Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion After decade of criticism, student grouping rises

we sure found that out (the hard way) this year! it never occurred to me that our carefully-chosen private school would take the view that if she was WAY beyond grade level, there was clearly no problem. i guesssss... but only if you ignore the whole wanting to quit school/wanting to be dead thing. at 5 years old.

"Accessible" is also a euphemism for the same thing. "We need to make the textbook more accessible" = "We need to dumb it down."

Beautifully put-- but especially the bolded portion.

We had ability grouping when I was at school with up to 6 groups. Being with the top 15%-20% of students is vastly better than lumping everyone together. You can move through material more quickly and, for example, get to calculus by grade 9 or 10. People around here are used to thinking of top 2.5% or top 0.1%, but even a top 15%-20% group can gain a couple of years over an average group.



What an infuriating article. I really wasn't aware of such extremist views. Why do some people think "Wider Achievement Gaps" is a bad thing. If everyone learns to the best of their ability, then of course there will be wider achievement gaps. Wider achievement gaps is what should happen.

I understand your frustration, and with kids in public schools, I've experienced it first hand. However, I think it is worth keeping in mind that practices to reduce the achievement gap are not driven by the notion that every child has equal potential.

Let's not forget that differences in environment also contribute to the gap. While my kids do have high IQs, their high level of achievement can be attributed in part to privilege - their basic human needs are met in a comfortable loving home where their every interest is indulged and supported and their every achievement is applauded. It is in the best interests of our society to support kids who are not so lucky to be privileged in the way mine are, so they have the necessary basic skills to have some quality of life as they become adults.

Right-- but the problem with implementing those (laudable) intentions is that there is a conflation of opportunity with measurable impact.

Just providing opportunity isn't enough, apparently... and we have to label and 'diagnose' reasons why some people don't/can't/won't take advantage of those opportunities and achieve the way that others (who already had them) do.

The assumption really DOES seem to be that if we're doing this all correctly, then EVERY child will be a high achiever.

That's simply not the case. It's very troubling that this is used as an argument against grouping by ability/readiness.

Not in our school district - I think they'd be ecstatic if every student learned how to read and do basic arithmetic. We're nowhere close to that right now.

And there is some good evidence that having a range of achievement levels in a class can benefit those at the lower end. That said, however, our district has extrapolated that evidence to dogmatic extreme by putting the *full* range of achievement levels in *every* classroom. There are many problems with this strategy, and the HG students suffer from it the most. I think the optimum lies somewhere in between this approach and full-on *tracking*. Grouping is just now being reintroduced in our district but there is a lot of pushback in the schools, from teachers AND parents....

If the home environment is a factor in lower achievement (which I believe it is), then focusing on the school environment won't correct the problem. But refusing to ability group does create new problems for any students who aren't moving at the group's pace.

Giving extra help to low SES may help them if done thoughtfully (which is wonderful). But I don't see why this means that kids who need a much faster or slower pace have to be gypped out of meaningful learning opportunities.

Right-- the problem isn't going to be solved by placing high ability students with those who need remedial pacing/material.

The underlying problem being one of non-enriched educational opportunity...

what the research seems to actually show is that ALL children do well with ENRICHED learning environments. But that is not the same thing as saying that they all achieve like HG+ learners. They don't-- but too many administrators think that the two things should be the same.

Placing high ability and low achievement kids in the same classrooms and giving them ALL the same instruction doesn't serve anyone very well. Giving them similar opportunities and enrichment within their on-level instruction is a GREAT idea, however-- but you've made that task a LOT harder if there is too wide a range of readiness and ideal pacing within that classroom.

Most states have a limit on class size. I sometimes wonder what would happen if class limits were expressed in standard deviations rather than numbers of students.

Imagine if you give the students an entrance exam for each subject. You calculate the mean and standard deviation of the scores. Then you divide them up into classrooms by standard deviations: Everyone between -3 and -1 SD in one class, everyone in -1 to +1 SD in another, and everyone in +1 to +3 SD in the last. You are treated as equally exceptional whether you are significantly above the mean, or below.

What would it be like to teach each of those classrooms?

Would this be fair?