Schools are the same, and kids are different.
I’m still thinking about Harold Howe’s statement that "most educators are aware that any group of children of a particular age or grade will vary widely in their learning for a whole host of reasons."* Is there any truer statement that one can make about education than this? That kids of the same age are different and that they learn differently? And yet don’t we go on in the way we structure our schools and classrooms pretending that this isn’t so?
That kids differ widely among themselves is what makes teaching an art, and not a science. If kids were all the same we could have them adding fractions, writing paragraphs, answering questions about the same texts in the same room at the same time, and have robots replacing teachers. But they’re not, and we can’t, unless as is too often the case, we have the entire class go on at the pace of the slowest learners among them.
The art of the teacher is to somehow enable all of her students to learn in spite of the fact that what they learn and the rate at which they learn are hardly the same for any two of them, let alone the entire class of 20 – 25 individuals. Only the extraordinary teacher will bring it about that most of her students in the class are learning. But not even the extraordinary teacher will bring it about that all are. The more ordinary situation, when only a few are learning, is the rule.
This situation has been with us for as long as we’ve had schools and is the reason for our repeated attempts at school reform. At times we have faced up to it directly and tracked the students, into slow and fast learners, into college bound and vocation bound, creating other, perhaps even worse problems by so doing. At times, such as now, we have religiously avoided tracking the students, and have invented one stratagem after another in order to keep all those of the same age together in the same classroom. The children of course have resisted our liberal and egalitarian solution with the result that many have fallen way behind their peers, and many of them have dropped out of school entirely.
But in fact tracking has always been with us in one form or another. Because in some terrible sense it does correspond to the ways things are. We’re perhaps not as guilty of this device as was the former Soviet Union where the schools were either magnet schools serving only the best and the brightest, or holding stations for the worst and the dullest youth who only upon reaching the proper age were released to join the working classes, usually for life.
Not as guilty, but guilty we are. For don’t we also have, not perhaps in the same building, but in different buildings, and very often far apart, in different corners of the city, or state, programs for our intellectually and artistically gifted and talented? Art and music academies, math and science regional schools, exam schools, and technical high schools? Not to mention the private, independent schools, serving more and more our political and economic elite. Not to mention the growing number of so called “no excuses” schools although not selected by the kids, selected by the parents? Not to mention the growing number of religious schools, not to mention the growing army of home schoolers. Haven’t we in these other learning situations placed those with similar interests and abilities together in the same learning environment? And haven’t we become in spite of our profession of egalitarianism a meritocracy?
So we have partially solved the problem of students of varying abilities in the same classroom by permitting selected students to attend more specialized schools. Now there are those, proponents of school choice, who would increase this movement away from the traditional public school and have all schools become schools of choice. And there are those, representing the entrenched interests of our public schools, who would resist this movement, seeing in school choice a slightly veiled attempt to dismember and eventually destroy our 150 year old system of public schools open to all.
There have always been efforts to reform our public schools. And time and time again we see reformers repeating the efforts of past reformers. I believe that this is so because schools have as a rule, from the beginning 150 years ago, put children all together in one building separating them only by age. This was certainly the least costly solution to educating all of our children. It was never, however, the most effective solution. Once again, this system has never really worked for the reason that, as Harold Howe reminds us, “any group of children of a particular age or grade will vary widely in their learning for a whole host of reasons.”*
*"Those of us who recently supported the new legislation (the NAEP) and its funding had no intention of creating a new authority to tell all American schools what to teach in each grade or even that schools should be organized by grades. More importantly, most educators are aware that any group of children of a particular age or grade will vary widely in their learning for a whole host of reasons. To suggest that there are particular learnings or skill levels that should be developed to certain defined points by a particular age or grade is like saying all 9th graders should score at or above the 9th grade level on a standardized test. It defies reality."
(Vinovskis, Maris. 1998. Overseeing the Nation’s Report Card. The
Creation and Evolution of the National Assessment Governing Board
(NAGB). National Assessment Governing Board, U.S. Department of
Education. p. 43)
