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Picking (and avoiding) your fights

April 15, 2013 by

Education Realist, a high school math teacher, took off a student’s hat as a joke. Before she could return it, he stood and shouted at her, “Give me my damn HAT back.” In Picking Your Fights—Or Not, she tells the story.

“Sit down, BTS. Right now.” I was standing very, very still. He edged even closer.

“Give me the damn hat. You don’t take my hat.”

. . . “BTS,” I said very carefully, very clearly. “I promise you I was just kidding around. You hadn’t done anything wrong. I was going to hand it back to you. And you will have the beanie back the minute you sit down. But you do not tell me what to do.”

He said, again, “Give me the damn HAT BACK. NOW.”

She didn’t want to give back the hat till he sat down. She didn’t want to call a supervisor, which would risk a charge of “physically threatening a teacher.” Furthermore it was partly her own fault for messing with his hat.

Then she heard her other students telling BTS to calm down. One girl said, “I got to tell you, BTS, that’s a damn ugly hat to be going face to face for.”

They weren’t mocking him, laughing at him, making fun of him for letting me take his beanie. They were, god love each and every one of them, fully cognizant of the thin line we were on, and determined to walk BTS back.

Sabi, a usually quiet Afghani, said “BTS, you should sit down and get your hat back.” Kyle said “It’s spring break, man. You want to lose a second of it to the (detention) hallway?”

BTS sat down. She gave him the hat back.

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Mao (and Confucius) in the Kids’ Zone

March 28, 2013 by

“Our attitude towards ourselves should be ‘to be satiable in learning’ and towards others ‘to be tireless in teaching’,” wrote Mao Zedong (Tse-tung to us oldsters), according to the U.S. Education Department’s Kids’ Zone web site. Actually, Mao wrote “insatiable,” which makes more sense.

When someone objected to giving the “quote of the day” to a Commie mass murderer, it was replaced with a quote from Abraham Lincoln, reports Buzzfeed. That didn’t stop the mockery.

The department apparently takes random education-related quotes from a database and puts them up without proofreading or thinking.

Mao was exhorting fellow revolutionaries to study and promote the Communist movement, writes Robert Upshaw on The Ponds of Happenstance. He found the original in The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War.

 Very clearly, the quote in context is about studying for the sake of propelling the movement, not for the sake of knowledge in its own right. And the teaching bit is about teaching others in order to bring them into the same movement. It’s cult-speak, plain and simple.

“Insatiable in learning” and “tireless in teaching” are Confucian phrases found in The Book of Mencius, writes Upshaw.

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The case for ability grouping

March 27, 2013 by

Let’s Go Back to Grouping Students By Ability writes Barry Garelick in The Atlantic. The drive for equity in the ’60s and ’70s eliminated tracking. Most K-8 schools now ask teachers to teach students of diverse backgrounds and abilities in the same classroom, using “differentiated instruction,” writes Garelick, who’s starting a second career as a math teacher. In high schools, what used to be “college prep” is now called “honors.” Courses labeled “college prep” are aimed at low achievers.

Unfortunately, the efforts and philosophies of otherwise well-meaning individuals have eliminated the achievement gap by eliminating achievement. Exercises in grammar have declined to the point that they are virtually extinct. Book reports are often assigned in the form of a book jacket or poster instead of a written analysis. Essays now are “student-centered” — even history assignments often call upon students to describe how they feel about past events rather than apply factual analysis.

Math classes are now more about math appreciation and being able to explain how a procedure works rather than the mastery of skills and procedures necessary to solve problems.

Gifted programs can relegate late bloomers to the non-honors track as early as third grade, he writes. By contrast, ability grouping can be flexible, letting students move up quickly when they’re ready.

A recent analysis of Dallas students found sorting by previous performance “significantly improves students’ math and reading scores” and helps “both high and low performing students,” including gifted and talented students, special education students, and those with limited English proficiency.

Schools are reviving ability grouping and tracking, according to Tom Loveless in the 2013 Brown Center Report on American Education.

He suggests a few possible reasons for the reversal: The emphasis on accountability, started by No Child Left Behind, may have motivated teachers to group struggling students together. The rise of computer-aided learning might make it easier for them to instruct students who learn at different rates.

Differentiating instruction for students of widely varying abilities — not to mention motivation and English fluency — is exceptionally challenging.  The “2008 MetLife Survey of the American Teacher reports that many teachers simply find mixed-ability classes difficult to teach,” notes Garelick.

