(Another post for newbies especially and anyone else who wants food for thought.)

Hello, new teachers,

Your education professors undoubtedly spent a fair amount of time teaching you to create lessons that involve group work. Cooperative learning has been in style for quite awhile. They may also have taught you methods for managing competition. You have likely been steered away from competition, since competition has winners and losers. Educational theory today doesn’t support creating possible losers, despite the fact that we are constantly gathering data that orders students by test score results from highest to lowest.

I owe this post to a former principal who was also a former football coach. I was teaching two grades in the same classroom that year, very unusual in these times except in rural areas. My classroom had seventh and eighth graders. We were talking about a language-learning strategy and he said, “Good idea. You can have them compete. Seventh graders against eighth graders.”

We did compete. We had fun. I pitted grade against grade and discovered that competition worked much better than I had expected. Bilingual language acquisition went up. The eighth graders usually won, but the seventh graders could win with effort, and effort went up as they tried to capture that language-learning crown. In the meantime, the eighth graders were working hard to avoid the embarrassment of being outlearned by the seventh graders.

Tonight, all across the country, people tuned in to watch the Cubbies and the Mets. We are a country of baseball, football, basketball, hockey and soccer fans. Sports bars dot the landscape. Sports events command big ticket prices.

Many humans relish competition, even crave it. They like a good fight. They like to explore their own wits and abilities. They will fight to capture a flag for no other reason than because that flag happens to be there, and they want to prove they can reach it first.

Competition often works at least as well as cooperation for learning. Teachers have to be careful to keep sensitive children out of the line of fire, but allowing boys and girls to compete in carefully-structured games and contests can promote learning in a way that cooperative group work does not. Some kids are wired to compete. They take winning seriously, more seriously than they will ever take a role in a cooperative group.

Eduhonesty suggestion: Play Jeopardy. Invent a few board games. Toss a plastic ball around in a game of fraction to decimal hot potato.

We can be too sensitive. If a kid really seems unable to handle losing, then let that kid keep score or work on an independent project. But don’t be afraid to pit the boys against the girls or whatever dynamic would work within your classroom. Most kids like to play games. Supporting that spirit — going with the grain — can net big academic gains.

One important last note for newbies: Shut the game down if behavior gets out of hand. If you want to keep playing games, you will have to be able to control the group while you play. I recommend going over behavioral expectations in advance, especially the ones about not making fun of anyone. Then hold your ground. Pull out individuals who break the rules. If too many kids are ignoring rules, tell the class the game is over and give them desk work. Have homework ready that you can convert into classwork for this purpose.

Games are great, but games can also be challenging to manage. As kids get excited, they begin to push limits. You must make sure the limits hold. Those limits make the fun activities possible.

I was at a potluck tonight, talking to a man who creates community gardens. He recently added an enabling garden with upraised plots for people in wheelchairs and people using walkers. Members of his group pay monthly fees to have plots at his sites. He has a mission, helping people to grow vegetables.

This man went to a local school to offer them a plot. The plot would be across from the school, convenient and easy to access. He planned to offer this space as a free benefit to local students and even volunteered to find people to help keep plants alive through the summer.

“We will have to see if we can work it into the curriculum,” he was told.

The school did not take him up on his offer.

Eduhonesty: When we are so busy trying to raise math and English scores that we can’t grow a few zucchini, we are making a mistake. In this time when administrators’ jobs often hinge on test score results, I am not surprised the school was unwilling to sacrifice academic time to gardening. I can’t fault those administrators. I am sad for the kids, though.

From an Education Week blog:

Student Tracking vs. Academic Pathways: Different…or the Same?

By Marc Tucker on October 15, 2015 6:25 AM

…

The most insidious aspect of the sorting—or tracking—system is the way it results in teachers making judgments about the innate ability of students and then adjusting the challenge of the curriculum they get to the judgment they made. This inevitably leads to self-fulfilling prophecies.

There is only one antidote to the sorting mentality—new or old—and its insidious consequences. That is to stop adjusting the challenge level of the curriculum down to the presumed ability of the students. It is to set high standards for all students, not just some, and then to do whatever is necessary to get the students to those standards. That sounds impossibly naïve, but it is just what the top-performing countries do. Judging from their results, it works.

