I was intrigued by a snippet I read in Sunday's Parade Magazine. In August of this year, a school district in Westminster, Colorado, will eliminate grade levels. No more second grade, no more fifth grade. Instead, elementary and middle-school students will find themselves in multi-age classrooms, grouped with other students at a similar learning level. The idea is to create an environment conducive to how children learn.
This isn't the first time this has been tried in the United States; in the 1990s, a small school district in Alaska reacted to dismal test scores, high dropout rates, and the inability of graduates to hold jobs by launching a comprehensive restructuring effort. The Chugach School District replaced credit hours and grade levels with an individualized, student-centered approach. By 2001, the dropout rate had been cut nearly in half; the students consistently tested above state averages in reading, writing, and math; and more than two-thirds of the graduates went on to attend college. The system is still working well today.
The Parade article has a poll asking whether schools should do away with age-dependent grade levels. I was surprised to see that an overwhelming majority of readers say "yes." What do you think?
I was also intrigued by the article since I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers. As a principal and teacher of an elementary school, I believe age does play a role in success. One of Gladwell's comments that resonated most with me is that primary teachers confuse ability with maturity. Often students who are more mature experience success in the classroom and appear to be "smarter" than their younger peers. This starts a pattern of ability grouping for students that, unfortunately, shapes the future of the students. Gladwell does suggest that perhaps a way around this is to level the playing field by putting elementary students in classrooms based on birth months: Class A = Jan-April, Class B = May-August, Class C = Sept-Dec. This allows students to learn and compete against other students of the same maturity level.
I plan on digging deeper to see if this would be possible to do with kindergarten and first grade students for the 2009-2010 school year. Most recently, I asked my kindergarten teacher to name the top five students in her two classes. Then, I took a look at the students' birth dates. Guess what, the students were amongst the oldest in the classroom. Definitely food for thought!