When I went to school, junior high was heterogeneous and I was miserable. High school was tracked and pretty good. It was divided like the article said, into Applied Arts, College Prep, and Honors. Applied Arts was where kids who would likely work or go to a trade school after high school took classes that taught them skills, College Prep was for kids who would go to a mid-level state college, then work in a white collar job. Honors was for kids who would end up at the University of California or a quality private university like Stanford or Cal Tech.
I was shocked to discover that there were no Applied Arts at my kids' high school, everyone was being prepared for college whether they liked it or not, and my kids considered college prep as classes for dummies. It seemed like a typical modern euphemism intended to make people feel good without actually improving anything.
I feel sorry for the kids who might have enjoyed metal shop, wood shop, auto repair, graphic arts, or other applied art classes, and who would have gained skills that could bring in decent pay, but who instead drop out of the totally useless (for them) college prep classes and go into low level service jobs or become single mothers.
They still have the tracks, they just have different names. College prep is for students who likely drop out or barely graduate with no skills and be miserable, honors is for students who will likely go to a state college, and AP is for students who will likely go to University of California or a quality private school like Stanford or Cal Tech.
The only change is the names and the fate of the lowest academic track. They are the losers in the current system.
I took and loved metal shop, auto shop, and wood shop (I still use the desk I made in it), and went on to Caltech. Engineering is more than just math - it's about making things!
Track 3, requires 7th grade pre-algebra and 8th grade algebra. They are equivalent to Algebra 9A and 9B. Our 8th grade algebra even qualifies as "high school math" for qualification for the Illinois Math and Sciences Academy(IMSA).
I enjoyed metal shop and even woodworking shop, but that didn't stopped me to go to college. In fact, I found those classes to be more important in life than other well established and respectable subjects, such as english and literature.
I don't care for this stuff. I don't think children should be placed into these tracks; it reinforces many problems. You have kids getting stuck into vocational trades because some administrator thinks they can't handle it or perhaps they haven't "blossomed" intellectually, or because of their family or family's station in life, think that's all they can do.
Sorry, but the "honors if for state college bound and AP is for UC bound" little formula you have there just makes my eyes roll.
As a current high school student, I can say that the trend away from tracking, at least in my district, is largely a product of parental indignation: they feel as though their kids are being systematically disadvantaged or academically repressed due to some sort of misguided assessment of their kid's innate ability. It's really pretty intuitive; no one wants to be told that their kid is too dumb to succeed in the upper-echelons of secondary education.
Although, in my personal opinion, tracking is probably detrimental inasmuch as success in high school is determined by sheer effort and monetary resources (and to a much lesser extent by academic ability.) Most people are capable of sufficiently completing most AP courses, but either don't have a desire to work for 4 hours per night on top of 10 hours at school, or aren't even offered the opportunity to take them. Because of that, tracking (like most other paradigms in k-12 education) rewards people with high income and supportive parents that compel their kid to take on more responsibility, and ends up artificially excluding potentially qualified students based on a test they took when they were literally 10 years old and is defined largely by wealth anyway.
On top of this, tracking involves a disproportionate allocation of resources whereby the "smart" kids get the most time poured into them, artificially increasing their test scores to a greater extent while leaving the less-qualified students out to dry. Malcolm Gladwell articulates this quite well in Outliers (which everyone ought to read). So, an arbitrary difference when one is 10 becomes a massive dichotomy when individuals are 18 because the kids on the higher track are given access to superior resources, while the kids who aren't are perpetually disadvantaged. Tracking takes minute differences in intelligence and, based largely off of one's circumstances and not innate ability, exacerbates those differences through unfair allocation of resources.
Tracking is largely arbitrary, enables disproportionate appropriation of district resources, and is needlessly exclusionary.
Just a minor comment: I assume you are well read, but one of the biggest tells of being a clever youth is writing style. George Orwell had some good advice on the matter here:
I've taken the liberty of rephrasing your post below:
I'm in high school; I think that we've stopped using
tracking because parents don't like it--nobody wants to
be told their kid isn't talented.
I'm not sure this is wrong. Tracking seems to be more a
function of wealth and parental guidance than of talent.
This being the case, we end up with a system that rewards
kids with those resources and ignores--or even slights!--
those without.
Another awful feature of tracking is that it multiplies
differences over time: because resources are allocated
based on test performance, minor differences in scores
snowball over time--two students with only minor
differences in ability may well end up in very different
classes, with one being trained to get to the next level
and the other abandoned by the system charged with
teaching them.
To sum up: the choice of tracks is arbitrary, unfairly
spreads resources, and is too skewed in demographics.