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Teaching yourself

March 26, 2013 by

As with Diane’s latest, this is my last post before Joanne comes back. This isn’t about any story in particular — it’s just some thoughts that I’ve got on teaching. Yep — it’s shameless preaching time. So gather ’round and let me tell y’all what I think. The title of this post is “Teaching yourself”. Teaching, of course, takes two objects: one teaches something to someone. When I say “teaching yourself” I mean teaching yourself to someone else. But what does that mean?

Well, let’s start with admitting that I’m talking about at least two separate, but related things: let’s call them style and substance. Every teacher has a style of their own — whether or not it has been developed or not. Every teacher also has knowledge and experience — substance — which I think can be usefully contrasted with “content”. “Content” in modern parlance is the stuff that’s in books and curricular guides, the stuff that everyone thinks should be taught to students. When I say “substance”, I’m talking about what’s in the teacher’s head, and more specifically, about how it’s situated in there and how it’s expressed in the teacher’s own way of doing things.

Let’s talk about style first. Diane recently advised teachers to avoid ickiness. She put it really well, so I’ll use her words:

Teachers often get told what to do and how to do it, but intelligent administrators realize that they won’t (and shouldn’t) follow directives to the letter. When deciding what to follow, what to adapt, and what to ignore, a teacher can safely put icky things in the last two piles. One can take an icky thing and make it less icky, or one can avoid it altogether. No teacher should have to descend into anything tacky or dumb. (Of course, what’s icky for one teacher may not be so for another.)

Following your “gut”, as Diane puts it, is really good advice. It’s good to break tablets, to explore — but the reason for doing that is to discover and refine your own style of teaching. (It helps if you’ve learned from people who know what they’re doing themselves.) If your teaching style isn’t amenable to lots of group work, don’t assign a lot of group work. You’ll quickly find out whether it fits your style by trying it out. The same goes for lectures: some teachers just suck at lecturing. Others are brilliant. Do what you need to do. My own personal style is highly Socratic; that’s how I was taught, and that’s what I have a natural affinity for.

But being true to your own style isn’t just about making yourself comfortable. It’s also about your students. Teaching takes place in the context of interpersonal relationships between teachers and students. Some of these relationships might be frightfully superficial given the context of institutional education, but that’s not nearly as large a problem as inauthenticity. Students can tell when you’re faking it, and if the students don’t trust you to be who you are, they won’t want to listen to anything that you have to say. Mutual respect is impossible if one party or the other is trying to be someone they really aren’t.

But style is just the “how”. More important is the “what” that is taught, the substance. And it’s here that I think people have, from time to time, gone a bit off the reservation in how they think about teaching. There is an insidious view that lurks about these days that holds teaching to be a substantive skill of its own, and the content to be something like a program run on the “good teaching OS”. Get a good teacher, give the teacher a curricular guide, and we’re off to the races.

This view is, I think, nonsense. (Sometimes I feel like it’s on its way out, which is a relief. But then we get things like “Common Core” and I’m nervous again.)

I think it’s the job of the teacher, to some extent or another, to make the student more like the teacher. Now, that sounds incredibly narcissistic, and given who is writing this, I want to explain what I mean. There are obviously limits to this: if I’m hired as an English teacher, I’m not going to make my students more like me in terms of my sense of humor or my knowledge and skill at fencing. My job as an English teacher isn’t to pass on some sterile set of alienated skills, but rather to make my students more like me in terms of my ability to read, interpret, and express myself in written form.

But skills don’t exist in a vacuum: they exist in the context of personal style. There’s no Platonic “writing skill” out there in the ether. There’s Michael Lopez’s writing skill; there’s Diane Senechal’s writing skill; there’s Joanne Jacobs’ writing skill; there’s Cal’s and Crimson Wife’s and Engineer Poet’s and Richard Aubrey’s writing skills. Do these all have certain characteristics in common? Sure. There are general rules of writing and style — but these rules are meaningless on their own. They need to be demonstrated within a specific context, and if the teacher isn’t using (one of) his or her own context(s), then the teaching isn’t going to be as good. I can’t show students how to generically “pick the best word” for what they mean. I can only show them how I go about thinking about it.

Once they master Mike Lopez style, and maybe several other styles… then the student will start to develop their own style. Maybe. That’s the highest level of learning, and it’s something into which that we as educators have surprisingly little input outside of establishing the foundational skills.

