5 ms·

It makes sense to group people for education based on ability. If a low performer is in a class of high performers, one of two things will likely happen: * the

by dolni 6y ago

It makes sense to group people for education based on ability. If a low performer is in a class of high performers, one of two things will likely happen: * the low performer will be left behind, because the course moves too quickly or sets the bar beyond their abilities * the class will have to be dumbed down so that the low performer can participate, which means that the high performers haven't realized their full potential That said, I take your general point about Ivy Leagues and I am curious to know if we can come up with an objective way of comparing them to other schools. As a prerequisite, you would need a way to measure someone's ability before and after admission.

endisneigh 6y ago
I'll have to find the research, but this generally is not true (at least with K-12). From my recollection in general what happens is that there's a certain ratio in which low performers and high performers interact. If the ratio is stacked towards high performers in general the low performers end up doing significantly better than they would've if they were in a group consisting of people entirely like them. This would suggest that societally there's some ratio that's optimal such that we intentionally put in "low performers" as a mechanism to raise their performance. As long as this is done very carefully it simultaneously increases the performance of low performers and maintains the potential of high performers. Conversely if you have too many low performers and put in a high performer, not only is their potential not met, but it's generally detrimental. In other words there's a sort of "force" pulling everyone to the mean. The "dilution" that results from adding high or low performers to an otherwise low or high performing group depends on how high or low they are and the group itself. With data this can be optimized such that low performers exceed their potential. Given the rate of change for low performers vastly exceeds high performers inherently, this is the societally optimal outcome. That being said K-12 education isn't like higher ed is that it's lower level (intellectually).
- dolni 6y ago
  Good K-12 schools _do_ batch people by ability, though. The inner city schools -- the ones that are struggling, they do a poor job putting underperforming students into remedial courses. They similarly do a poor job putting high performing students into honors and AP/IB courses. Measuring ability is tricky, which is why schools rely on grades for prerequisite courses. As a simple, contrived example: you can't really learn how to add if you don't even know your numbers yet. I think you're right on about K-12 being lower level is also a massive factor. I coasted through K-12, personally. I know a lot of people who did. But college kicked my ass in a lot of ways. I would argue that for higher education, matching courses to ability is _even more_ important because what you're studying is that much more difficult.
  - endisneigh 6y ago
    Which good schools are you thinking of? Most schools don't really do any analysis to show that they're good or not. The others are either exam schools or schools in areas that are expensive. Given the correlation between socioeconomic status and school performance, that's also just selection bias. I'm not necessarily against tracking (which is what we're describing) - but when you have a fixed number of resources and a mentality that the best should get more resources all you really end up with is a situation where the poor students are setup to fail. Grades pretty much exist because we decided that they need to be out of the traditional school system by 20 or so (in most school systems you can only be held back a couple of times). I disagree with grades in general but that's another discussion.
    - dolni 6y ago
      > Which good schools are you thinking of? Most schools don't really do any analysis to show that they're good or not. The others are either exam schools or schools in areas that are expensive. Given the correlation between socioeconomic status and school performance, that's also just selection bias. This isn't really a scientific analysis, just basing that on my own lived experience and what I've learned from other people over the years. I went to an inner city school. Inner city schools here offer fewer honors courses as compared to their suburban counterparts. My experience generally is that people who went to suburban schools are better educated. Suburban schools have higher graduation rates and kids get into college with more college credits than their urban peers. > I'm not necessarily against tracking (which is what we're describing) - but when you have a fixed number of resources and a mentality that the best should get