The only problem I experienced with this sort of system is if you're a smart kid that missed the jump when it came around because you weren't really serious about school yet. In my district you were basically judged at the end of elementary school on your last years performance grade-wise, and that would determine the rest of your academic future. When I was 10 years old, playing basketball and running around in the woods building forts took much greater priority over doing homework and I was a B student, never mind that I could ace any test without even trying. I was put in the regents classes. The "honors" kids simply ended up taking a year of condensed classes, and then were just a year ahead in all the subjects, allowing them to take a plethora of AP courses for college credit in their junior and senior years. Around 8th grade I got serious about tech and science and learning, but it was impossible to be advanced to the honors courses unless my parents were to raise a major stink which they were too modest to do. So I was just stuck in the "newb" classes the rest of my career and had to head into college with practically no AP credits. I think tracking and having different tiers is great, but there should be flexible mobility throughout the entire journey.
A lot of this has to do with Obama allowing states to waiver out of the No Child Left Behind program, effectively repealing it, which is for the better.
No Child Left Behind pretty much forced teachers into focusing on the lowest common denominator, as the objective was to have 100% pass rating by 2014 or 2015 for all students, and federal monies were tied to that objective.
As we can pretty much all attest to, 100% metric on anything is effectively ridiculous as a required hurdle. While certainly not a bad ideal, 100% is practically impossible.
As a one-time "gifted student", who eventually grew bored of traditional education because there was nobody to challenge me, and it wasn't until I got into technology as a career that my desire to learn was rekindled.
As a parent, I routinely try to find things that my daughter is interested in, even if it seems nonsensical, and try to apply deeper-learning techniques to it, if only to stoke the thirst for knowledge that I hope she never loses.
Surprisingly my state (the supermajority leftist CA) has not waived NCLB [1]. I have no idea what "costs" it would entail, but I see no reason why organization would agree to ludicrously unachievable goals like 100% passage rates - unless folks in that organization wanted it to fail (for political purposes).
A few days ago another article about education from The Atlantic made it to the front page [0] and the subtitle was: "The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence." .
I tend to agree with the other article rather than with this one: I tend to think that we often underestimate the power of positive peer interaction. A student that is momentarily better at math can tutor one of his classmates, while later during the day the roles could be inverted for biology or grammar.
What is really happening is that equality has become a race to the bottom, where as the article says: the overall quality of education has plummeted and the only acceptable form of testing is by multiple choice.
A little anecdote: my girlfriend has studied in France, she's been to a generalist high school (as opposed to professional) and it was generally well known that if you didn't want to be in a class where the lower class, troubled kids were, you had to choose German as a second foreign language, because the trouble kids largely went for Spanish.
This goes to say that even a fairly egalitarian system will be gamed, and that the dynamics involved often involve wealth and social status (let's call it class) rather than raw brainpower. And even raw brainpower is largely a function of social standing.
I have two kids going through the US education system at the moment and I think about this stuff a lot, having gone through a different system myself.
One of the challenges in the US is the lack of a proper examination system that tests what you've learned. There may be problems with O-levels/GCSEs and A-levels in the UK or their equivalents in other European countries, but proper exams - not just multiple choice tests that are little more than proxies for IQ testing - are a good starting point for understanding who has learned what and when. Regrouping kids year by year to ensure that they're getting the best support for learning at the pace they're ready for is a lot easier when you have some standards.
A key problem is that pretty much ANY change is resisted. If it's a change that emulates another country that does better than the US at education the knee jerk reaction is to explain why the American system is so much superior. Yet we continue to fail to educate our kids, churning them out with little knowledge of the world, woeful critical thinking skills, and often lacking the curiosity necessary to seek out self-improvement on either front.
Edit: One more thought that strikes me is the terrible state of tertiary education. Colleges have byzantine admissions systems that favor nepotism and subjective criteria (partially no doubt a factor of no real exam system at 18 that you can base entry on). Many of the top colleges have become - to steal someone else's rather nice phrase - hedge funds with schools attached for tax reasons. They've taken all the money off the table - in that your lifetime expected earnings increase is now approximately equal to the fully costed amount you'll spend gaining the degree, in many cases. That absolutely trickles down a negative impact on the younger levels of education - when things other than what you learn at elementary and high school level have the greatest impact your ability to gain benefit from the college cycle.
tl;dr I agree we should have ability streaming so long as there is a mechanism to rejig the streaming every year to make up for those surging ahead and help those falling behind where they were placed the year before
I think we should go further and eliminate age-based grades. For every subject, kids should be grouped with students that are his/her equal. That may mean one student is with kids two years older in English and two years younger in Math. Kids shouldn't be able to move forward until they've mastered the material at their level.
It is asinine that a high school student is not able to read or perform basic arithmetic. But, hey, they get to play with their friends every year for 12 years.