Eduhonesty:  Oh, please, help us somebody!  Yes, I’d call that demand for high standards for all students naïve. It’s also not what top-performing countries do, not exactly. Yes, they set high standards and expectations, as we should. But they also sort students. Finland sorts students into vocational as opposed to college tracks. In high school, students enter one track or the other in a nearly even split. The following graph shows Finnish options. http://www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/finland-overview/finland-instructional-systems/

I had a long conversation a few years ago with a young woman on a train in Germany about the German educational system. After completing their primary education (at 10 years of age, 12 in Berlin and Brandenburg), children attend one of five types of secondary schools in Germany. The five kinds of schools vary from state to state in Germany. Essentially, students have a vocational option, a college-track option, and schools that offer elements of both.

South Korea does not do vocational tracking, but instead follows the exhortation above to set “high standards for all students, not just some, and then to do whatever is necessary to get the students to those standards.”

In “An Assault Upon Our Children: South Korea’s Education System Hurts Students,” by SE-WOONG KOO, AUG. 1, 2014, Koo talks about the South Korean educational system and the chest pains and allergies his brother suffered from the stress of being a student in South Korea. Mom moved Koo out of the country to Vancouver because of that stress. To quote a paragraph from that article:

“The world may look to South Korea as a model for education — its students rank among the best on international education tests — but the system’s dark side casts a long shadow. Dominated by Tiger Moms, cram schools and highly authoritarian teachers, South Korean education produces ranks of overachieving students who pay a stiff price in health and happiness. The entire program amounts to child abuse. It should be reformed and restructured without delay.”

I strongly recommend the rest of the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/02/opinion/sunday/south-koreas-education-system-hurts-students.html?_r=0

Eduhonesty: Articles like “Student Tracking vs. Academic Pathways: Different…or the Same?” make me want to toss up my hands and write science fiction. I am hanging in here only because I have watched children paying the price for all this idealistic propaganda. I feel the need to try to rescue those children. I am also offended by the presumptuousness behind some of that idealism. The world needs as many plumbers as philosophers. In fact, in terms of job openings, I’d far rather be a plumber than a philosopher. If I opened my own business, I’d almost certainly make more money repairing toilets and faucets than the average philosopher makes. I’m pretty sure my plumber makes more in a year than I ever have as a teacher.  I wouldn’t be surprised to discover he makes twice as much.

In the meantime, this country has racked up $1.2 trillion in college-loan debt. In many cases, students did not finish and get a degree, but they remain saddled with those loans, albatrosses tied around their necks for possible decades. Too often, counselors and other responsible adults knew or should have known that those debt-laden students had little chance of college success, but said nothing. That truth was left off the agenda, a victim of the social agenda of college-for-all.

Our students are real people, not items in a social agenda. Instead of telling them they must go to college, we ought to create alternative options for those who don’t like school and/or who have trouble with the “rigorous” material that now sometimes has become our only offering. What do we have to offer to students who can’t follow the complex questions favored by the Common Core? They exist. The PARCC and Smarter Balance test results amply demonstrate that they exist.

I acknowledge we can’t unleash large hordes of electricians on the world, but community colleges offer many programs that could be taken in high school. I have a former student who is paying a technical school $13,000 to become a medical assistant right now. Why don’t we offer that option in high school? Many one- and two-year programs could be spread out over the four years of high school. Why don’t we offer automotive repair, CAD/CAM classes, graphic design and practical nursing to interested students? Why not allow students to study to become dental hygienists? My students spend so much money to go to culinary school and beauty school after high school – and we leave them no choice. In many cases, they know what they want to do by the time they are sixteen or even younger. They then go straight to trade school or the community college specifically to get a degree or certificate that their high school could have offered them sooner for free.

The idea that working harder will somehow result in a universe where everyone can pass the annual state standardized test and go to college seems to be the pipe dream propelling our government’s agenda. If that pipe dream were true, No Child Left Behind might have succeeded. The government set up Draconian penalties for failing to make targets and then told the schools to make NCLB work. Yet NCLB never worked. Many of the best schools in the country ended up on watch and warning lists, while curriculums were gutted, recesses were eliminated, and cheating skyrocketed.