more resources all you really end up with is a situation where the poor students are setup to fail. Well yeah, I think we're in complete agreement that some schools just don't have enough resources to do what they need to do. The goal should be for every child to realize their full potential. For some kids, that means you need to move a little slower. For others, that means you need to challenge them. > Grades pretty much exist because we decided that they need to be out of the traditional school system by 20 or so (in most school systems you can only be held back a couple of times). I disagree with grades in general but that's another discussion. I dunno, I think they are a useful metric for gauging ability in general terms. Not perfect. But I've yet to really see anything better.
adamhp 6y ago
> It makes sense to group people for education based on ability Ability to do what exactly? Your premise is based on this idea of "performance" as if it that is easily measurable or is some innate quality of a person. Performance is a function of the system itself though. Speaking from the perspective of someone in the United States: I didn't "perform well enough" in middle school and so got ignored by staff and counselors in high school, so then "underperformed" there as well. I got lucky and had a peer mentor me and help me figure out the importance of education. I went to community college and transferred to a top tier public university and went on to get a Master's degree, and now I am a high earning, tax paying, productive member of society. Could just be another "underperformer", but I lucked out and received someone else's empathy. We should be seeking to build a system that works for a variety of learner's, a variety of life situations, and a variety of subjects. We certainly have the technology and we understand that it isn't as simple as "high performers" and "low performers".
- thatfrenchguy 6y ago
  Same here. It sounds to me like every test trying to measure "ability" ends up testing for a specific kind of ability instead of the presence of ability in general. US college admissions today are basically a joke though, given universities mostly admit upper-middle class kids with perfect grades who can write an essay where they pretend that their life was hard.
  - dolni 6y ago
    I think we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good, here. Yes, ability measurement is sort of fuzzy and it's not perfect. It at least gives you a starting point. There would be no doubt in anybody's mind that we shouldn't take a kid whose mathematical abilities are counting to 10, and adding and subtracting one digit numbers, and toss them into a calculus course. So given that there is some boundary, that ability is meaningful in _some_ way, we can start to narrow it down. We can think about methods for measuring ability. What knowledge and understanding is required before you can tackle algebra II? Again, not perfect, but certainly necessary and better than nothing.
  - 6y ago
gugagore 6y ago
I think it's more interesting not to take for granted that this grouping (often called "tracking" in K-12) makes obvious sense. http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108013/chapters/What-Tracking-Is-and-How-to-Start-Dismantling-It.aspx http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108013/chapters/What-... > Do students differ in talents and achievement? They do. But when those observed differences are reinforced by track placement and grouping practices, and children then internalize those differences, learning opportunities become limited for all but the elite student. The talents of late bloomers go undiscovered, and the rewards of hard work and diligent study are never realized. > As our school district began its detracking reform, we began to pay attention to our language. Language shapes our thinking and our beliefs. We began with the word "ability" and made a conscious effort to replace it with "achievement." Thus, we write about, study, and talk about students who are lower achievers or higher achievers. Achievement is a measurable construct that describes what a student knows at a given point in time; ability implies an innate quality that cannot change and that limits success. As we made this commitment personally, we shared it with our faculty. Our language began to change, and so did the way we viewed students. Discussions about the labels placed on students and the beliefs they represent can help a faculty that is embarking on a detracking reform question constructs and practices that they have taken for granted. Being conscious of our own language can help us understand how deeply ingrained the culture of student sorting is. Language awareness is also likely to help uncover other justifications for tracking. > Both students and adults mistake labels such as "gifted," "honors student," "average," "remedial," "LD" and "MMR" for certification of overall ability or worth. These labels teach students that if the school does not identify them as capable in earlier grades, they should not expect to do well later. Everyone without the "gifted" label has the de facto label of "not gifted." The resource classroom is a low status place and students who go there are low status students. The result of all this is that most students have needlessly low self-concepts and schools have low expectations. Few students or teachers can defy those identities and expectations. These labeling effects permeate the entire school and social culture.