Anyway, the trick to good education (or one of them, anyway) is getting teachers who are the sorts of people — in relevant respects — that you want your students to be. We don’t need “highly qualified” teachers, we just need teachers we can look at and say, “Yeah, I want my child to be more like that.”

Teachers always talk — and rightfully so — about giving so much of themselves to their work, about putting themselves into their work body and soul. That’s good talk. Because that’s exactly what should be going on. And the reason it should be what’s going on is that the only thing, at the end of the day, that a teacher has to teach is themselves.

So teach yourself. And if you’re worth anything at all, you’ll get good results.

Many thanks to Joanne, Diane, and all of the commenters here at everyone’s favourite edu-blog.

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The pull and counter-pull of teaching

March 26, 2013 by

Education is filled with opposing principles, where neither is absolutely correct. When you’re learning a musical instrument, you need a lot of technical exercises, but you also need to learn to play actual pieces. When you’re proving a mathematical theorem, you should be precise with your steps, but sometimes, if you have an insight, it’s good to take a leap. (Then you can backtrack and fill in the steps.) And so on. Most teachers have certain leanings, but those leanings are not the whole of their understanding or of the truth. Often I find that when I tip just a little bit against myself, interesting things happen.

For instance, my philosophy courses have focused on reading and discussion of texts—for good reasons. The texts are compelling, and the students approach them thoughtfully and enthusiastically. Yet when I give students a chance to take off with their own ideas, I find that they bring forth some of their best work. The moral is not that I should abandon the texts, but rather that I should vary the type of assignment now and then.

My ninth-grade students are studying rhetoric and logic. Most recently, they read G. K. Chesterton’s essay “The Fallacy of Success.” We examined how Chesterton takes apart the idea of success, and how his reference to the myth of King Midas enhances his argument. They did well with this.

Then I thought: why not have them take apart a concept themselves? I had them choose a word from a list, to which they contributed (the options included happiness, justice, power, friendship, solitude, collaboration, courage, wisdom, and more). They were to (a) explain how the term is commonly understood; (b) explain what’s wrong or incomplete about that understanding; (c) explain why it’s important to come to a better understanding of the term; and (d) offer a more complete definition. This began as classwork, with one sentence for each part; later, they expanded their responses into an essay.

I am reluctant to repeat or paraphrase my students’ responses, since I don’t have their permission. I can say that they were all interesting, and some quite moving. Much came out of this exercise. Yet it was informed by our reading and discussion of “The Fallacy of Success.” There need not be a contradiction between analyzing someone else’s essay and writing your own (with your own ideas). In the best of scenarios, the two support each other. Still, it isn’t just a matter of striking a “balance”; the correct proportion may be an unbalanced one.

Back to the original point: our educational leanings need something to pull against them. Very few opinions or preferences in education contain the whole truth. We may go ahead and lean—the leanings do matter–but allow for a bit of sway now and then, as it may turn out to be the best thing that happened all year.

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Breaking the tablets

March 24, 2013 by

Last week, my tenth-grade students read the prologue of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra; to supplement this, I had them listen to part of the fourth movement of Mahler’s Symphony no. 3 and read Exodus 32 (about the breaking of the tablets). The former has lyrics, sung by a contralto, that are only a slight rearrangement of “Zarathustra’s Roundelay”; the latter is important because Zarathustra speaks of seeking out tablet-breakers as companions. On my own, I have been thinking about how teachers are (or can be) breakers of tablets. I am making this analogy cautiously, so take it with all the salt you need.

In Exodus, Moses comes down to the mount to see that the people have made a gold calf idol (well, they brought Aaron the gold, and he made the idol for them). Moses arrives, sees the idol, and breaks the tablets in anger, the tablets that he had received from God. (Later, in Exodus 34, God gives him the words for the new tablets.) Moses then asks Aaron, how did this occur? And Aaron replies, “thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief” (King James version).

Now, I would suggest that one aspect of being a student (whether you’re attentive in class or not) is learning to set idols aside. At times a teacher has to break the tablets and create new ones.

On an immediate level, this might take the form of a teacher changing the lesson plan when it’s clear that the students don’t understand or aren’t paying attention. But it’s possible to see this as a single and permanent event.

A teacher comes with a sense of the subject (and often a love for the subject). She has something she wants the students to see, grasp, and make their own. She knows they won’t get it right away, and she wants them to persevere until they get it.