(This is said as a father of four very diverse kids, including one who suffers from a mental illness, two who are in gifted/honors programs, and one who never really aligned with the education machine and failed to thrive as a result.)
I think this has an enormous amount of practical problems in terms of implementation, class room dynamics, and so on. You really think public schools should do this?
When I was in the 5th or 6th grade I tested three levels below where I was supposed to be in mathematics. It wasn't because I was brilliant and board, it was simply because I was board and didn't care. Yet, because I was a home schooled student I was able to progress at a normal rate in my other classes without being lumped in with other underperforming students. I eventually found a modicum of enjoyment in mathematics through my love of science and went on to minor in the subject in college.
(I realize this is an anecdotal story, but I still think it has some relevance to this discussion.)
I hope that if the public school system adopts a program of grouping students by "ability" they will find a way to attempt to push underperforming students ahead as fast as possible. Interacting with other kids who were better at math in some of the sciences classes I took helped me improve my skills in math. I don't know if I would have done that if I was in classes full of other kids who were constantly underperforming all the time.
I didn't RTFA, but the headline made me think about my experience in 7th/8th grade when I moved to a new city. In previous years my grades in math were pretty bleak. When I transferred, they made a mistake and put me in honors Algebra. I just sort of went with it and it was a nightmare. I had essentially skipped a year of some essential math that wasn't being covered and we were, of course, expected to know. The experience was horrifying and I essentially BS'd my way through the class for the first half of the year. However, at some point things started clicking and by the end of the year I was good to go. I continued with honors math in high school, including pre-calc and calculus and then took every math class known to man to get my mechanical engineering degree. I now wonder what would have happened if they decided I had "low ability" based on my previous performance.
They link to a paper which states that sorting benefits both high and low-performing students. However, it helps high-performing students more, which may explain why sorting has been unpopular in the last few decades. People are so into 'equality' they end up being in favor of results where everyone does worse if there's a smaller spread, i.e. more 'equal'. This way they can say they closed the 'gap' or something like that. Helping bright students excel is almost 'undemocratic'.
I'd be interested in some kind of social and/or psychological measures in addition to test-taking measures. My own experience as a "gifted" student is that I did not greatly enjoy or become motivated by being in "gifted" courses. My 4th-5th grade were entirely tracked, then 6th-8th were tracked more weakly, and high school varied depending on the course.
I much preferred the subset of courses that were mixed, which I found more rewarding on many axes, at least once I got to high school (I don't know whether I would've preferred a non-tracked 4th grade). The non-tracked courses were more rewarding in terms of socializing and friendships. I also found they played better to my own strengths, which are aligned more towards trying to help out fellow students who were having trouble with material in one way or another, rather than competing with them. In "gifted-only" classes, I found more people were overachievers more interested in outdoing me than swapping strengths. I found I learned best myself when I had opportunities for informal tutoring, which happened more in the mixed-skill classes, where someone actually was interested in me helping them.
They weren't always the same sorting of skills, either. I would guess I was in the "upper" part of the mixed-skill classes in most of those I took, but I had some useful experiences when some of the same people I helped out in a science course in turn helped me out in an art course, which I wasn't great at. At least half the intrinsic joy of learning something, imo, is being able to share it with someone who doesn't (yet) understand it as well as you do.
One of the main things I learned by being in a "gifted" program in school, was that it's very rare that someone is truly "permanently ahead." Kids will be early at learning some things, late at learning other things, but by 18 or so the majority of the population will have arrived at a similar skill level in most subjects[1].
This might be an effect of the current education system, not a cause, but I still think it's wrong-headed to put kids permanently into a "teach all the harder stuff RIGHT NOW" class just because they happened to have mastered one or two things early. It may just mean their parents decided to teach them one or two things the other kids' parents didn't; it doesn't mean they're at the developmental stage where they can absorb the more difficult material.[2]
What would help, in my mind, is for kids to be able to learn each subject at their own, separate pace--one "micro-skill" at a time, advancing to the next only when all the micro-skills relied upon as a base for the next micro-skill have been mastered (100%ed). [Think of it sort of like an unlockable "tech tree" of education.] For this to work, a school would need to provide:
A. free access to recorded lectures--not necessarily created by the school, but hopefully taken from the very best presentations of that micro-skill in the world;
B. computerized tests for each individual micro-skill that can be retaken infinitely without score penalty (but procedurally-generated so that this can't be used as a way to cheat), and which, importantly, should also be able to be used as a pre-test to "test out" of having to learn things one already knows;
C. the availability of tutoring/mentoring from others who have just finished learning the micro-skill (not teachers, for whom it's been forever since they learned it; and especially not "peers", who don't understand what they're saying yet.)