I’d like to ask the people making today’s educational policy to come down off Mount Olympus and talk to some of the students in our middle schools and high schools — and not just the middle schools and high schools in their own middle class and upper class neighborhoods. Come on down, guys. Meet America’s students. Find out who they are. Ask them what they want. Ask them how we can help them to achieve their dreams, with the understanding that wanting to cut and color hair should be considered a perfectly acceptable answer.

That girl who wants to go to beauty school? The odds are excellent that she will do exactly that. She does not need to hear that she is making a mistake and should go to college to study chemistry instead. When we don’t create alternative high school pathways, but insist that students stay on the one-and-only-one true path, the college path, we devalue that girl’s interests and choices. We may or may not change her mind about going to beauty school. But if we don’t, our words and their implicit criticism may succeed in making that girl feel like an underperforming, second-class citizen for the rest of her life.

We have to present our students with all their options. We have to offer them the possibility of college and university success when possible. I’ve had many students who remained completely uninterested in college after the many years of being pushed in that direction, though. I’ve had students who already knew they intended to join dad’s landscaping business. I’ve had students who did not read or who could not read and who simply were not going to succeed unless they had a personal epiphany. Without that epiphany, those students had no business taking out student loans.

Maybe we need to take a hard look at the Finnish model. After a decade of NCLB, the learning landscape does not seem to have radically improved. We still have many students who are unready for college, academically and/or emotionally. So I am going to end by disagreeing with Marc.

Call it tracking. Call it pathways. Call it whatever acronym you want to invent for it. I believe we ought to provide real vocational tracks to our students. I’d wait until high school. But if a sixteen-year-old girl wants to study auto repair at the expense of the college curriculum, I’d say let her go for it. Let her graduate with a skill she can turn into a job.

If she changes her mind later, she can fill in her educational gaps at a community college. Community colleges have become fully expert at remedial education. Many young Americans have gone back to school in their twenties and gone on get advanced degrees.

Opening practical, vocational pathways should not be considered closing doors. For many students, these pathways will open doors. My former student could easily have learned to be a medical assistant in high school. As it stands, she will owe $13,000, a debt I don’t believe she should ever have had to incur.

Many districts that are short of funds end up placing their lower students, including their special education students, in all-inclusive regular classes. Teachers are a big expense for districts and if a district can eliminate a few special education positions, a gifted-track position, and/or a lower-level math position, then a district that lacks resources may embrace a philosophy of widespread inclusion simply because it’s cheaper. It’s also easy to justify with court decisions supporting the idea that students should be in the least restrictive environment where they are able to “function.”

What exactly does “function” mean in this context? In education today, the word function does not necessarily mean perform at grade level. When classes have such broad differences in academic understanding and mastery, function must take on another meaning to allow inclusion of all students placed in a classroom. Does function mean to make progress? How do we define progress? How much progress is enough? How do we weigh the costs to students whose needs go unmet while other students receive remedial instruction? What do we do when inclusion results in confusion?

This may be another reason why Stan’s $540 book has not been purchased. What if the district realizes that many students cannot read this prospective textbook that teachers are employing? What if the district cannot find a readable book, due to the as yet limited supply of new, Common Core materials? If that $540 book is appropriate for only a subset of students, purchases may be postponed until another, better, Common Core-aligned book appears.

Eduhonesty: In the big picture, any program that forces the whole nation to retool it’s math work chest ought to have had much more scrutiny by teachers, parents and STEM professionals than the Common Core curriculum received before it was rolled out. In the small picture, when a parent cannot get inexpensive, comprehensible resources to help tutor his children as a result of that program, we have a problem with frightening implications. Parents are our first line of defense when children start to fall behind in school. They should never lack the resources necessary to help their kids.

(Follow-up taken from a Facebook post by a man who tried to buy a textbook so he could help some kids with their math. That post precedes this one now, as I shifted it toward the front.)