- dolni 6y ago
  To be blunt, this sounds like a lot of flowery-language bullshit that isn't backed by anything. Anybody who has been through education has observed that there are the people who "get it" and the people who struggle. And similarly, if you take an expert in some field and have them start explaining concepts to a random person that are at the very edge of the expert's knowledge, said person will be completely lost. This is a real thing we all can relate to. The idea that "we all can do it" because "we're all equals" is doing a disservice to the kids who struggle. You better prepare them by putting them in courses that are matched to their level and challenge them appropriately. You can't take someone who weighs 600 lbs, say "okay, go run a marathon" and expect success. Even if that person really wants to suceed. What you can do is train them in a way that is tailored to them, and eventually they may be able to run that marathon. One idea I agree with is that we should evaluate kids more regularly to see how their abilities change over time. If they show improvement, their coursework should be adjusted accordingly. But all this "not sorting" kids stuff? That's just nonsense.
decafninja 6y ago
Considering that there are legacy admissions, sports admissions, and students that get in because daddy & mommy donated a new wing to the library, etc. does it really matter? There are also students that are smart and capable, but just unmotivated, or going through life issues, etc. Some people are there to just get a piece of paper that shows they graduated from a top school, regardless if their GPA was a A or a C; and that school name on that piece of paper could still open doors a lesser school might not. It's kind of like FAANG. You could have an engineer with FAANG on their resume who otherwise did relatively unremarkable work. Another person has only no-name companies but has accomplished a lot. Yet the FAANG alumni is the one who will have recruiters and employers groveling to hire them, not the other guy.
jjk166 6y ago
I don't think that assumption is valid if you look more closely at what is actually happening in a school. Typically kids are learning a series of loosely related concepts that require different skillsets to process. If for one person integrals are intuitive but vectors are not, while for another vectors are intuitive while integrals are not, both would average roughly the same rate of learning, but you are still faced with the same dilemma - either you're slowing down to make sure the one student gets the concept they struggle with at the expense of the one who wasn't struggling or you move ahead quickly at the expense of the straggler. Both students would appear to be equal performers but that doesn't mean it made sense to group them together. While perhaps classes could be designed to have good correlation between concepts, you certainly couldn't do so for a well rounded education - there is absolutely no reason to believe someone who learns mathematical concepts quickly would also pick up literary concepts quickly. There may be small populations who do learn everything quickly and others that learn everything slowly, but certainly the overwhelming majority of the population would fall in-between.
- dolni 6y ago
  Point taken and I agree with the examples you provided. I would argue this is not quite the problem you make it out to be, because generally speaking, people tend to be strong or weak in a subject overall. If you're generally good at math, getting tripped up by vectors is not a death knell for pursuing coursework at that level. But there is a massive divide between the ability of someone "generally good" at math and "generally bad" at math. Tests do a really good job of capturing that, actually.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    Yeah, the problem is more with the schools. At least until post-secondary education, you don't go to school for just a narrow range of subjects. You might be excellent at math but does that mean you can keep up with people who are excellent at history? Unless we expect people to hyperspecialize from a young age (which would have disastrous consequences), we need schools to be able to deal with people at various different levels of proficiency.