This is very difficult to implement, though, when the majority of school-time until at least University (and sometimes continuing through undergraduate studies) is spent in centralized lectures on messy conglomerations of many micro-skills taught in arbitrary order (that is, "courses"), where for each one, the students likely are either "above" or "below" the level.
This format won't be going away any time soon, so these hare-brained "just move them up or down in everything" schemes will continue to be put forth in its place.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_cognitive_development -- basically, there is a reason we don't start mathematics education with set theory, even though it's more "fundamental"--it's more abstract, and abstraction requires faculties that don't develop until later on. The same can be said for teaching kids "real programming" at an early age.
This is not true and suggests that the author has limited experience dealing with the general population. The college going population is not the general one, and even within that population there are huge differences in ability. This is like saying that UC Berkeley and Cal State San Jose are not meaningfully different in their student intake.
"What would help, in my mind, is for kids to be able to learn each subject at their own, separate pace--one "micro-skill" at a time, advancing to the next only when all the micro-skills relied upon as a base for the next micro-skill have been mastered (100%ed). [Think of it sort of like an unlockable "tech tree" of education.]"
This is exactly what the Khan Academy is doing. I believe there's at least one school (not sure if public or private) where they're experimenting with that model. See:
IIRC, the students in the class take most of the lessons via computer/tablet and move forward once they've answered a certain number of quiz problems correctly. The teacher can monitor the progress of each student, and if one is having difficulty than he/she can get some individual help from the teacher or another student.
basically, there is a reason we don't start mathematics education with set theory, even though it's more "fundamental"
Ah, that brings back memories, because I grew up in the heyday of "New Math". We called September "Set-tember", because every September year after year we started each school year with yet another review of sets: union, intersection, subsets, empty sets. If Set A contains blah-blah and Set B contains foo-foo, list the elements in A union B, A minus B, etc., etc., et cetera.
We were all so sick of sets we could hardly stand it, had no idea why they were seemingly the most important topic in all of math, and couldn't wait to get past sets and, around October or so, find out what we were actually going to do in math that year.
Grouping children by ability is fantastic for the majority of students. The reality is trouble kids distract the entire class, as well as stealing teaching time that could be used on everyone else. It's imprudent to remain politically correct at the detriment of the majority of learners.
Grouping by _occupation_ however is foolish, we don't know what the economy will look like tomorrow, let alone what jobs will be ready when the kids leave school. Also capability isn't restricted by occupation, there are plenty of brilliant individuals who choose trades over intellectual pursuits.
In many ways NCLB hampers the performance of public schools which in turn tarnishes their reputation. By focusing on conformity instead of individual ability it's difficult to actually group children effectively.
If there is new evidence suggesting ability grouping works better for everyone then that's interesting and certainly worth looking at, but highly unlikely since it contradicts the last 5 decades of research.
Regardless, by coercing states into evaluating their teachers with VAM the DOE has effectively made ability grouping illegal since the tests aren't vertically scaled.
When I was in junior high, just after a grade skip, I was mostly in "tracked" classes. Although I didn't like the grade skip (from fifth to seventh, which put me in a new school while my previous classmates were still in sixth grade at the elementary school), I did like being among classmates who in general were smarter than average. (I still had industrial arts classes and physical education classes with the general school population, and there was only one choir class.)
I hear that now that junior high schools are mostly called "middle schools," there has been a strong middle school philosophy of having all classes for early adolescents be heterogeneously grouped. That doesn't sound like a good educational idea to me. I fully approve of the idea of young people learning to get along with people of all ability levels. I have good friends from my non-tracked elementary school classes whom I am catching up with recently after FORTY YEARS of not seeing one another. (Facebook has helped a lot with that reconnecting.) I have lifelong friends from the tracked classes after the grade skip too, including a childhood best friend after whom I named my oldest son.
Even more important than grouping by ability, methinks, is upping the curriculum standard for everybody. In Taiwan, where my wife grew up, the seventh grade mathematics curriculum includes a good bit of algebra and geometry for everybody--including all the below-average students. I didn't see algebra, even with a tracked math class, until eighth grade in Minnesota, and when my family moved to Wisconsin the next school year, the highest math class in ninth grade was studying the same beginning algebra class from the same textbook I had already had the year before. The countries with the best performance in primary schooling get it in large part by having specialist teachers in the core subjects in elementary school. United States elementary teachers are expected to be generalists, but in practice they devote a lot of time and effort being jacks of all trades but masters of none.
Let's do better for everybody in school. Let's get a reality check on aspirations by emulating best practice wherever it is found.