My own editorializing led me to blog the following:

“Eduhonesty: Let’s start with the idea of $540 books. Who believes this does not discriminate fiercely against financially-disadvantaged districts? At those prices, only the wealthy will regularly see new books.”

I have thought about that post in the last day or two. I live in an economically-privileged district. My walking buddy lives in a similar district. Last year, she spent $400 for her younger son’s high school math books. My girls are in graduate school, but I remember writing a $1,200 check for school materials one year. Here’s the whammy in those expensive textbooks: In our financially-advantaged districts, districts may get parents to buy the books.* In poorer, districts, no one may buy the books.

In impoverished districts, parents obviously can’t write those checks. Schools supply the textbooks for the year.  Those books don’t get replaced very often. Corners are often cut in the purchasing process with only part of a series purchased. The district where I taught had some software sitting for months one year, because the district had purchased the software but not the support, and staff could not figure out the software without the support.

I honestly don’t see the solution to this disparity in available materials short of changing how America funds education. I do want to flag the problem, though. The kids who most need help and support get the short end of this stick, that’s for sure.

It’s some years back in the past, so I don’t think I have a picture, but I vividly remember an aged textbook that I issued to one student. The front had a place for students to write their name on the left and the book’s condition on the right. We were on about name number eight. Condition had started at good, gone to fair, gone to poor and the last entry said “OMG!!” We had a good laugh. I probably said something like, “Well, you don’t have to worry about accidentally dropping this one in a puddle!” There are some scary old books out there.

I think Stan Wayne’s indignation about that $540 book should be more than a blip on the educational radar. I am guessing his district is doing without those books because they can’t afford the new Common Core materials. They can’t use the old materials because they don’t match the Common Core, but they can’t afford to load up on $540 books either, especially since the Core’s future seems slightly uncertain. This situation screams probable economic discrimination. In the district where I live, motivated parents most likely can buy those books. In much of America, though, $540 represents the month’s food budget, and many families don’t have $540 per book to spare.

Eduhonesty: Here’s a sideways thought that merits consideration: Maybe financially-comfortable politicians and educational administrators ought to consider more carefully the costs of the programs they mandate. The Common Core is resulting in a surge of book and materials purchases as districts attempt to prepare students for new standardized tests based on the Core. When the books all have to be edited or rewritten to match the new program and tests, the costs fall most heavily on those who can least afford those absurdly-priced books.

*I hope the schools help those who can’t afford $400 for math books. I’ve honestly never enquired or even thought about this before yesterday. What if you can’t write that $1,200 check?

Taken from a Facebook post by Stan Wayne:

I want to get some warriors thinking with me about a tactic. We have done the refusals so another tactic is appropriate.

Not only that but part of common core ideology involves keeping parents away from outrageous Math methods, anti American history (today my 10 year informed me on Columbus Day weekend that teacher says Columbus was a bad man) and gender bending and provocative literature.

I spend a lot of time helping 3 kids with math. None of them have a text book. Only the teacher has that. Kids have problem books and parents are supposed to be mollified with a stupid irrelevant parent guide book. I told the principal I don’t want your “resources” I want your “damn text book” after a long ridiculous condescending lecture. He said he would get back to me.

You go on the Pearson website to buy and the book is $540 !! I started to buy it because I was angry but was told – must have school credit card.

I called teacher, principal because I am sick of helping kids with math with no text book to reference cuz there is no student book. I said I want the Teacher book, I am a teacher and a parent , they say they are thinking – I said I cannot get for $500 from Pearson cuz I have to have School credit card – I called Albany Dept of Ed Curriculum Dept – they sympathized – guy was half drunk on their Koolaid but admitted he can’t help his own elementary kids even though he was a teacher – they said make paper trail – request from principal then chairman of board – then do an “article 30” complaint – I wrote it down the exact law at work – I think our next tactic is for each parent warriors to demand ALL texts- make a paper trail from teacher – principal – district superintendent – chairman of board of Education. We have to jam this ridiculous system up that thinks parents are idiots.

