<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/education/grouping-students-by-ability-regains-favor-with-educators.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/education/grouping-students-by-ability-regains-favor-with-educators.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0</a></p>
<p>Isn’t which college a kid gets into a form of grouping?</p>
<p>Opera, yes, but many schools have eliminated grouping by ability at K-5 or 6 levels.</p>
<p>This why I never listen to any current ed theory. I have seen most come and go. They had ed pretty well figured out around 100 years ago.</p>
<p>Ability grouping occurs in middle and high schools, when students take more advanced courses (e.g. starting algebra 1 in 8th or 7th grade instead of 9th grade) or are offered honors courses. Selective admission middle and high schools (including public ones) are another form of ability grouping.</p>
<p>The likely issues with ability grouping are that (a) some students may be grouped not by ability, but by should-be-irrelevant aspects like race or ethnicity, (b) pushy parents may lobby the schools to place their kids into higher ability groups, which might counteract (a), but might in other circumstances put the kid in a group too advanced, and (c) some teachers might not be effective in helping the lower ability group students catch up, allowing them to fall further behind.</p>
<p>But without ability grouping, the teacher has to target instruction somewhere, which can be boring for those of higher ability than the target, but confusing for those of lower ability than the target.</p>
<p>I think it’s better to think in terms of achievement grouping, especially in the early years.</p>
<p>It doesn’t make sense to group together kids who are reading and kids who don’t know the alphabet in kindergarten. It doesn’t help either group. The groups should be flexible. You shouldn’t be stuck in a “track.” You should be able to move up or down. You should be able to be in one level for reading and a different level for math. </p>
<p>It would help if art and music were also grouped by achievement level.</p>
<p>Jonri - that’s how my D’s elementary school was. It was a k-8 charter school where the entire school went to math, reading, spelling and writing at the same time. A kid could be advanced in math and on level or behind in reading, and get the appropriate teaching for him. Classes could have 4, 5, and 6 graders doing 5th grade math. Or K, 1, 2 together. They tried not to have more than a 3 grade age spread in a class. Classes were small, usually 10-12, because they added part time teachers for those morning classes. For kids way behind and way ahead they might have 2-4 in a class.</p>
<p>My children’s international school used achievement grouping, and I cannot imagine how it would be possible to teach them any other way. </p>
<p>Students were taught English, German and French. The number of class periods per week they had in each language was determined by their levels of knowledge; students who knew no English to begin with had 7 or 8 class periods of English while the native English speakers learned German and French. Some students were native German or French speakers as well, and they would not have been well served by being placed with students who knew not a word of either.</p>
<p>It would have been absolutely impossible to teach students without achievement grouping, particularly in languages.</p>
<p>Take this to the limit and you get Montessori schools, where every student is in a group of one in every subject. I loved it.</p>
<p>It’s a problem in the public schools. In a very large district where I used to live, the schools were court ordered to integrate disabled students, including those who could not communicate in the classrooms. No ability grouping. But there were “pull outs” to meet the special needs of kids from gifted, advanced instruction to occupational therapy for those who were at that level, and ESL, speech therapy, LD instruction. Those teachers’ schedules were complicated matrices and I don’t know how the heck they juggled all of that. </p>
<p>So now the kids are grouped by ability–where do the ones with little or no academic abilities, the mentally handicapped get grouped? WIth the the kids who need the MOST personal attention? </p>
<p>There’s no winning in these situations. I would love to see the stats on a large number basis of how these things work in school districts. From just observing, the top kids seem to fly high regardless, and the kids in the lower ability groups flounder, regardless of what is done. IT’s that mid section that can vary. Most of my kids were in that mid section, so I worked with them for a year so that they could be classified as home schoolers, prepped them for the ISEE and got them into rigorous private schools where they ended up in the mid section there, which gave them a fine education Nothing missed in terms of academic preparedness, and I could not say the same for our public schools. </p>
<p>Given the number of NYC high school grads that are not even considered literate after all of the years in the system, some improvements are needed. But the poorest schools are not any better than what I remember them being 40 Years ago, and all sorts of theories have been tried on them.</p>