ParisTampaBlog

We’ve only recently moved to Tampa, about a year ago to be exact when we moved into our son’s house while our new home was being significantly renovated for our own purposes. Now it’s completed, but we’re still moving in, taking things out of hundreds of boxes as spaces are prepared for them. Books in particular.

Just this morning while going through books I happened to pick up David Berliner’s and Bruce Biddle’s 1995  The Manufactured Crisis. Picked it up and began to leaf through it, not expecting much other than the usual left liberal criticism of the still on-going conservative right’s attack on the public schools, and indeed, the Berliner/Biddle book begins with a sharp putdown of the 1983 broadside, bearing the imprimatur of Ronald Reagan, A Nation at Risk.

But lo and behold I was flabbergasted as I turned to their Chapter 7, Fundamentals of School Improvement, and encountered their thoroughly radical proposal concerning the management of heterogeneity (the differences among school kids). This single reform, if it had been enacted which it of course wasn’t, would have thoroughly revolutionized our public schools, and while doing so probably earned the Right’s blessing, and the Left’s condemnation.

Now my particular interest in this ancient (1995) radical reform proposal directly speaks to my own principal criticism of how schools, both public and private, are structured, one that I have been making now for nearly 50 years or more, almost since the time I begin teaching and saw that the great differences, differences of all kinds, among kids in the classroom most of all prevented learning from taking place, at least for most of them.

I criticized, condemned the schools to inevitable failure, for placing children of the same age, and therefore  most probably equally ignorant of the world, and with widely different abilities and interests, in the same classroom, and more or less keeping them together until they reached 17 years of age. Why has that structure been so widely accepted, for some 150 years or more? Doesn’t it fly in the face of common sense?

The more natural learning situation, as in families, and for some time in this country’s history in the one roomed schoolhouse, is to have children of different ages together. This allows for children learning as much or more from one another as from the teacher.

When the whole burden of learning is placed on the single teacher only those few children who happen to be ready for whatever is the day’s lesson will learn, and the others….? well we get A Nation at Risk and any number of other exposés of all that our children are not learning in the schools.

Anyway, Berliner and Biddle propose that we radically change the way we manage heterogeneity. If you want to read what they have to say in its entirety go to the Chapter 7 excerpt posted on my Must Reads.

To cite just a few of the authors’ words from this chapter:

“Today, American public schools commonly segregate students by age and presumed ability. Students having roughly the same chronological age are assembled into classroom groups representing specific “grades,” and often those students are also sorted into ability groups or “tracks” that are to be given different curricular experiences. In fact, so common are these practices today that many Americans assume they are “natural” and cannot conceive of other procedures for conducting education…. [it is our opinion] that age-segregated classrooms create many problems.”

What do the authors propose in order to change things? And I would especially ask that you think about, as I did, how could these liberal, public school defenders, ever imagine that their super-radical proposal could possibly be accepted by the super- conservative, and super-protective of their own, educational establishment? And of course it wouldn’t be. Helas!

According to the authors, “the key to maximizing the effectiveness of schools lies in creating subject-matter lessons that bring together all students whose levels of knowledge about the subject are about equal—regardless of whether they acquired the knowledge they now possess quickly or slowly.”

[Can you imagine anyone successfully doing that? Equal levels of knowledge about the subject? Not my experience of kids. Equal ignorance of the subject was much more the rule. Knowledge of the subject is not something kids bring with them to school. Don't they go to school for that?]

“Let us propose,” they say, “that schools take in children on the day of their fifth birthday or some other agreed-on marker age…. Each child would then be assessed for his or her knowledge in various subjects, and the professional staff would move the child into appropriate-level reading and other academic lessons depending on those assessments. And as soon as the child was able to master basic skills for each subject, the child would be moved on to more advanced lessons.

“In such a model for schooling, the child is moved upward through the curricula as fast as the child’s achievements warrant…. All lessons taught, from kindergarten to high school graduation, would be designed to help students move through the curriculum at their own rates. And this means that all students would be challenged in the most beneficial ways throughout their schooling.

“It would also mean, of course, that classes would be composed of students who varied greatly in age. A specific ten-year-old, for example, might be a whiz in mathematics and would be found in a calculus lesson early in the day…. the school we envision would help both those who are “speed” and those who are “slow” in various subjects to get the most out of their educations—and achievement levels for all students would shoot up.

“….teachers, students, and parents would learn quickly that children may excel in one subject but move quite slowly in another, and this would reduce their tendency to make holistic judgments about students who are thought to be either “superbright” or “hopeless.” Thus, such a school system would help to eliminate the stigmas presently acquired by large numbers of students who are thought to be “poor learners” or merely “ordinary.”

“Thus, the ways in which Americans presently conduct schooling conspire to make ‘losers’ of many children. In contrast, the type of school organization we envision would sharply reduce this type of stigmatizing. Students who are slow in one subject would know that they are fast movers in others. And those who were truly interested in moving more rapidly could explore ways to do so.”

Amazing, isn’t it, that they could propose this with a straight face. And to think that within the same school the division in regard to the speed at which children learn would be substantially different from what is now called ability grouping. For isn’t the rate, or speed at which children learn the most common evidence of ability? And more often than not children who learn quickly in one area learn quickly  in most other areas as well.

No, what the authors propose is just another version of tracking by ability, that which the authors themselves put down as being dehumanizing, creating winners and losers. Why do we find it so hard to accept that there are, in most if not all areas of endeavor, at least in regard to achievement, winners and losers.

Biddle and Berliner needed to go much further, do away with the school itself, not just the present age divisions among the students. With great benefit to their proposal they might have made use of Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, basing their divisions and separations among kids more on these than on different learning rates. In this regard they might better have proposed multiple school or learning environments and/or structures based on the widely different intelligences and abilities of kids (and people).

For most of all the way to handle heterogeneity or differences among children, and also among people, is to provide multiple environments, for living as well as for learning. By providing instead a single environment, in the case of children the school building itself, and keeping the kids all there together, inevitably comparisons between kids will be made, and of course there will be winners and losers, and all the other demoralizing effects of age segregation that Biddle and Berliner would avoid.