I’m not talking about downloading movies or anything like that; I’m talking about the practice of grouping schoolkids into classes according to their abilities — something which has been regarded as doubleplusungood by Big Education for a long time.
As always, Joanne Jacobs brings in da numbers:
“It wasn’t long ago that some educational researchers in the UK and Ireland were calling ability grouping ‘symbolic violence’.”
And yet…
Strong students learn less math in mixed classes, concludes a new Education Endowment Foundation study of English middle schools, reports Richard Adams in The Guardian. Weaker students, as judged by prior math achievement, do about the same whether they’re in mixed classes or lower-track classes, University College London (UCL) researchers found. Furthermore, students placed in lower-track classes were more confident of their math abilities than those in mixed classes.
I can attest to this. Way back in time, we members of the chalk ‘n slate set we “streamed” in just about every class, from A to D where the numbers supported it (e.g. in Mathematics and English), and from A to C for the elective classes (such as Geography, Biology and History).
I remember starting at St. John’s College in the A class for every course, but by the end of my second year I was moved down to the B classes for Mathematics and Science (Chem and Physics, which were combined into a single discipline). All the other courses, I remained in the A stream (English, Afrikaans and Latin — our French class was so small that streaming made no sense.
Once I’d got over the shame of being “dropped” — and withstood the anguish of my parents, who couldn’t believe that their “straight A” son was no more — I actually found those two courses less intimidating, because I didn’t have to to work with the super-smart Maths and Science geniuses in the A class who regularly got 90%-100% for all their tests, whilst I was lucky to pass.
In the B classes, however, because the teaching was delivered at a much slower pace, I regularly passed all the tests, along the way discovering that my actual problem was that I had no facility for mathematical processing — ironic, really, considering that I ended up being a statistician and data analyst at the Great Big Research Company, and later as a data model algorithm developer as a consultant.
My problem was never getting the thing solved; I just needed a lot more time than everyone else to get there. So tests were always going to be difficult for me because of the limited time thereof. (I proved this when I took the Core Math class at college, yeah in my fifties: I could barely scrap through tests with a passing grade, but because the final exam was taken in a lab with no time constraints, I ended up with a final “B” grade — my only one in all the courses I took for my B.A. — because while my semester tests were a dismal failure, I actually scored 99% for my final exam, which luckily for me counted for 80% of the total.)
But I wouldn’t have been able to do even that, if my self-confidence hadn’t been bolstered in high school by being able to work at a slower pace in the B class.
So you can put me on the side of people who don’t think that ability grouping / streaming is symbolic violence.