Children are mainstreamed in a number of ways in school and out. Flexible ability grouping is not tracking. Appropriate education for the gifted/bright is not “superior entitlement.” Their “contribution to society” has nothing to do with the speed their math class takes.

I know quite a bit about this. I have a child with a two-digit IQ and severe developmental delays who I will need to take guardianship in a couple of years, and one with a gifted IQ. There is no way you can put both children in the same room and meet their needs, plus teach 20-something children in-between all at the same time.

But, I have watched them try. The differentiation that needs to take place just in a special ed classroom alone is enough to drive a good teacher over the edge.

And you don’t need a research paper to witness the devastation of putting a child in a classroom that is years above his/her level the entire year to know the damage it will do.

“The effects of ability grouping have been analyzed and debated related to various populations including individuals identified as gifted and talented, individuals identified with educational disabilities, individuals of minority status, and economically disadvantaged students. Research has demonstrated that the use of whole class ability grouping disproportionately impacts minority students, economically disadvantaged students, and students with lower ability. Related to individuals identified with educational disabilities, whole class ability grouping does not comply with the requirements of placement within the least restrictive educational (LRE) environment. Further, the practice of whole class ability grouping/tracking can deny many children of their statutory right to equal educational opportunity.

Demonstrated best educational practice can lead to the establishment of excellence for all learners without resorting to the use of ability grouping.”

Among the troubling assumptions that I hear from those, particularly in advocating for students that they consider to be of higher intellectual capability, who support ability tracking, are those of an innate cognitive ability that is fixed from birth, and of a superior entitlement based on a belief that those who are judged to be of higher capability will ultimately make a greater contribution to society and therefore warrant an additional amount of attention–and separation from others not to be considered their peers.

Those studies must have largely controlled for class considerations, then — because the aforementioned James Coleman had changed his initial tune, so to speak, about the supposed benefits of integration on [black] student achievement. I had read only a little of Coleman’s idea that it was better teachers that accounted for any improvement (as Linda noted); I’ve read more (based on research about New Castle County, Delaware’s desegregation case from the mid-70s) regarding his belief that the disparate behavorial issues between suburban (white) and urban (black) kids were more readily apparent than any academic improvements.

It is almost certainly correct that ability grouping reinforces differences. But that’s not a bug, as she seems to think; it’s a feature. The difference between a child with -2 S.D. IQ and +2 S.D. cannot be “compensated for;” the only thing mixed grouping can guarantee is that time does not widen it as much as should happen if every child is achieving his or personal best.

(See Malcolm Gladwell’s example of the Canadian hockey rules that inadvertently privilege young players who happen to be born early in a calendar year.)

If one child makes (or can make) two years’ progress in a school year, and her sister can make only a half-year’s progress in one year, it is immoral to hold the brighter child back so the gap between them does not grow.

And as public policy, it’s insane. If you’re worried about America’s global competitiveness, worry about the competition at the top for the best-trained brains, not the competition for slightly better performance in entry-level jobs, however important the latter is to the life chances of people who will never get much past entry-level jobs.

James Coleman explained why minority children who previously attended segregated schools did better when they began attending schools with white children; they had more effective teachers. His research was too explosive to publish at the time, he said in a lecture I heard him give much much later. So even if they did, that does not provide evidence in favor of the proposition that it was smarter *classmates* who made the difference.

Racial issues aside, I doubt that the experience of feeling that just about everybody in your class is smarter than you are confers any academic benefit. Especially if you’re right.

For that matter, neither does thinking you’re smarter than just about everybody in your class. Even if you’re right.

The research that purports to show that high-achieving children are not harmed by homogeneous grouping is methodologically suspect. (see, e.g., the work of Deborah Ruf at wwww.educationaloptions.com/ ). She explains that most of the instruments available to researchers have rather low ceilings, so they don’t show that children above the ceilings are making slower than normal progress (for them). That’s harm, in my book.

I think we’re in danger of beating a dead thread here. I’m at linsee at plethora dot net, if anyone wants to pursue it.

“Furthermore, mixed groupings typically produce better outcomes for those on the bottom with no harm to those on top.”

There is harm to the top. A mixed group by definition has children at different skill levels. A child who can read Harry Potter levels gain no benefit sitting in a classroom sounding out three letter words. The wasted time is harmful.

You can argue that:

1. The benefit to the bottom kids outweighs the harm to the high kids;
2. The high kids don’t deserve to learn in school;
3. Or whatever else you want

But at least admit the harm that sitting in a classroom with little to no opportunities for learning, interacting with academic peers, or developing study skills causes the top kids.

I am no intuitive fan of Direct Instruction–but I do pay attention to research and what it says, and I am aware of the research re DI and what it says and doesn’t say. The grouping used in DI is flexible ability grouping. This means that children are assessed frequently and placed in groups accordingly. These groups are used for reading instruction. This is a very different thing from ability streaming or tracking–which is what I understood to be advocated. These systems typically lack flexibility, apply across the board–so that students are abundantly clear regarding who are the smart kids and who are not, and the earlier that this tracking takes place, the less likely kids are ever to move from one group to another (particularly upward). Most effective systems internationally have moved away from this kind of tracking (although the popular US delusion is that they are still educating and testing only the best and the brightest) with the result being that their aggregate scores are higher, but also that the spread between top and bottom is narrower. They have fewer kids (smaller percentages) on the bottom and more at the top.

Early studies with school integration, in which minority students who performed less well were integrated with better performing majority students. The minority students tended to do better with no detriment to the majority students. Studies of inclusion of students with disabilities have tended towards similar results.

This programme focuses on grouping children by two factors – how much they already know and how much they learn. So a kid with an IQ of 120 who starts school not knowing their alphabet would be placed earlier in the lesson sequence than a kid with an IQ of 80 who starts school knowing their alphabet. Kids can and often are placed in different places in the maths and reading sequences based on their results. Replacements are frequently reviewed. And if a kid misses a chunk of school, say due to illness, they’re placed back where they left the sequence, rather than being expected to have magically learnt everything their class learnt while they were missed. There are a lot of other things that Direct Instruction does, including providing scripted lessons to teachers and providing school backup for teachers dealing with difficult students. But this brief description of how placement by ability is done in Direct Instruction indicates how difficult it is to make general statements about grouping by ability – the Direct Instruction system is very different to, say, giving kids an IQ test and then using the results of that test to assign them to one stream for all their academic lessons.

Education really deserves to be a profession in that it’s like engineering or medicine or architecture – a whole lot of things need to go right for the overall outcome to be good. Engineers not only need to build a working internal combustion engine, but also fill it up with fuel, if they don’t do this step then the car doesn’t go no matter how good the engine is. A doctor needs to prescribe you the right medicine, and then the pharmacist needs to disburse the right medicine (my father started getting some serious health problems when he was prescribed a medicine to be taken twice a day, and the pharmacist gave him a different medicine which should only have been taken once every two days, so Dad was getting 4x the expected dose and of the wrong medicine to boot). A building may have wonderful walls and a brillantly designed-and-built roof, but if the builders stuffed up the foundation it can all come crashing down. Be careful about drawing conclusions from education research, it’s hard to figure out if something failed because the idea was wrong or because a detail of the implementation was wrong.

I’m a prosecutor. Nights, yes. Weekends? Not every one, but when I’m in trial you bet your ass plus a million dollars I work harder than you do for less money and less thanks.