Eduhonesty: Let’s start with the idea of $540 books. Who believes this does not discriminate fiercely against financially-disadvantaged districts? At those prices, only the wealthy will regularly see new books.

A second sad observation: Lots of teachers can’t do Common Core math. They have to learn this new technique, despite the fact that so far as I can tell there is still zero evidence that the Common Core system is superior to its predecessors. Few parents can do Common Core math. I haven’t met one yet who is comfortable with this latest mathematical fad. Maybe the district did not buy the books because they did not want parents to realize what a mess we are making of elementary mathematics.

I will let readers in on a secret. I am happy not to be teaching math this year. The story problems and techniques keep getting more convoluted. The kids keep looking more confused. Even when they figure out what to do, they often can’t believe they somehow managed to solve a problem.

I can go one better than Stan on the question of Columbus: I have a colleague who purchased a Social Studies book as a supplement for her class and discovered that Columbus had been written out of the book.

I’d suggest Stan find a book at the library or a used book store, except I imagine that won’t work for his purposes. That older book would probably just add numbers and carry over to the next place value, for example. I’d bet his kids are not allowed to use such simple techniques. No, they have to draw lots of little boxes and do a version of making change in order to finish a simple addition problem. Stan really does need that book.

If he ever gets it, I’ll be glad to blog his screams when he finally looks at the content.

In concrete terms, if a student asks me, “What really started the World War I? Why was Franz Ferdinand so important?” I might have a teachable moment. A lot of history is in play here. These are not small questions. I may look out and see that the whole class is focused on me, waiting for this answer. There’s a romantic marriage in this story, the whole concept of monarchy, the concept of unbreakable vows, among other big ideas. The story’s not exactly in the curriculum, though, and will easily require the rest of my class and some of the next class to tell with the right amount of drama, especially since a story as good as this one is likely to inspire lots of questions.

Can I break from my planned lesson to tell this story? Before No Child Left Behind and the ensuing test-preparation mania, I could have taken those couple of hours, with the understanding that student interest would be high and many concepts in the social studies curriculum might be reinforced. Now, I often don’t have that choice. Not enough of the material in this story is on the test. In terms of the state standardized test, I’m not getting a lot of bang for my buck. In terms of creating student interest in social studies, the First World War and school in general, I have potential here to do awesome job – but I can’t quantify that and I can’t justify it through higher test scores.

In schools requiring matching lesson plans, when a teacher encounters a teachable moment, she has to consult with colleagues to add any new material to her lesson, unless she decides to try to cram that extra moment on top of required material. Teachable moments can’t always be delivered in a crammed sound bite, though. Teachable moments are also fleeting. By the time that a teacher’s colleagues sign off on the new lesson addition, any brief, inspired spark of student interest may have passed.

If a school requires that all teachers in a subject area give exactly the same tests (more schools do this all the time and we are now doing this in regular classes in both of my last two districts), a teacher can’t skip parts of a lesson to go off on a side topic of interest without risking her students not being ready for the test. She may do her best teaching for the whole year and yet end up getting in trouble with the administration because of her lower test scores.

We need to find a method to deal with the loss of these moments. The train schedule needs the flexibility to make a few unscheduled stops. Kids deserve those inspired hours created by their own questions or interests.

This post requires a bit of back story. Readers may know I am working on a book. I got to a section on RtI (or MTSS as it sometimes called now), otherwise known as Response to Intervention or Multi-Tier System of Supports. RtI was mandated by federal law some years back, an intervention system for students who are falling behind academically. One paragraph references an email written by an RtI expert who helped us set up our own program. I may post more about this later, but for now I just want to copy a few paragraphs I wrote in the past:

“There are many ways for schools to implement small group interventions – and they do not all steal from the teacher’s free time.  Actually, if one thing gets stolen from the most, it probably is Social Studies or Science instruction.  When doing so, schools are making a conscious choice that Reading or Math is a priority over other subjects.”

That was from the email. Here is my then-response.

