Category: Education

For many years, the word “tracking” has been taboo in American education. The general consensus has been that separating the “Bluebirds” from the “Meadowlarks” imposes a class system in the classroom. Everyone points out that kids know what the groups are, whether or not euphemisms are used: the smart kids and the stupid kids. The rich kids and the poor kids. The white kids and the black kids.

But recently, lots of people—including pretty much everyone who advocates for gifted education—have been revisiting the idea of ability grouping. The writer of Should it be OK to place students in ability groups? points out that ability grouping today doesn’t have to be what it was in the past. I agree—as always, I think that the best education is the most flexible.

My son was in a public charter school for first and second grade where he was in a mixed-grade classroom. This type of classroom is definitely harder for the teacher—she could never just relax and give all the kids the same assignments. The great thing about it was that because all the kids started the year knowing that they were at different levels, there was no animosity to being put into separate groups based on their abilities.

At the beginning of the first year, my son was a novice reader. By the middle of that year, he was reading Harry Potter. As a novice reader, he really appreciated the fact that the teacher read aloud (to all the students, reading and pre-reading) and that he was never made to feel like there was something “wrong” with him because he couldn’t read. As an advanced reader only a short time later, he was thrilled to be put with the more advanced readers so that they could read a book together that challenged and interested them.

Because being at different levels was a reality in the classroom, there was never any idea that a) the kids in the advanced group were better in any way, or b) that kids were destined to stay in the group they were in. Most of the first graders were reading an easy book for their reading group, but none of them assumed that they’d still be in that group by third grade. That idea wouldn’t make sense.

This is where traditional schooling ideas clash with the reality of what’s good for kids’ education: Most kids in our country are age-segregated, making fluid ability-grouping harder. When you do leveled reading groups in segregated classes, there’s a much higher possibility that the students are going to see the grouping as “tracking”—sticking them in with the slow kids or the smart kids “forever.”

Although I agree that this is a problem, I don’t agree that because this is a problem, there should be no ability grouping. Kids who are voracious readers when young shouldn’t be tortured into reading JEasy books because it makes their classmates feel better. This is simply not a choice that is any fairer than making slower readers feel dumb.

So how can a traditional school fulfill the needs of its different readers? First of all, the teachers can work hard not to convey even a hint that slower readers are in any way “less smart” than their fast-reading compadres. Any adult can tell you that the age at which they learned to read had no bearing on whether they became a functional, successful adult. But adults who were made to feel stupid because they didn’t learn to read on someone else’s schedule can certainly tell you that they felt the attitude of the teacher, which bled over into the students and their parents. Everyone knew who the “stupid kids” were.

The next thing teachers can do is to construct more fluid classrooms. If they do ability grouping for reading, they could make sure to mix the groups up for an activity that doesn’t need to be differentiated, or is in some way naturally differentiated. For example, elementary school science projects can involve kids of different levels if the project is open-ended enough so that the more advanced students are able to — and encouraged to — do more.

Another thing the teacher can do is to devote some time each day to reading out loud. This allows the children who are still stuck in stiflingly boring leveled readers to hear good writing and good stories. (Now, we could also argue about using stiflingly boring leveled readers at all, but that’s another argument altogether.) I have actually never been with a group of students of any age who didn’t appreciate a good book read out loud, but teachers often leave reading out loud for kindergarten only, as if they’d never heard of the bustling market for audiobooks for adults. On top of that, if teachers encouraged students to write in their notebooks or doodle during reading out loud time, the kids who need to fidget would get as much out of it as the kids who need to need to keep their brains busy.

Finally, ability grouping works best when the schools themselves are more fluid. For some reason, it’s assumed that younger kids can’t deal with more fluid classrooms, moving from one space to another or in with different groups of children. But of course they can—we already stigmatize the gifted kids and the kids who are behind in some subject areas by doing “pull-out” programs. So what if every student were in a pull-out program? Ability grouping doesn’t have to stop at separating out only the outliers.

This article in Education Week sums up the pro’s and con’s of ability grouping. “Emerging research suggests that, in some cases, flexible ability grouping can in fact benefit students.”

