I agree with pretty much everything that has been said so far. I especially feel strongly about ability grouping. I also believe that mixed age classrooms in general are better. My grandfather is over 100 and went to a small schoolhouse with all different ages. He paid attention when the teacher taught the older kids math and ended up learning it well ahead. He wasn't great at reading though and learned that with his age mates (mate). There was no set differentiation or acceleration, the kids just grouped by what they were ready for purely on their own. Certainly that works best if you have 20 kids total in the whole school (my grandfather's grade had 2 students, he always jokes he was the 2nd best student in his class!), but I think it also says something important and interesting even if it's no longer feasible.

My other thing that I feel strongly about is teaching beyond academics. How will a child living in poverty ever learn to manage money for instance? How will a kid who sees adults in their life making poor choices daily ever learn to be a good decision maker? We need to spend a lot of the day teaching real life skills to children, especially those children who are not learning it at home. IMO, this is an important part of breaking the poverty cycle. Will a child who realistically is not going to go on to college someday be better served with tons of state testing and instruction beyond their ability to get the best test results possible or academics at just the right level freeing up so much instructional time for learning about good nutrition and how to make a budget?

We need to teach all students to be better critical thinkers. To understand and interpret statistics and navigate a world full of advertising and politics. We need to teach logic rather than just textbook math. When you focus so much getting everyone up to a certain level on a test of a very limited number of subjects all else gets less time. I'm sure that the young person flipping burgers for a living and barely able to support herself and her 2 kids even with some public assistance would have been much better off learning some budgeting and decision making skills than learning a bunch of unconnected math she will never use.

When I went to school we had 4 groups in each grade. Group 1 was college prep and there were 3 other groups. The 4th was remedial. We were given tests for placement, but each year some moved up and some moved down. We took entirely different classes or different versions of the same class or went at a different pace. People learned what they needed to learn to go on to the careers they were best suited to. If your dad was a mechanic and you wanted to be a mechanic too you could just take what you needed to to graduate and do what you wanted with your life. Over a third of my classmates went to vocational school for high school. I started college early. My school was actually not very good in general (poor, rural area), but ability grouping was one things they got right.

I would also argue that the assertion that less able kids benefit and so do more able from mixed ability classes sounds ridiculous to me. More able children are frustrated. They are held back in their learning and development. They often end up being more intolerant of the slower kids who are holding them back and who they are often tasked with tutoring (to help them master the material better too, of course). And the less able kids honestly feel stupid. They know they are slower. I personally would rather have a hard time mastering addition in 3rd grade with other kids in the same boat than with a bunch of kids who are learning times tables and a few who seem to get everything the first time the teacher presents it and complain about waiting for me to finish up my work each day. I honestly think ability grouping leads to better self esteem and more effective teaching of all abilities.

OK, said my bit. Not that it will make any difference. Our solution was to leave public education entirely and do homeschooling and we are now trying out private gifted school. I'm not sure that public could ever meet my sons needs and prior experience makes me hesitant to ever try again. What could they do with a first grader who has mastered elementary math? The elementary teachers aren't likely to have the expertise to teach higher math even if they had the time and the inclination. This leads into better teacher training of course. I'll never forget the day in 3rd grade when I realized I was smarter than my teacher. While he was spectacularly unintelligent even for an elementary teacher in my district, it was still hard for me to cope with listening to and supposedly learning from someone who I could think circles around. Soon I was smarter than all of my teachers. And I was never identified as gifted. How much harder must it be for the most gifted children to deal with being taught by people who can't even understand at the level they can understand at? So, yeah, better and more highly educated teachers who are compensated accordingly, I'll add that to my most important points:) OK, that's really it!