In the first place, teachers do not have “free” time. Planning periods are used to grade, to plan lessons, to tutor, and for many other tasks that are essential to educating students. My fellow teachers and I had effectively about 45 minutes of planning time at that middle school each day while my students were in gym and specials such as Spanish (we rotated these). Not uncommonly, administrative requirements ate up most or all of that time, time stealers such as missing lunch tickets, calling on incomplete permission slips or discussions with the counselor about depressed students. Many random noninstructional activities take place in a teaching day. If RTI makes it impossible for me to finish my grading, that is one set of papers that won’t be returned until later. When I lose my planning period, I also lose my set-up time. If I am teaching science, this lost time may force me sometimes to move away from hands-on experiments towards bookwork.

I wrote that a few summers back. I am not sure if I ever blogged it. I find writing cathartic and there are scribbles all over this house, on computers, on hand-outs and in journals.

Why was I suddenly gloomy when I read this snippet? Last year, we were not allowed a single field trip until students took the PARCC test in the spring. My sadness was for the lost field trips. No field trips for bad students with low scores! No parties! You have to get those test scores up! Now!

Eduhonesty: In higher-scoring, wealthier districts, I bet they took field trips. I bet they piled excitedly into busses for trips to forest preserves or museums. Maybe they stopped for lunch at McDonalds. Kids in my financially- and academically-disadvantaged district love that McDonalds stop, however nutritionally dubious it may be. (At least they get enough to eat, which is not always true with school lunches.) I bet those higher-scoring wealthier kids enjoyed a few minutes or maybe even a whole class celebration before Winter Break. Maybe they even ate candy or cake, forbidden items during the school day at my school.

My kids were not so lucky, at least until after the spring PARCC test. The administration had made its position very clear: Bell-to-bell instruction at all times or else. That “or-else” had real teeth in it too. Admin seemed clearly intent on cleaning house. The day before winter break, admin was wandering randomly into classes to make sure that we were all on task.

A quote from an academic article on why instructors need to differentiate classroom instruction, “Differentiating Instruction For Advanced Learners in the Mixed-Ability Middle school Classroom” by Carol Ann Tomlinson:

“A single seventh grade heterogeneous language arts class is likely to include students who can read and comprehend as well as most college learners; students who can barely decode words, comprehend meaning, or apply basic information; and students who fall somewhere between these extremes.”

I have taught these classes. Almost every teacher who is not specifically teaching special education or gifted classes deals with these classes. I’m convinced that at least part of the reason why schools are throwing students together so indiscriminately lies in our distaste for grouping students by academic mastery — or, as it has often been called, tracking. Tracking traditionally sorted students into classes based on their previous academic performance and has been perceived as a trap for lower-performing students who were placed in less rigorous classes.

Yet, as Eliza Krigman noted in a NationalJournal article, “many schools still practice tracking in varied forms. In 2007, 75 percent of schools nationwide tracked 8th-grade math classes and 43 percent tracked 8th-grade English, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And, despite tracking’s negative reputation in the research community, its presence has remained relatively stable: From 1992 to 2007, the number of schools that track math in 8th grade increased by 3 percent; the number who tracked English classes dropped by 5 percent.” (December 14, 2009, updated January 2, 2011: http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/no_20091214_5320.php)

Why does tracking continue? I suspect because tracking has some formidable advantages for teaching and learning. Most importantly, tracking allows a teacher to direct lessons at the bulk of the class and not just subgroups within the class. Specifically, if my students are close in ability, I can spend my whole 50 minutes addressing one lesson. As I get a wider range of understanding in my classroom, I end up breaking the class into groups. Instead of one 50 minute lesson, I might now be teaching 3 different 15-minute lessons. In the first case, my students got a full 50 minutes of my time. In the latter, they effectively received 15 minutes instead. This one difference can be guaranteed to have a huge impact on student learning. Students are likely to receive substantially more useful instructional time when they are at similar learning levels.

I’d like to make a word substitution here; Instead of “tracking,” I now intend to use “ability grouping” to describe the process of putting students together based on similar academic performance levels. I have entered tricky territory here. These terms are not exactly synonymous, depending on sources. Questions of semantics abound when the topics of tracking and ability grouping hit the table.