One statement in the article especially stood out to me: "Exercises in grammar have declined to the point that they are virtually extinct." I have observed this in suburban schools in the area near where I live. My second son (an aspiring writer since early homeschooling days, who has pursued a lot of knowledge about writing) reports that few of his classmates in the high school classes he now attends have had any instruction in grammar. I have been doing some tutoring for college entrance tests from time to time, and really, really bright young people who need no help at all from me in mathematics have not learned even the most basic grammatical terminology for revising English prose or identifying errors in writing. Ouch.
AFTER EDIT: I see another comment in this thread includes the statement
but by 18 or so the majority of the population will have arrived at a similar skill level in most subjects[1].
And the reference provided for the statement, about "regression to the mean," illustrates that the statement is untrue, because when I graduated from high school, I was aware that that claimed situation is NOT what "regression to the mean" is about. Most eighteen-year-olds, and plenty of older people, have no idea what regression to the mean is. There is a huge variation in skill level in most subjects among eighteen-year-olds in the United States and most places.
It seems the "level" of education at a certain grade is highly variable in the United States. I grew up in Michigan, who, at the time, was a leader in education in the States, and I was seeing beginning algebra in 5th and 6th grade. We moved to Illinois when I was in High School, and experienced much the same your transition to Wisconsin.
These days, still in Illinois, my 7th grade daughter is doing high school level algebra and some geometry.
For a little context, 7th grade pre-algebra + 8th grade algebra is equivalent to Algebra 9 (she'll start with Algebra 10 in high school). 9th graders can take either Algebra 9 as a freshman then Algebra 10 as a sophomore, and so on, or Algebra 9A as a freshman and Algebra 9B as a sophomore.
"There is a huge variation in skill level in most subjects among eighteen-year-olds in the United States and most places."
I agree with you there, but I do think in terms of ability (if not skill level) then there is an evening out that takes place over time. (I would say more like 25 rather than 18 though.) On a biological level things like developmental delays tend to wash out over time. Even kids with mild autism tend to become more or less normal after a while. And on a social level people become less dependent on their personalities, which is important since a lot of what is considered ability is actually probably just personality to begin with.
> computer-aided learning might make it easier for them to instruct students who learn at different rates.
Yep. We need this. In particular I think we need to have testing which is adapted to students current knowledge -- more on this here: http://minireference.com/blog/exams-suck/
My only complaint is that being labelled "slow learner" might be discouraging to the students. I would opt for having a "standard" track and a "extra stuff" track, but not a "you are slow" track.
The choice between streaming and not is essentially the choice between wide disparities in educational achievement and not.
Let's stop talking about personal experience and get real. Let's talk objectively instead. Pretty much ALL the research since the war has shown that streaming results in higher achievement for high achievers, and lower achievement for lower achievers.
If you're happy with those disparities, that's fine.
[+] [-] davidroberts|13 years ago|reply
I was shocked to discover that there were no Applied Arts at my kids' high school, everyone was being prepared for college whether they liked it or not, and my kids considered college prep as classes for dummies. It seemed like a typical modern euphemism intended to make people feel good without actually improving anything.
I feel sorry for the kids who might have enjoyed metal shop, wood shop, auto repair, graphic arts, or other applied art classes, and who would have gained skills that could bring in decent pay, but who instead drop out of the totally useless (for them) college prep classes and go into low level service jobs or become single mothers.
They still have the tracks, they just have different names. College prep is for students who likely drop out or barely graduate with no skills and be miserable, honors is for students who will likely go to a state college, and AP is for students who will likely go to University of California or a quality private school like Stanford or Cal Tech.
The only change is the names and the fate of the lowest academic track. They are the losers in the current system.
[+] [-] WalterBright|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmj42|13 years ago|reply
1. Algebra 9A; Algebra 9B; Algebra 10; Geometry 2. Algebra 9; Algebra 10; Geometry; < various choices> 3. Algebra 10; Geometry; <choices>; <AP Choices>
Track 3, requires 7th grade pre-algebra and 8th grade algebra. They are equivalent to Algebra 9A and 9B. Our 8th grade algebra even qualifies as "high school math" for qualification for the Illinois Math and Sciences Academy(IMSA).
[+] [-] Gleaming|13 years ago|reply
It isn't a either/or thing. And it shouldn't be.
[+] [-] jdmichal|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|13 years ago|reply
Sorry, but the "honors if for state college bound and AP is for UC bound" little formula you have there just makes my eyes roll.
[+] [-] ruswick|13 years ago|reply
Although, in my personal opinion, tracking is probably detrimental inasmuch as success in high school is determined by sheer effort and monetary resources (and to a much lesser extent by academic ability.) Most people are capable of sufficiently completing most AP courses, but either don't have a desire to work for 4 hours per night on top of 10 hours at school, or aren't even offered the opportunity to take them. Because of that, tracking (like most other paradigms in k-12 education) rewards people with high income and supportive parents that compel their kid to take on more responsibility, and ends up artificially excluding potentially qualified students based on a test they took when they were literally 10 years old and is defined largely by wealth anyway.
