Nancy Flanagan considers whether grouping and diversity have a place in education. Reposted with permission.
If you were in the classroom, as I was for well over three decades, you will have had some experience with tracking— ability grouping, or dividing the class into the Bluebirds, the Orioles and the Buzzards at reading time. And you will know that some teachers strongly resist the impulse to sort and label students, while others endorsed the practice of dividing students by their—key word alert!—perceived differences.
I taught 7th grade math for two (non-consecutive) years. Students were leveled into math groups both times, although the labeling process was different. The first time, there were four levels—Honors, Advanced, Basic and Remedial—and I taught Basic math.
The math faculty, understanding that ability differences were, indeed, perceived rather than scientifically determined—and that skills and understanding were also likely to shift, over the course of a semester or two—proposed testing the students quarterly, using the same test. Any student whose test scores were wildly out of line with their perceived peers could be moved. Up or down.
Except—this was a lot less feasible in practice. Most kids (and their parents) had internalized their math labels. Honors or Advanced? Try suggesting, after nine weeks, that their skills were really… kinda basic.
I also had a couple of kids in my “basic” group who, right off the bat, were obviously sandbagging. Their actual skills and math sense were so far above the norm that I wondered immediately how and why they were placed in the Basic group.
After a few weeks, however, I started to understand how behavior issues impacted the sixth grade teachers’ divvy-up process at the end of the previous year. Act like an attention-seeking four year old? No Honors for you! The only African American kid in the 7th grade? Basic.
Point being: Leveling students, in most academic settings, has limited and conditional value. More importantly, grouping students is often about things totally unrelated to academic ability or potential.
There is probably no education writer who has influenced me more than Alfie Kohn, whose book No Contest inspired me to stop using chairs and challenges, something band directors everywhere see as a normal practice. (I wrote about how that actually improved my school bands, HERE.)
Alfie Kohn just wrote a rather brilliant essay: Heterogenius; Why and How to Stop Dividing People into Us and Them. It’s well worth the read, packed with evidence-based observations and sharp analysis, and incredibly timely in an era when we have to be reminded that diversity, equity and inclusion are actually good goals—especially when teaching children—not merely “DEI,” a catch-all trigger for the people currently in power to run roughshod over the rest of us, including our future citizens.
Here’s a sampling from Kohn’s column, on the measurable, research-supported benefits of diversity:
The idea of minimizing homogeneity has a great deal to recommend it even on a biological level. Genetic diversity allows for adaptation to a changing environment. Species diversity makes for more robust ecosystems. Plant diversity (for example, through crop rotation) protects against pests and disease. Even nature, in other words, seems to be saying “Mix it up!”
As for human interaction, the experience of being in a heterogeneous group not only attenuates tribalism but can enhance performance on various tasks. Social psychologist Adam Galinsky put it this way: “Diversity increases creativity and innovation, promotes higher quality decisions, and enhances economic growth because it spurs deeper information processing and complex thinking…[whereas] homogeneous groups run the risk of narrow mindedness and groupthink (i.e., premature consensus) through misplaced comfort and overconfidence.”
It’s that last quote that explains why Trump, after raving about–and winning an election on—his goal of deporting millions of brown people, has now decided to welcome White “refugees” of European descent from South Africa.
It’s all out in the open now—how politicized the pushback against diversity and equity are. Long-time right-leaning ed-research houses like Fordham keep pumping out anti-diversity reports, in favor of reserving education goodies for the top layer of (white and Asian) HS students. However:
As the report notes, research does support the finding that many students are insufficiently challenged. The research is also mixed on how best to design schools to avoid any students languishing academically. But the report fails to take seriously the decades of research showing the harms of the tracking and ability grouping systems in secondary schools that have stratified opportunities to learn. After muddling the research evidence, the report then recommends the practice most harmful to equity: increased tracking (called, “readiness grouping in separate classrooms”).
Ah. You’re not tracking kids. You’re readiness grouping them. In separate—but decidedly unequal—classrooms.
A blithe quote from the Wall Street Journal: On day two of his administration, President Trump ordered federal agencies to terminate “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs in the government and combat them in the private sector. The order follows through on his promise to forge a colorblind, merit-based society and to end the engineering of race and sex into every aspect of American life.
Jamelle Bouie: This is the “merit” two-step. First, you strongly imply or state outright that the presence of anyone who isn’t a straight, able-bodied white man is unfair “DEI,” then you argue that just because an institution is all-male and lily-white doesn’t mean there is discrimination. That’s just merit!
Been there. And had those conversations with my fellow math teachers, back then. One of the words to watch for: deserve.
As in: He’s going to be an engineer, like his Dad. He deserves to be in Honors math, even though his score is a little low. Or: She doesn’t turn her homework in—says she has to babysit. Even if she aces the test, she doesn’t deserve to be in Advanced math.
Because tracking (stratifying, merit-based clustering, readiness grouping, whatever) happens at the school level, it is something local schools and districts have some control over, despite Donald Trump’s empty threats against Stuff He Doesn’t Like in schools resulting in pulling federal funding.
Teachers, even threatened, fearful teachers, can hold firm to the time-honored principle of doing their best to challenge every child, to look for and support their strengths, without arbitrarily dividing them into academic stars and lesser lights. They can also honor the principle of diversity, knowing diversity makes a classroom, a school and society stronger.
As Alfie Kohn says:
That’s a message that children need to hear — and to see modeled for them — by the adults in their lives: a commitment to inclusiveness whose implication is that there is no future in tribalism, no justice in “just us.” Every day our kids should watch us encounter and talk about others in a way that highlights how those people are not alien beings; they’re like us with respect to the things that matter — and, at the same time, their qualities can’t be reduced to membership in any category.