The students are not always open to this. Either they want nothing to do with it, or they make partial attempts toward limited goals (such as a good grade). Some learn to fake their way through; some distract themselves during class and at home. Sometimes this reaches a pitch where those who don’t take class seriously dominate the lesson. They have essentially erected their idol.

The teacher then realizes that something has to crack. Breaking the tablets here would mean: recognizing that this is going in the wrong direction, stopping right there, and starting over with something more basic, so that the students can build up to the subject. It doesn’t mean making the subject “relevant” or eliminating its challenges and strangeness; it does mean rewriting the tablets so that they actually reach the students. (This may relate to the distinction Michael Lopez made in his excellent recent post.)

But isn’t it wrong for a teacher to get angry at the students? It depends on the kind of anger. There is a warm kind that wakes the students up, helps them see the situation, and points toward the good. Sometimes a teacher must say, “this has gotten out of hand.” Even in college and graduate school, professors do this; the students may be distracted not with chatter, but with this or that intellectual fad or bad habit. I remember a professor raging over the ubiquitous misuse of the verb “subvert.” That’s almost a case in point.

I say “almost” because the individual instances don’t really do this justice. Many teachers have a turning point in their practice. It may recur, in different contexts, but they will always draw on that first experience. It’s where they realize that they aren’t reaching the students (or many of them) and that they must reach them. They break not only the lesson, but their conception of what they are doing, and start with something else.

Now, that new approach may be incomplete. (Maybe it’s inevitably so.) It’s a common error for an educator to “see the light” and then think that his or her new method is all that’s needed. It isn’t. What matters here is the gesture of breaking through to the students. In one sense, this gesture happens over and over; in another, it happens only once.

This is where the likeness breaks down. One can’t compare a teacher’s “new covenant” with the new tablets that Moses inscribes. There’s a gulf between the two, whether or not one regards Exodus as sacred text. Still, there’s something to the analogy, for all its imperfections.

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Two separate issues

March 22, 2013 by

Apropos of Diane’s recent post about “superfun sameness”, which touched on one of my own personal betes-noires, “relevance” in teaching, I thought this would be a good time to talk about this article out of Minnesota.

Here’s the skinny:

The St. Mary’s program is part of an effort among some teachers to make their classes more culturally relevant to their students. It requires the teachers — most of whom are white women — to find new ways to connect to struggling kids.

St. Mary’s instructor Marceline DuBose encourages her students to shake up their traditional teaching styles. She said music and movement can help capture students who learn differently.

The education system is already working best for white, middle-class kids, particularly female students, so it’s no surprise that many teachers share those traits, DuBose said. The state Department of Education estimates that less than 4 percent of Minnesota teachers are people of color. Yet more than a quarter of Minnesota’s students are nonwhite.

The upshot is that Minnesota’s white teachers need to practice making their teaching “culturally relevant”, the better to grab the hearts and minds of their students. They might even consider a graduate certificate in “culturally responsive teaching. That these sorts of programs exist and that they continue to grow isn’t really news… It’s probably nothing most readers of this blog have not heard before.

I want to focus on some specific language from the article, however, that makes me think that there is something very basic getting lost in these sorts of programs. I’ve emphasized the parts on which I want to dwell a bit.

Tracine Asberry, an African-American school board member and a former teacher in Minneapolis, says it’s natural to teach who you are. But if you come from a privileged background and don’t believe in the struggles faced by many people of color, your opinions can alienate a lot of kids.

“As teachers, teaching students who have different realities, we have to be aware of those things. We can’t just be aware of them. We have to be comfortable so that we can have the conversation, and then encourage our students to feel comfortable to have those conversations in our classroom.”

Asberry believes one way to close the achievement gap is to close the teacher gap. For some students of color, she says, the key might be as simple as making sure the person leading the classroom looks like them.

Let’s start with the painfully obvious. It’s not only natural to “teach who you are”, at least in a very broad sense, it’s sort of a logical requirement. With apologies to the lovely people who spend their time making up programs like the Common Core, it is an exercise in futility to attempt teaching some skill or bit of knowledge you do not actually possess. You have to teach who you are, because that’s all you have. That is not to say that you can’t change who you are over time, that you cannot broaden your perspective, and it certainly isn’t to say that you can’t understand other people’s perspectives. I am just acknowledging that putting an illiterate in front of a class with an English curriculum is madness.

