses 20 students out of 200. On paper, that amounts to a whole classroom of students, which at first glance might translate into needing one fewer teacher. The problem is those 20 students are scattered across the grades, one or two per classroom, so no classroom has really disappeared. Eliminating a teacher requires combining existing classes, which, in smaller schools, often means combining grade levels.

Nothing will make me a fan of multiage education, but I wouldn’t mind it nearly as much if we’d just be honest with ourselves. Yes, it would be better if we could afford enough teachers to keep students in grade-level classrooms, the way public schools have progressed over the last century. But if we can’t afford it, we need to acknowledge that as we cut funding, the quality of our children’s education will generally suffer, the same way nursing care in a hospital suffers as we cut nurses.

Sadly, we’re not capable of that measure of honesty. While conceding that multiaging is a “strategy for managing declining enrollment and revenue,” proponents invariably add that it “offers educational benefits.” Some maintain that multiage regimes uniquely allow students to progress at their own rates by eliminating “artificial” age-based grade levels. Even assuming it’s wise to put 21st-century 9-year-olds and 11-year-olds in the same room, students are rarely placed in multiage classes according to their abilities and achievement. Besides, most multiage fans reject grouping students by ability in any other setting as elitist and too 20th century.

Other supporters claim multiage formats provide “broader educational opportunity” and foster “collaborative learning” where students “teach and learn from each other” at “their own pace.” Rounding out the barrage of jargon, multiaging allegedly empowers children to mentor each other while it also enables teachers to “differentiate” so “every child is taught individually.” It’s multiaging’s fancied connection to “more personalized instruction” that keeps it alive in this age of personal learning plans.

There’s nothing about multiage classrooms that uniquely conveys any special educational opportunity. As for collaborating and learning from other students, reformers have promoted this scheme for decades as “facilitating,” where teachers “get out of the way” and students direct their own education. The surest way to produce educated 9-yearolds, or high school seniors, isn’t setting up classrooms where they educate themselves. Forty years of academic decline should have proven this to us.

We also need to stop pretending we can offer every student “individual instruction.” No school or classroom can. Individualized instruction for all requires a battalion of private tutors, and that’s not what I am. I’m a classroom teacher facing a roomful of students with widely varying abilities, skills and psyches. Multiage classroom teachers face students with typically even more widely varying abilities, skills and psyches.

It’s not that students can never learn unless their classmates were all born in the same calendar year. In reality, though, despite the rosy reassurances, multiage classes work the way you’d expect, multiplying the disparities in maturity, ability, knowledge and skill that students and teachers already struggle with in single-grade classes.

Over the last century or so, many changes in public education haven’t made much sense. Grouping students by age was one of the innovations that yielded genuine benefits by allowing teachers to deal with a narrower range of abilities and age-based development. We should retain that sensible format, even if it requires cutting costs somewhere else.

If we can’t, we need to admit that we just can’t afford it.

Our schools and students will likely suffer, but at least the honesty will be refreshing.