The key here is flexible: All children’s needs can be served as long as the system is flexible enough to accommodate those needs. The past bad reputation that ability grouping got was because of its inflexibility: it was used to track low-performing students permanently into another educational sub-class. But that is not a permanent feature of ability grouping, but rather a predictable result of inflexible education.

Last year, as San Francisco’s wonderful science museum, the Exploratorium, was preparing to move to their new space, a friend and I exchanged dire predictions. The Exploratorium has long been a favorite of science-loving families. In their funky cavern of a museum they made it cool to be inquisitive and exciting to take part in activities that might be deemed boring or just plain gross in the wider world. But as they started to promote the move to Pier 15—just down the line from the very stupidest part of San Francisco (as in, the part where all the tourists go)—longtime fans got worried.

Would they fall victim to the “pretty but vacant” revamp of the Academy of Sciences?

Would they become yet another “children’s museum” that presents cool activities but with all the science stripped out of it?

Would they cater to the quick-stop tourist who’d want to be entertained with trite and shallow content?

I decided I would keep my membership for one reason: So we could attend the members-only preview which was held Saturday.

I’m pleased to let you know that none of our dire predictions came true, and there are many charming surprises to be had at the new Exploratorium. First, the location: Yes, it’s right down the street from the part of San Francisco no local wants to be found dead in, but it’s much more accessible to both out-of-towners and car-free city dwellers. The new site is as different from the old as possible: light and airy, part of the general bustle of the waterfront, the sort of place someone could wander into and be totally taken by surprise. There is more floor space and the elongated layout makes a visit there like a stroll through the history and future of science.

“This is like a Lamborghini versus a Volkswagen…that’s missing a cylinder,” says Chuck Mignacco, Building Operations Manager, in a video on their website. The new building is a “net zero” building that uses no fossil fuels in heating or cooling.

Many of the Exploratorium’s best features made the move intact. My daughter, of course, was thrilled to see the toilet drinking fountain right in the first lobby. Oldie-but-goody displays were scattered throughout, some updated but all with a new sheen in their new location. Like the old Exploratorium, the workshops and labs are open for view, but now they seem more accessible, more a part of what’s going on.

The new building is bigger, and they have started to make use of the space in true Exploratorium fashion. Another museum might have a slice of a large redwood trunk on display; the Exploratorium has much of the lower part of an enormous tree, including the root ball. My very favorite part of the museum is all new: the Bay Observatory. This is a lovely room upstairs that opens to a courtyard overlooking the Bay with gorgeous views of the Bay Bridge. A couple of large tables hold piles of facsimiles of old maps of California. We spent a good amount of time shuffling through the maps and talking about California past and present. The other side of the room presents a view of the Bay through displays and interactive exhibits (some of them still not finished).

This mix of old and new continued to surprise us right until the end. My daughter noticed the old “tornado maker” which we had somehow missed when we went back downstairs. She positively dragged me back up to see it, though I’d seen it enough times to know that there was no point in making a special trip for it. But right next to it was an exhibit we’d never seen before. Though she was momentarily thrilled to see her old tornado friend, our attention was grabbed for some time by the “Arp” shape maker, a device containing a pan of “oobleck” (cornstarch and water). When the pan is jiggled vigorously, the non-Newtonian fluid in the pan rises up in fascinating sculptures reminiscent of the work of Jean Arp. (By the way, if you don’t know oobleck, here is my daughter’s favorite oobleck video!)

In our two-and-a-half hours at the new building, we didn’t have enough time to see half of what’s there. But what we did see was a great taste of what’s to come—we’ll definitely be going back.

The other day I wrote about the question of school security. I argued that no reasonable person would want our kids to go to schools that were equipped to repel any possible invasion by a hostile adult.

But there are other ways to make ourselves more secure, and improve our schools at the same time.

A recent article in The New Yorker (“Adaptation,” Jan. 7, 2013) brings together research that urban planners are using to make cities safer. The most shocking research was done in the aftermath of the 1995 Chicago heatwave that killed 739 people. When researchers compiled the data, they found that the deaths were largely concentrated in poorer neighborhoods, which was unsurprising. The surprising thing was how neighborhoods with very similar demographics fared so differently.