Now, if you believe that you can only teach who you are (as I do) then the next bolded clause will give you nightmares. DIFFERENT REALITIES???. What the heck does that even mean? There is one reality. I can only assume that Asberry is being clumsily metaphorical here and means to say something like “students who have a substantially different way of seeing the world and communicating.” Of course, once you drop the vacuous metaphor and actually say what you mean, it becomes clear pretty quick that the differences aren’t all that great. Maybe the students don’t have the same views of authority, the same sense of the value of organization, the same (I’ve always loved this one) “future time orientation”. But once you are specific about the differences, they start to be manageable.

There seem to me to be two very separate issues at work here that are being muddled. The first is a question about pedagogy. The plain fact of the matter is that teachers need to know their students in order to be effective. You cannot teach if what you think is a signal of displeasure on your part is taken as a signal of approval on the part of your students. There needs to be some common ground for introducing the new material, or communication is impossible. And teaching is, if it is anything, a type of communication. (From a language and culture standpoint, I think that Lisa Delpit stands out as one of the only really sane CRT-type voices on this sort of issue. I don’t think her work Gospel, but it seems mostly on the right track.) It also helps if your teachers don’t objectively stink – if they are not racist, not sexist, and not given to ignoring their students’ various qualities.

But there is another issue, apart from pedagogy. That issue is one of cultural relevance in what is taught, as posed to awareness and sensitivity. The nature of education is to expand that which the student takes to be their culture. Think about it: a five year old has a culture… One that consists (hopefully) of household patterns, domestic relationships, and likely a healthy dose of mass media. Except in extreme circumstances, Hamlet isn’t part of a five year old’s culture. It is the job of a teacher to introduce poetry and math and music and shape the student’s culture. On some views, it is to introduce the student to an existing culture… Some dominant paradigm like “Western Culture” or somesuch. On other views, the role of the teacher is to allow the student to expand and shape their own sense of and place in their society’s culture. Still others think that the student should shape their own culture. (That way lies madness.)

My point is just this: pedagogical sensitivity and the ability to communicate with and teach students whose existing culture does not share as much with your own as might otherwise e the case is an issue separate and distinct from the question of whether certain material is “culturally relevant” to the student, and what sort of cultural picture for the student lies at the end of his or her education.

Finally… With respect to the last emphasized part of the article — the part about teachers looking like students, I just quoted that to show that for many people opining on this issue, it isn’t really about culture at all. They’re just racists, and they want the students to be racist, too.

H/T educationnews.org.

UPDATE: Minor typos corrected, including changing the rather accusative-sounding “you teachers” to “your teachers”, which was intended. Also a few small language clarifications. -ML

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Calling an end to the day

March 22, 2013 by

In contrast with Andy Rotherham, who lauds efforts to create round-the-clock schools, I write here about the importance of calling an end to the day. (In all fairness, he didn’t say that individual teachers should be working around the clock—but one wonders how such a school could get by without a cadre of late-night and early-morning teachers. Sleep goes by the wayside, as do the rhythms of the day.)

Today my spring break begins (I don’t teach on Fridays). This morning I started clearing the clutter off of my desk. It was a fairly straightforward matter, yet in the rush of the past two months or so, other things took priority, and the piles mounted higher.

I had neglected meals, dental work, basic home repairs, correspondence, friends, family, musical instruments, and book upon book that I hadn’t had time to read.

Most of the teachers I know work longer and harder than I do, from what I can see. They spend evenings and weekends at school. They get to school before dawn. They spend hours at home grading homework and tests. They take on additional school duties and activities.

We live in a society that places high priority on work. Few professions have reasonable hours; most of them sprawl over one’s life. Many European countries take a different approach to work (though this might be changing): their work days are shorter, their vacations longer, and their work duties more contained. Here, in the U.S., long work days are a fact of life.

Teaching, though, goes a bit farther. It requires your soul (or whatever you would like to call it). It takes most of what you have: intellect, wit, emotion, presence of mind, physical stamina and agility, character, intensity of intention, and much more. There are days when lessons seem to go effortlessly—but on other days, you must throw yourself into the lesson in order to get things going or quell disruption. You have to be alert and responsive, minute after minute, and then do the same in the next lesson, and the next.

Unless you exercise caution, and unless you have made something of a fortress in your life, you can end up with nothing but school. I don’t just mean that you spend all your time on it; I mean that you lose even the sunset, even the sense of a meal. To have an hour to yourself (or with others), to enjoy the rhythms of the day, becomes taboo. The dedicated teacher is the one running down the hall with papers to photocopy while wolfing down a power bar.