A few of these semantic differences are worth noting. Many sources would agree that one significant difference exists between ability groups and tracking: Assignment to an ability group can be more easily changed than traditional tracking allowed. Traditional tracking placed a student into a preplanned, curricular sequence. In the past, this sequence might even have been listed on a transcript. Tracking represented a set of prospective classes into which a student would be placed.

Ability grouping often takes place on a classroom level with students placed into small groups based on previous academic performance. As such, ability grouping becomes one available grouping strategy, an alternative to mixed-ability groups. Groups can be readily changed from year to year and even semester to semester, based on test scores and other academic indicators.

While I may be leaping off a semantic cliff at this point by substituting ability grouping for tracking in most of what follows, these terms are used interchangeably by some sources and I prefer to use words that carry less historical baggage. While we should learn from the past, we are never locked into our past. Besides, educators are great at making up and changing words and acronyms. Look at the opener -> bell ringer -> do now, for example.

Modern districts are fully capable of creating classes based on academic mastery. Realistically speaking, most districts are drowning in data  — frequently more data than teachers and administrators can process during the little time remaining after all the spreadsheet preparation, meetings and tests. If administrators of the past could separate out students based on past performance, today’s administrators ought to be able to do so in a heartbeat, at least once they locate the right Google Docs.

Why group by academic mastery? Studies amply document the benefits of tracking for our highest academic achievers. Grouping produces academic gains for gifted students in no small part because these students then have to waste much less time listening to material they already know. Those students who “exceed expectations”? They deserve to see the more demanding material for which they are ready. They deserve an opportunity to answer critical thinking questions appropriate for their learning levels.

Studies are less clear on the academic benefits of grouping less-gifted students, but I believe a few essential observations are needed at this point: Studies don’t show that widespread inclusion, mixed grouping or more homogenous lower-level grouping improves education for our lower students. They tend to show that one system does not work appreciably better than the other systems in terms of increasing test scores.

Let me note that I believe a great deal of bias exists in these studies, much of it intended to prove the benefits of more universal inclusion. Let me also note that giving academically-lower students material at their learning level may not increase test scores – if the test does not match the material and their learning levels. Absent cheating, a student operating at a fourth-grade level in math will always bomb a test at a seventh-grade level, even if that student has technically advanced two or more years in mathematical mastery. Thus, ability grouping of lower students may be producing solid results that remain unproven due to faulty measuring instruments.

Some better studies use more appropriate tests and still find a lack of learning in mixed-group or lower-level classes, suggesting that academic problems within these lower classes remain intransigent whether higher-ability students are thrown into the mix or not. The quick reaction to these studies has usually been a demand for increasing academic rigor, despite a lack of evidence for the overall success of the greater-rigor approach. Too often, I fear, we are taking students who cannot jump the 6 foot hurdle and trying to solve their problems by giving them 8 foot hurdles instead.

To sum this up, ability grouping has not been proven to decrease learning overall for our academically-lower students. We have not yet found any win for those students other than intensive interventions that are more difficult in mixed-group classes than in similarly-grouped classes. Ability grouping has been proven to increase learning for our academically-stronger students. Given that high-achieving students clearly lose under the current trend of widely inclusive class placements, while lower-achieving students do not appear to gain, I suggest that America needs to begin seeking alternatives to our long-running inclusion experiment.

Eduhonesty: I have gone sideways in this post. I did not say what I had intended to say. The missing financial component in this post that I have not yet addressed has potent implications. The district where I live has a great deal more money than the district where I worked with those mixed-group classes. Where I live, students are grouped by ability and four different levels of high school math are available to students, depending on past performance. Where I worked, two levels were available but most students were place on the same track. Juniors took geometry. Stronger juniors might have a more demanding geometry class if their schedules permitted.

One problem with detracking, with moving toward widest-possible inclusion and mixed-groups, is that financially-disadvantaged school districts are more likely to choose this strategy simply because consolidating classes eliminates some classes, reducing offerings and thus saving money on teachers, books and supplies.

The research shows benefits to higher-achieving students from ability grouping, but in poorer districts that grouping happens less frequently, when it happens at all. This becomes yet another hidden obstacle to success for higher-achieving, financially-disadvantaged students.