Placement by achievement

The educational blogosphere has been hopping lately with the resurrected idea that students are best taught with other students at about the same level.  That is, that “heterogeneous grouping” with “differentiated instruction” has been one of the most dismal failures ever perpetrated by well-meaning educrats.

For a lot of commenters, the trigger was the Associated Press article  Forget grade levels, KC schools try something new by Heather Hollingsworth.  She describes Kansas City’s wholesale attempt to eliminate age-based tracking.  All students get placed by what they can do, and advance to the next unit when they have mastered the one they are on.  This is not quite self-paced curriculum, which was popular a long time ago, because students are still taught in groups. The key idea is that the students are not locked into age bands, but can advance through the curriculum changing groups as they advance.

This approach to placing kids has long been popular with parents of gifted children (though for some reason not with school teachers and administrators).  It has gone by many names (subject acceleration, readiness grouping, grouping by ability or skill or mastery, … ).  I prefer the name placement by achievement, since we are not accelerating students but letting them move at whatever velocity best suits them, and we can’t measure “readiness” but only what has already been achieved.  Ability is not the point, achievement is.  I guess that “grouping by mastery” is ok, but “mastery” seems to me a more cumbersome word than “achievement” and “mastering” a subject seems to me appropriate for post-baccalaureate studies.

I think that students at the top and bottom of the current classes will benefit from being placed in more educationally appropriate classes, and kids in the middle will benefit from having a teacher more focused on what they are learning, rather than having to teach five different levels simultaneously.

Tamara Fisher discusses grouping kids by something other than age and asks

Do you have knowledge of or experience with a school that has tried cross-age readiness groupings? How did it work? What were the results?

Actually, I do.  The private school my son attended for grades 4–6 had the entire school do math at the same time.  The K–6 school had math classes up to 8th grade, and placed kids in the appropriate class at the beginning of each year, according to a placement test.  If the placement seemed wrong after a few weeks, or kids progressed faster or slower than expected, they changed the placement as needed.  I had not been aware of this practice when we enrolled him in the school, and so was a bit surprised to find out he had been placed in the 7th grade math group at the beginning of 4th grade.  The placement worked well, though my son did have to do geometry as a self-study in 6th grade, since there were no other children at the school at his level.

For middle-school, we sent him to a 6–12 school, so that he had access to high-school classes.  He did not do well on the summer placement test, so he had to retake geometry in 7th grade and delay honors algebra 2 until 8th grade.  The pace was a bit slow for him, but he liked the teacher, so it worked out ok.  Several other new 7th graders felt by midyear that they had been placed in too low a math level—I think that the placement tests were not well aligned with the classes being taught.  That is one major risk with placement by achievement: if the measures of achievement don’t match the classes being taught, kids will still be taught at the wrong level.