On top of this, tracking involves a disproportionate allocation of resources whereby the "smart" kids get the most time poured into them, artificially increasing their test scores to a greater extent while leaving the less-qualified students out to dry. Malcolm Gladwell articulates this quite well in Outliers (which everyone ought to read). So, an arbitrary difference when one is 10 becomes a massive dichotomy when individuals are 18 because the kids on the higher track are given access to superior resources, while the kids who aren't are perpetually disadvantaged. Tracking takes minute differences in intelligence and, based largely off of one's circumstances and not innate ability, exacerbates those differences through unfair allocation of resources.
Tracking is largely arbitrary, enables disproportionate appropriation of district resources, and is needlessly exclusionary.
Just my two cents...
[+] [-] angersock|13 years ago|reply
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
I've taken the liberty of rephrasing your post below:
See? Much more readable.[+] [-] mattsfrey|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmelton|13 years ago|reply
No Child Left Behind pretty much forced teachers into focusing on the lowest common denominator, as the objective was to have 100% pass rating by 2014 or 2015 for all students, and federal monies were tied to that objective.
As we can pretty much all attest to, 100% metric on anything is effectively ridiculous as a required hurdle. While certainly not a bad ideal, 100% is practically impossible.
As a one-time "gifted student", who eventually grew bored of traditional education because there was nobody to challenge me, and it wasn't until I got into technology as a career that my desire to learn was rekindled.
As a parent, I routinely try to find things that my daughter is interested in, even if it seems nonsensical, and try to apply deeper-learning techniques to it, if only to stoke the thirst for knowledge that I hope she never loses.
[+] [-] r00fus|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.cep-dc.org/page.cfm?FloatingPageID=22
[+] [-] carlob|13 years ago|reply
I tend to agree with the other article rather than with this one: I tend to think that we often underestimate the power of positive peer interaction. A student that is momentarily better at math can tutor one of his classmates, while later during the day the roles could be inverted for biology or grammar.
What is really happening is that equality has become a race to the bottom, where as the article says: the overall quality of education has plummeted and the only acceptable form of testing is by multiple choice.
A little anecdote: my girlfriend has studied in France, she's been to a generalist high school (as opposed to professional) and it was generally well known that if you didn't want to be in a class where the lower class, troubled kids were, you had to choose German as a second foreign language, because the trouble kids largely went for Spanish.
This goes to say that even a fairly egalitarian system will be gamed, and that the dynamics involved often involve wealth and social status (let's call it class) rather than raw brainpower. And even raw brainpower is largely a function of social standing.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399143
[+] [-] richardjordan|13 years ago|reply
One of the challenges in the US is the lack of a proper examination system that tests what you've learned. There may be problems with O-levels/GCSEs and A-levels in the UK or their equivalents in other European countries, but proper exams - not just multiple choice tests that are little more than proxies for IQ testing - are a good starting point for understanding who has learned what and when. Regrouping kids year by year to ensure that they're getting the best support for learning at the pace they're ready for is a lot easier when you have some standards.
A key problem is that pretty much ANY change is resisted. If it's a change that emulates another country that does better than the US at education the knee jerk reaction is to explain why the American system is so much superior. Yet we continue to fail to educate our kids, churning them out with little knowledge of the world, woeful critical thinking skills, and often lacking the curiosity necessary to seek out self-improvement on either front.
Edit: One more thought that strikes me is the terrible state of tertiary education. Colleges have byzantine admissions systems that favor nepotism and subjective criteria (partially no doubt a factor of no real exam system at 18 that you can base entry on). Many of the top colleges have become - to steal someone else's rather nice phrase - hedge funds with schools attached for tax reasons. They've taken all the money off the table - in that your lifetime expected earnings increase is now approximately equal to the fully costed amount you'll spend gaining the degree, in many cases. That absolutely trickles down a negative impact on the younger levels of education - when things other than what you learn at elementary and high school level have the greatest impact your ability to gain benefit from the college cycle.
tl;dr I agree we should have ability streaming so long as there is a mechanism to rejig the streaming every year to make up for those surging ahead and help those falling behind where they were placed the year before
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|13 years ago|reply
It is asinine that a high school student is not able to read or perform basic arithmetic. But, hey, they get to play with their friends every year for 12 years.
(This is said as a father of four very diverse kids, including one who suffers from a mental illness, two who are in gifted/honors programs, and one who never really aligned with the education machine and failed to thrive as a result.)