To resist such sprawl, one needs a stronghold outside of school, an obligation to call an end to the day at some point—maybe not every day, but on certain days. For some, this may be religious observance. For others, it may be their children. For others still, it may be a commitment (not having to do with school) or a self-imposed routine. Some may have combinations of the three. It must be something sacred (in a religious or secular sense), something that cannot be eroded.

Why is it important to have a stronghold? For one thing, it makes life more interesting; you have a retreat, a chance to put together the many events of the day and gain some perspective on them. For another, it means you have more to bring your students. Teachers about to drop of exhaustion cannot be good role models—or maybe they can for a little while, until they actually drop. Students need to be around adults with interesting and varied lives, whether or not they know about these lives.

I don’t tell my students much about my life, but now and then I let them in on a special occasion. For instance, last week I went to my high school in Boston to attend an alumnae (girls’ school) book discussion led by two of my former English teachers. My students were excited to hear about this and asked me about it afterward.

No matter what the pressure to do “whatever it takes,” teachers need a counterweight: a time and place that does not and will not belong to school. It is good for everyone: for the teachers themselves, for the students, and for our rude and ragged world.

There is still another benefit: the twilight gets a larger audience.

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Kindergarten, play and standards

March 15, 2013 by

Teachers are blaming new standards for taking the joy out of kindergarten, writes Deborah Kenny, a charter school founder in New York City, in the Washington Post. Kindergartners should learn by playing, she writes. But she thinks the standards are getting a bum rap.

Last year, as Harlem Village Academies prepared to open new elementary schools , our principals visited dozens of kindergarten classrooms. The upper-income schools focused mostly on active play, interesting discussions and crafts, including papier-mache projects that delighted children for hours. In the lower-income schools we saw regimented academics, reward-and-punishment behavior systems and top-down instruction. In one South Bronx classroom, the only time children spoke during the course of three hours was to repeat drills of the sounds of letters over and over.

Why the disparity? Many educators are placing the blame squarely on the Common Core — national learning standards recently adopted by 45 states and the District and supported by the Obama administration — and asserting that they lead to poor-quality teaching and take all the joy out of kindergarten.

The standards’ goals —  ”teach students to think independently, grapple with difficult texts, solve problems and explain their thinking in a clear and compelling way” — are noble, Kenny writes. That can be done well or badly.

Take vocabulary, for example. The Common Core standards state that kindergarten students should be able to “distinguish shades of meaning among verbs that describe some general action (e.g., walk, march, strut, prance) by acting out the meanings.” Imagine a classroom full of 5-year-olds marching, strutting, walking and prancing for 10 minutes to different kinds of music while laughing and learning vocabulary. . . . So while some schools might choose to teach vocabulary in a rote, boring way, clearly the standards are not to blame.

Teaching to the new standards demands more of teachers, Kenny writes. Principals need to hire good teachers and then let them learn from each other, try different strategies, learn from mistakes and improve. Principals also need the power to fire teachers who aren’t up to the job.

Via Eduwonk.

This anti-CCSS math blog critiques the standards’ call for kindergartners to “decompose” numbers.

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Study: Sorting students boosts scores

March 9, 2013 by

Sorting students by performance “significantly improves” reading and math scores, concludes a study that analyzed  data linked to a cohort of elementary students in Dallas. Sorting helps both high- and low-performing students, though the high achievers showed larger gains.

Tracking went out of fashion a generation ago. Teachers are supposed to “differentiate” instruction for students with varying levels of achievement, English fluency, ability or disability and “learning styles.”

“A wise wonk once wrote that the biggest challenge facing America’s schools is the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom,” notes Education Gadfly.

Analysts attempt to account for unobservable ways that schools might sort (say, by student behavior) and ultimately find that three-quarters of the schools organize students along at least one dimension: Nineteen percent by prior math scores, 24 percent by prior reading scores, 28 percent by “gifted” status, 57 percent by LEP (limited English proficiency) status, and 13 percent by special-education status (further, around 40 percent sort by at least two dimensions).

Grouping all students by prior performance would produce a significant gain in reading and math achievement, researchers concluded. However, school leaders also must consider “the impact of homogeneous classes on classroom culture and the importance of flexible grouping (so that students move out of low-level classes after they demonstrate mastery).”

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