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Writer's pictureJoanne Jacobs

Achievers need a chance to go faster, fly higher



High-ability students should be grouped together and allowed to accelerate their learning, argues Brandon Wright. That's especially true for students from black, Hispanic and low-income families.


Grouping high achievers together doesn't harm other students, he writes. The alternative grouping all students together in one class and asking teachers to "differentiate" instruction -- is very difficult to pull off, especially in classrooms with a wide range of performance levels.


"The typical American classroom includes students that span three to seven grade levels of achievement mastery," according to a 2022 study. A fifth-grade teacher may have students who haven't mastered second-grade math content "as well as those who have already mastered eighth-grade math content."


The pandemic widened the performance gap, a more recent study found, notes Wright. Few teachers can provide effective instruction to students at so many levels in the same classroom. Often, teachers focus on the struggling students and ignore the high achievers.


"Equity" advocates have tried to scrap programs for advanced learners in Virginia and California and cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, and New York, Wright notes. He argues for more opportunities for advanced education and better identification of "marginalized students" who'd benefit from the challenge.

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4 Comments


mcra99
Oct 31

Wishful thinking. Been said...tried...and won't happen. Kids won't allow it.


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rob
Nov 01
Replying to

Funny how it used to work. In my grade school, the classes were definitely sorted. The smarter kids all knew it; it was pretty obvious. No one seemed to care, however, we all mixed equally on the playground. The cool part is that some of the kids from the dumber classes turned out to be pretty successful adults. It's obvious that hard work and determination can overcome genetics. The opposite is true as well.


We don't sort students today because we are afraid to admit that there are some students that are smarter than others (whether it's genetics, family situation or whatever). "Equity" is everything.

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Malcolm Kirkpatrick
Malcolm Kirkpatrick
Oct 30

Curricula evolve. A competitive market in education services would accelerate evolution. With well-designed self-paced curricula, one teacher could handle 50 students with a wide range of ability levels, but self-paced curricula would demonstrate the irrelevance of trained classroom teachers and so destroy an $837 billion per year industry.

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rob
Nov 01
Replying to

Competition cures many ills, but it is extremely unfashionable to notice it.

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