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eduardo3rd|13 years ago|reply
(I realize this is an anecdotal story, but I still think it has some relevance to this discussion.)
I hope that if the public school system adopts a program of grouping students by "ability" they will find a way to attempt to push underperforming students ahead as fast as possible. Interacting with other kids who were better at math in some of the sciences classes I took helped me improve my skills in math. I don't know if I would have done that if I was in classes full of other kids who were constantly underperforming all the time.
[+] [-] Mc_Big_G|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arikrak|13 years ago|reply
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18848
[+] [-] _delirium|13 years ago|reply
I much preferred the subset of courses that were mixed, which I found more rewarding on many axes, at least once I got to high school (I don't know whether I would've preferred a non-tracked 4th grade). The non-tracked courses were more rewarding in terms of socializing and friendships. I also found they played better to my own strengths, which are aligned more towards trying to help out fellow students who were having trouble with material in one way or another, rather than competing with them. In "gifted-only" classes, I found more people were overachievers more interested in outdoing me than swapping strengths. I found I learned best myself when I had opportunities for informal tutoring, which happened more in the mixed-skill classes, where someone actually was interested in me helping them.
They weren't always the same sorting of skills, either. I would guess I was in the "upper" part of the mixed-skill classes in most of those I took, but I had some useful experiences when some of the same people I helped out in a science course in turn helped me out in an art course, which I wasn't great at. At least half the intrinsic joy of learning something, imo, is being able to share it with someone who doesn't (yet) understand it as well as you do.
[+] [-] derefr|13 years ago|reply
This might be an effect of the current education system, not a cause, but I still think it's wrong-headed to put kids permanently into a "teach all the harder stuff RIGHT NOW" class just because they happened to have mastered one or two things early. It may just mean their parents decided to teach them one or two things the other kids' parents didn't; it doesn't mean they're at the developmental stage where they can absorb the more difficult material.[2]
What would help, in my mind, is for kids to be able to learn each subject at their own, separate pace--one "micro-skill" at a time, advancing to the next only when all the micro-skills relied upon as a base for the next micro-skill have been mastered (100%ed). [Think of it sort of like an unlockable "tech tree" of education.] For this to work, a school would need to provide:
A. free access to recorded lectures--not necessarily created by the school, but hopefully taken from the very best presentations of that micro-skill in the world;
B. computerized tests for each individual micro-skill that can be retaken infinitely without score penalty (but procedurally-generated so that this can't be used as a way to cheat), and which, importantly, should also be able to be used as a pre-test to "test out" of having to learn things one already knows;
C. the availability of tutoring/mentoring from others who have just finished learning the micro-skill (not teachers, for whom it's been forever since they learned it; and especially not "peers", who don't understand what they're saying yet.)
This is very difficult to implement, though, when the majority of school-time until at least University (and sometimes continuing through undergraduate studies) is spent in centralized lectures on messy conglomerations of many micro-skills taught in arbitrary order (that is, "courses"), where for each one, the students likely are either "above" or "below" the level.
This format won't be going away any time soon, so these hare-brained "just move them up or down in everything" schemes will continue to be put forth in its place.
---
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_cognitive_development -- basically, there is a reason we don't start mathematics education with set theory, even though it's more "fundamental"--it's more abstract, and abstraction requires faculties that don't develop until later on. The same can be said for teaching kids "real programming" at an early age.
[+] [-] barry-cotter|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
This is not true and suggests that the author has limited experience dealing with the general population. The college going population is not the general one, and even within that population there are huge differences in ability. This is like saying that UC Berkeley and Cal State San Jose are not meaningfully different in their student intake.
[+] [-] croyd|13 years ago|reply
This is exactly what the Khan Academy is doing. I believe there's at least one school (not sure if public or private) where they're experimenting with that model. See:
http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_rein...
IIRC, the students in the class take most of the lessons via computer/tablet and move forward once they've answered a certain number of quiz problems correctly. The teacher can monitor the progress of each student, and if one is having difficulty than he/she can get some individual help from the teacher or another student.
[+] [-] SiVal|13 years ago|reply
Ah, that brings back memories, because I grew up in the heyday of "New Math". We called September "Set-tember", because every September year after year we started each school year with yet another review of sets: union, intersection, subsets, empty sets. If Set A contains blah-blah and Set B contains foo-foo, list the elements in A union B, A minus B, etc., etc., et cetera.
We were all so sick of sets we could hardly stand it, had no idea why they were seemingly the most important topic in all of math, and couldn't wait to get past sets and, around October or so, find out what we were actually going to do in math that year.