“Englewood and Auburn Gresham, two adjacent neighborhoods on the hyper-segregated South Side of Chicago, were both ninety-nine per cent African American, with similar proportions of elderly residents. Both had high rates of poverty, unemployment, and violent crime. Englewood proved to be one of the most perilous places during the disaster, with thirty-three deaths per hundred thousand residents. But Auburn Gresham’s death rate was only three per hundred thousand, making it far safer than many of the most affluent neighborhoods.”

The neighborhoods that fared better had far more interconnected communities. Individuals did not solve their problems on their own; they relied on their community to provide support, while they provided support to others.

Our public schools have largely become like the neighborhoods of Chicago where elderly residents suffered and died alone. Where once schools were used as community centers and viewed as central meeting places for neighbors, now in the name of security the community is locked out of schools. Where once parents were considered part of a community that educated children, now parents are on the outside and are brought in only to meet with the professionals whose job it is to teach the children.

The more locked away our schools have become, the more inaccessible and remote, the more they have been seen as “the other” by members of the larger community. Most of the news about schools is negative. People whose children don’t go to the local schools are likely to have a vaguely negative opinion about them. There is no sense that our schools are part of our community, functioning to help create more productive members of our society. The punitive testing environment created in the last 12 years has nurtured a sense that our kids are running behind in a race and will never measure up, and that our teachers are lazy slackers who are taking advantage of taxpayers.

In this time, violence in our schools has risen while violence elsewhere in our society is falling rapidly. We live in the safest time ever to be a human being, yet we feel anxious and fearful for our kids’ safety. In this post-9/11 society, we see security being increased everywhere, and it seems natural to call for an increase in security in our schools.

But as The New Yorker article points out, this increase in security measures has not increased our actual security—our safety on a day-to-day level.

“Whether they come from governments or from civil society, the best techniques for safeguarding cities don’t just mitigate disaster damage; they also strengthen the networks that promote health and prosperity during ordinary times. Contrast this with our approach to homeland security since 9/11: the checkpoints, the bollards, the surveillance cameras, the no-entry zones. We do not know whether these devices have prevented an attack on an American city, but, as the sociologist Harvey Molotch argues in “Against Security,” they have certainly made daily life less pleasant and efficient, imposing costs that are difficult to measure while yielding “almost nothing of value” in the normal course of things.”

Bullet-proof doors and electric fences will not solve the problem of violence aimed at our schools. We can’t fortify ourselves against an unknown enemy and still go about our business in a comfortable, socially healthy manner.

What we can do, however, is learn from the past in order to find what really will bring positive benefits to our society. In the case of school security and improving education, we can bring our communities back into schooling. We can not only welcome but expect that community members would want to take part in the education of a new generation. We can make our schools places where caring adults interact with needy children.

In “Why You Truly Never Leave High School” (New York Magazine, January 20, 2013), writer Jennifer Senior points out that teenagers of the past were not separated from adults and made to feel like “the other” in our society:

“Until the Great Depression, the majority of American adolescents didn’t even graduate from high school. Once kids hit their teen years, they did a variety of things: farmed, helped run the home, earned a regular wage. Before the banning of child labor, they worked in factories and textile mills and mines. All were different roads to adulthood; many were undesirable, if not outright Dickensian. But these disparate paths did arguably have one virtue in common: They placed adolescent children alongside adults.”

Over the last century, we have grown a new teenage culture due to the fact that teens spend so little time with adults and so much time getting “socialized” into a culture that is a parody of adult relationships. We expect our kids to get excited about STEM careers, but they’re spending most of their time with people who are excited about playing video games. We expect our kids to develop kindness and empathy, but they are spending most of their time in “Lord of the Flies”-like mini-societies where kid rules trump anything the occasional adult may teach them. Sure, you can have anti-bullying campaigns and rules enough to fill a 3-inch binder, but if you don’t have enough adults to model what it is to be a scientist, a business owner, a nurse, or simply a mature, productive adult of any profession, how do we expect kids to learn these things?

Learning happens when the learner sees a purpose for the learning. Security happens when we connect with each other and care about the connections we make.

Opening a school back up to a community model will not fortify its walls against an intruder who bought a hand grenade from someone he met at a shooting range, but it will make our schools safer and more effective, nonetheless. We all need to feel that we have a stake in how well the next generation is educated, and once we do, we’ll also feel that we are part of a safe and interconnected community.