Commentary: One-Size-Fits-All Education Doesn’t Work Well, but Diversity Advocates Are

by Vince Bielski

There’s a world of difference in the abilities of elementary school students in the Trotwood-Madison City School District, outside Dayton, Ohio. Some low-performing fifth graders are only capable of reading first-grade picture books with basic words like dog and cat, says Angie Fugate, a district specialist focusing on gifted education. In the same classrooms, the aces read at a sixth-grade level, devouring thick novels that adults also enjoy, including the Harry Potter series.

“It’s like we have gone back to the days of the one-room schoolhouse,” Fugate says. “The gap is really huge and yet we are supposed to teach them all the same curriculum. It’s a very difficult thing to do. For some teachers, it’s just overwhelming.”

This remarkable learning gap of about five grade levels exists today in many if not most K-8 classrooms in the U.S., according to researchers. They say it makes teaching everyone in a classroom extremely difficult and may help explain the poor performance of many public schools.

The gap partly reflects reformers’ decades-long push against grouping students by ability that’s only intensifying now in a renewed clamor for diversity in classrooms. Although much attention has focused on dropping selective admissions at academically competitive public schools, the diversity movement has also rolled back gifted programs and honors classes at more schools, from New York to Seattle.

Even educational experts who support diversity warn that the dismantling of accelerated instruction will likely add to the learning gap problem as advanced students are increasingly tossed into general education classrooms.

The learning gap already exists in big cities, suburbs, and small towns. A 2021 study found that in about 70% of fourth-grade classrooms, student performance varied widely, with pupils placing in four or more different math benchmarks from low to advanced – or from about the second- to sixth-grade levels.

The pandemic lockdowns widened the spread even more. It was particularly harmful to low-income students of color who spent more time in remote instruction and dropped even further behind their white peers, according to a 2022 study.

Diverse, but at What Cost in Learning?

To learn, students need challenging instruction calibrated just beyond what they already know. But the wider the learning gap in a classroom, the more likely that a teacher won’t provide everyone with appropriate levels of instruction, says Scott Peters, a senior research scientist at school assessment group NWEA who focuses on the achievement gap.

“What schools are doing today is so inefficient and ineffective,” Peters says. “Equity should be about giving every kid what they need to grow. But we are teaching every kid the same thing, despite the big achievement gaps among them, and that’s the definition of inequity.”

For diversity advocates, the priority is integrating classrooms of high-achieving whites and Asians with more blacks and Latinos despite the disparity in skill levels that often exists among these students. They argue that mixed classrooms are essential in a country with a population that’s become much more diverse over the past two decades.

Halley Potter at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, says that while ability grouping almost always produces classrooms skewed by race and class, mixed classrooms create “learning environments that build empathy, reduce racial bias, and prepare students to thrive in a diverse world.” 

But what about academic performance? Years of research to find out if mixing students from different economic backgrounds improves the performance of low achievers is “inconclusive,” according to a review of the studies by Sarah Cordes at Temple University.

Several studies suggest that struggling students do see gains in more prosperous schools ‒ but a few studies suggest they don’t. The bigger issue, Cordes points out, is that it’s unclear what’s causing the improved performance: Is it the exposure to high-achieving peers or the family background of the struggling students?

If mixed-ability classrooms work, it’s not reflected in the nation’s report card. The national testing scores of fourth and eighth graders in math and reading showed almost no progress from 2009 to 2019. More telling, the divergence between the high and low performers widened significantly. Scores for the weakest students fell in both subjects and in both grades.

But researchers who say lumping students together isn’t working and it’s time to consider new approaches sometimes face a hostile reception in today’s racially charged fight over public education.

“If you want to be called a racist, go out and say that you’re for ability grouping,” says Jonathan Plucker, a professor of education at Johns Hopkins University who studies and consults with schools on this issue. “And people will say it to your face. But I’ve spent my career trying to help every kid grow academically, and I think the research says that ability grouping is a better way to do it.”

The learning gap takes shape even before kids enter kindergarten. A 2022 study looked at math and science skills among kindergartners of different races. Researchers found that about 16% of white students and only 4% of blacks and Latinos showed advanced abilities, a spread that they attributed mostly to differences in family income and early educational opportunities for children.

As students move through elementary school, so does the learning gap. In a study of sixth graders, researchers examined math and reading test data from two large and racially diverse urban school districts with more than 22,000 students in the 2014-2015 school year. They found that 59% of math classrooms and 82% of English classrooms had a gap of five or more grade levels

Tracking and the Reformers’ Track Record

School reformers have arguably helped to maintain if not widen the gap by dismantling ability grouping practices like tracking, according to Tom Loveless, a former senior fellow at Brookings Institution who wrote a book on tracking. This system that typically places students in low-, average- and high-performance classrooms for most of their schooling was the dominant way to organize students in the late 1980s, when it first came under attack by liberal-minded educators and academics. They were inspired by the work of Jeannie Oakes, an educational theorist at UCLA whose research focused on school inequalities and social justice.

While research showed that top students benefited from the high tracks, those in the lower tracks, composed of many black and Latino students,  were being neglected. Oakes found that the low tracks were filled with less-experienced teachers, ineffective rote instruction, and unruly behavior that undermined students’ ability to learn.

Reformers succeeded in sharply reducing tracking in English, history, and social science courses across the county, but not in advanced math, according to Loveless. They also rolled back remedial education, in which struggling kids were pulled out of class and placed in groups for special interventions in subjects such as reading.

Since then, the opposition to tracking has expanded into a broader movement that has toppled other forms of ability grouping in several cities.

San Francisco was among the early cities to target advanced programs, ending accelerated math in middle school and early high school in 2014. Seattle abolished honors programs in 2020 in middle schools, stirring protests from parents who want advanced classes for their kids.

In October, New York City went much further. It eliminated grade- and test-based admissions in most middle schools after years of pressure from advocacy groups. In one prominent Manhattan district, a majority of parents had urged the superintendent at several community meetings to retain selective admissions to ensure their children would be in challenged in class. The superintendent rejected those pleas from parents, some of whom are now considering leaving public schools.

The Learning Gap Loss  

To see how the learning gap can hamper education, consider a typical third-grade math class. The focus is simple multiplication and division.

Peters says struggling third graders are probably working at a first-grade level and still learning single-digit addition. Multiplying 7 x 5 will be a leap too far for them. The best students mastered multiplication tables a year or two ago and are ready for fifth grade work, with fractions and decimals. But they are stuck in third-grade math.

Making matters worse, teachers nationwide are given a one-size-fits-all curriculum for general education students in the same grade, no matter their skill level.