By Domenic Giandomenico, Legislative Director
Last week, the Brookings Institution released a new report detailing the resurgent practice of ability-grouping in classrooms. It was a longstanding practice that fell sharply among teachers in the 1990’s after decades of studies and criticism by groups such as the National Governors Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, only to climb back upwards in recent years. Any time you bring up the issue of tracking or ability grouping in education, you rightfully raise the specter of discrimination and racism, which is exactly what we should be moving away from, not moving towards. However, this does not mean that we should continue the practice of teaching the same large group of children each day based only on age without taking into account a child’s skill set or knowledge base.
Finding the best policy for children between these two extreme positions—narrowly tracking versus age-only placement—raises two key questions. First, why are students with objectively different ability levels lumped into the same classroom? It’s one of the many phenomenally inefficient practices ongoing in education today, where teachers are delivering an appropriate lesson to just a third of their students—at best—at any given point in time. Second, how can we solve that problem without risking the kind of discrimination we’ve seen throughout our nation’s history?
The reflexive answer has been to reduce classroom sizes, but this tactic has been repeatedly shown to fall short in results. By decreasing class sizes, the central problem still exists—it’s just mitigated slightly by reducing the amount of students in the margins. Beyond that, you have the more serious issue of teacher quality. In reducing student-teacher ratios, a school necessarily must create more classes since students aren’t just disappearing, after all. Thus, schools must hire more educators to teach those classes. If schools are already struggling to find high quality educators to fill existing classrooms, adding more teachers just exacerbates the situation. Plus, we already know which students get the bad teachers. (Hint: it’s not the rich kids in the suburbs.) On top of that, you have necessary capital improvement issues—after all, you’ve got to have a place to put these additional classrooms. And, don’t forget the fact that adding more teachers means spending substantially more money, both in the short- and long-term, which neither states nor the federal government has at this time.
Add it all up, and you have little to show for it. By reducing class sizes to fix the problem, you’re doing little more than trading one inefficiency for another without getting much, if anything, in the way of improved academic achievement. And even then, you haven’t overcome the problem of tracking and the discrimination that goes with it. In fact, you’re probably exacerbating these problems by creating more buckets in which to place kids.
There are other ways to address the problem, which is where technology comes into play. The use of technology to drive customized, self-directed education has been growing worldwide in recent years. The School of One in NYC, for example, has been providing public school students with the opportunity to learn math at their own pace on computers by utilizing complex algorithms and smart classroom design to give them exactly what they need, when they need it. Teachers are still around, but they’re able to narrowly tailor their lesson plans and strategies towards the needs of specific students, rather than metaphorically spraying them all with the same fire hose. Since this system is driven by objective measures of performance, students aren’t arbitrarily placed, but are rather advanced by their own hands. At a minimum, this provides some form of tangible evidence by which to equip those who might seek redress in the event that discrimination rears its ugly head.
Other countries are also utilizing technology to teach their students. In India, Sugata Mitra has democratized education in the slums of New Delhi by providing children living in poverty with access to high quality, self-guided education. Under his system, students learn everything from language arts to DNA replication mostly on their own. The adults serve in more of a “grandparent” capacity, providing encouragement and guidance rather than serving as traditional educators. Mitra’s program, with its promising early results, have earned the praise of funders worldwide, who have contributed resources to help expand it throughout Asia and Africa. Mitra also recently won a $1 million TED Prize to continue his work.
There are also examples of successful models that are gaining momentum closer to home, such as Kahn Academy and Massive Online Open Courses (MMOC). These programs are further evidence that new strategies to better serve all students’ needs are rapidly evolving far beyond our concepts of what education is and should be. Even further behind are our policies and laws governing education.
So what can and should be done to help?
For starters, the further development and implementation of Common Core is a critical component for growing these practices. The rigorous, skills-based standards are a great fit for competency-based, self-guided education systems, and having common standards encourages the ongoing investment and growth of innovations that aren’t hemmed in by state lines.