[+] [-] pippy|13 years ago|reply
Grouping by _occupation_ however is foolish, we don't know what the economy will look like tomorrow, let alone what jobs will be ready when the kids leave school. Also capability isn't restricted by occupation, there are plenty of brilliant individuals who choose trades over intellectual pursuits.
In many ways NCLB hampers the performance of public schools which in turn tarnishes their reputation. By focusing on conformity instead of individual ability it's difficult to actually group children effectively.
[+] [-] Alex3917|13 years ago|reply
http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/the-most-im...
If there is new evidence suggesting ability grouping works better for everyone then that's interesting and certainly worth looking at, but highly unlikely since it contradicts the last 5 decades of research.
Regardless, by coercing states into evaluating their teachers with VAM the DOE has effectively made ability grouping illegal since the tests aren't vertically scaled.
[+] [-] tokenadult|13 years ago|reply
I hear that now that junior high schools are mostly called "middle schools," there has been a strong middle school philosophy of having all classes for early adolescents be heterogeneously grouped. That doesn't sound like a good educational idea to me. I fully approve of the idea of young people learning to get along with people of all ability levels. I have good friends from my non-tracked elementary school classes whom I am catching up with recently after FORTY YEARS of not seeing one another. (Facebook has helped a lot with that reconnecting.) I have lifelong friends from the tracked classes after the grade skip too, including a childhood best friend after whom I named my oldest son.
Even more important than grouping by ability, methinks, is upping the curriculum standard for everybody. In Taiwan, where my wife grew up, the seventh grade mathematics curriculum includes a good bit of algebra and geometry for everybody--including all the below-average students. I didn't see algebra, even with a tracked math class, until eighth grade in Minnesota, and when my family moved to Wisconsin the next school year, the highest math class in ninth grade was studying the same beginning algebra class from the same textbook I had already had the year before. The countries with the best performance in primary schooling get it in large part by having specialist teachers in the core subjects in elementary school. United States elementary teachers are expected to be generalists, but in practice they devote a lot of time and effort being jacks of all trades but masters of none.
http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf
Let's do better for everybody in school. Let's get a reality check on aspirations by emulating best practice wherever it is found.
One statement in the article especially stood out to me: "Exercises in grammar have declined to the point that they are virtually extinct." I have observed this in suburban schools in the area near where I live. My second son (an aspiring writer since early homeschooling days, who has pursued a lot of knowledge about writing) reports that few of his classmates in the high school classes he now attends have had any instruction in grammar. I have been doing some tutoring for college entrance tests from time to time, and really, really bright young people who need no help at all from me in mathematics have not learned even the most basic grammatical terminology for revising English prose or identifying errors in writing. Ouch.
AFTER EDIT: I see another comment in this thread includes the statement
but by 18 or so the majority of the population will have arrived at a similar skill level in most subjects[1].
That is not factually correct.
http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-notes/2012...
And the reference provided for the statement, about "regression to the mean," illustrates that the statement is untrue, because when I graduated from high school, I was aware that that claimed situation is NOT what "regression to the mean" is about. Most eighteen-year-olds, and plenty of older people, have no idea what regression to the mean is. There is a huge variation in skill level in most subjects among eighteen-year-olds in the United States and most places.
[+] [-] jmj42|13 years ago|reply
These days, still in Illinois, my 7th grade daughter is doing high school level algebra and some geometry.
For a little context, 7th grade pre-algebra + 8th grade algebra is equivalent to Algebra 9 (she'll start with Algebra 10 in high school). 9th graders can take either Algebra 9 as a freshman then Algebra 10 as a sophomore, and so on, or Algebra 9A as a freshman and Algebra 9B as a sophomore.
[+] [-] Alex3917|13 years ago|reply
I agree with you there, but I do think in terms of ability (if not skill level) then there is an evening out that takes place over time. (I would say more like 25 rather than 18 though.) On a biological level things like developmental delays tend to wash out over time. Even kids with mild autism tend to become more or less normal after a while. And on a social level people become less dependent on their personalities, which is important since a lot of what is considered ability is actually probably just personality to begin with.
[+] [-] ivansavz|13 years ago|reply
Yep. We need this. In particular I think we need to have testing which is adapted to students current knowledge -- more on this here: http://minireference.com/blog/exams-suck/
My only complaint is that being labelled "slow learner" might be discouraging to the students. I would opt for having a "standard" track and a "extra stuff" track, but not a "you are slow" track.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dangravell|13 years ago|reply
Let's stop talking about personal experience and get real. Let's talk objectively instead. Pretty much ALL the research since the war has shown that streaming results in higher achievement for high achievers, and lower achievement for lower achievers.
If you're happy with those disparities, that's fine.
I am not, personally.
[+] [-] lolnope|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mckoss|13 years ago|reply