by dolni 6y ago

endisneigh 6y ago

I'll have to find the research, but this generally is not true (at least with K-12). From my recollection in general what happens is that there's a certain ratio in which low performers and high performers interact. If the ratio is stacked towards high performers in general the low performers end up doing significantly better than they would've if they were in a group consisting of people entirely like them. This would suggest that societally there's some ratio that's optimal such that we intentionally put in "low performers" as a mechanism to raise their performance. As long as this is done very carefully it simultaneously increases the performance of low performers and maintains the potential of high performers. Conversely if you have too many low performers and put in a high performer, not only is their potential not met, but it's generally detrimental. In other words there's a sort of "force" pulling everyone to the mean. The "dilution" that results from adding high or low performers to an otherwise low or high performing group depends on how high or low they are and the group itself. With data this can be optimized such that low performers exceed their potential. Given the rate of change for low performers vastly exceeds high performers inherently, this is the societally optimal outcome. That being said K-12 education isn't like higher ed is that it's lower level (intellectually).

dolni 6y ago
Good K-12 schools _do_ batch people by ability, though. The inner city schools -- the ones that are struggling, they do a poor job putting underperforming students into remedial courses. They similarly do a poor job putting high performing students into honors and AP/IB courses. Measuring ability is tricky, which is why schools rely on grades for prerequisite courses. As a simple, contrived example: you can't really learn how to add if you don't even know your numbers yet. I think you're right on about K-12 being lower level is also a massive factor. I coasted through K-12, personally. I know a lot of people who did. But college kicked my ass in a lot of ways. I would argue that for higher education, matching courses to ability is _even more_ important because what you're studying is that much more difficult.
- endisneigh 6y ago
  Which good schools are you thinking of? Most schools don't really do any analysis to show that they're good or not. The others are either exam schools or schools in areas that are expensive. Given the correlation between socioeconomic status and school performance, that's also just selection bias. I'm not necessarily against tracking (which is what we're describing) - but when you have a fixed number of resources and a mentality that the best should get more resources all you really end up with is a situation where the poor students are setup to fail. Grades pretty much exist because we decided that they need to be out of the traditional school system by 20 or so (in most school systems you can only be held back a couple of times). I disagree with grades in general but that's another discussion.
  - dolni 6y ago
    > Which good schools are you thinking of? Most schools don't really do any analysis to show that they're good or not. The others are either exam schools or schools in areas that are expensive. Given the correlation between socioeconomic status and school performance, that's also just selection bias. This isn't really a scientific analysis, just basing that on my own lived experience and what I've learned from other people over the years. I went to an inner city school. Inner city schools here offer fewer honors courses as compared to their suburban counterparts. My experience generally is that people who went to suburban schools are better educated. Suburban schools have higher graduation rates and kids get into college with more college credits than their urban peers. > I'm not necessarily against tracking (which is what we're describing) - but when you have a fixed number of resources and a mentality that the best should get more resources all you really end up with is a situation where the poor students are setup to fail. Well yeah, I think we're in complete agreement that some schools just don't have enough resources to do what they need to do. The goal should be for every child to realize their full potential. For some kids, that means you need to move a little slower. For others, that means you need to challenge them. > Grades pretty much exist because we decided that they need to be out of the traditional school system by 20 or so (in most school systems you can only be held back a couple of times). I disagree with grades in general but that's another discussion. I dunno, I think they are a useful metric for gauging ability in general terms. Not perfect. But I've yet to really see anything better.

adamhp 6y ago

> It makes sense to group people for education based on ability Ability to do what exactly? Your premise is based on this idea of "performance" as if it that is easily measurable or is some innate quality of a person. Performance is a function of the system itself though. Speaking from the perspective of someone in the United States: I didn't "perform well enough" in middle school and so got ignored by staff and counselors in high school, so then "underperformed" there as well. I got lucky and had a peer mentor me and help me figure out the importance of education. I went to community college and transferred to a top tier public university and went on to get a Master's degree, and now I am a high earning, tax paying, productive member of society. Could just be another "underperformer", but I lucked out and received someone else's empathy. We should be seeking to build a system that works for a variety of learner's, a variety of life situations, and a variety of subjects. We certainly have the technology and we understand that it isn't as simple as "high performers" and "low performers".

thatfrenchguy 6y ago
Same here. It sounds to me like every test trying to measure "ability" ends up testing for a specific kind of ability instead of the presence of ability in general. US college admissions today are basically a joke though, given universities mostly admit upper-middle class kids with perfect grades who can write an essay where they pretend that their life was hard.
- dolni 6y ago
  I think we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good, here. Yes, ability measurement is sort of fuzzy and it's not perfect. It at least gives you a starting point. There would be no doubt in anybody's mind that we shouldn't take a kid whose mathematical abilities are counting to 10, and adding and subtracting one digit numbers, and toss them into a calculus course. So given that there is some boundary, that ability is meaningful in _some_ way, we can start to narrow it down. We can think about methods for measuring ability. What knowledge and understanding is required before you can tackle algebra II? Again, not perfect, but certainly necessary and better than nothing.
- 6y ago

gugagore 6y ago

I think it's more interesting not to take for granted that this grouping (often called "tracking" in K-12) makes obvious sense. http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108013/chapters/What-Tracking-Is-and-How-to-Start-Dismantling-It.aspx http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108013/chapters/What-... > Do students differ in talents and achievement? They do. But when those observed differences are reinforced by track placement and grouping practices, and children then internalize those differences, learning opportunities become limited for all but the elite student. The talents of late bloomers go undiscovered, and the rewards of hard work and diligent study are never realized. > As our school district began its detracking reform, we began to pay attention to our language. Language shapes our thinking and our beliefs. We began with the word "ability" and made a conscious effort to replace it with "achievement." Thus, we write about, study, and talk about students who are lower achievers or higher achievers. Achievement is a measurable construct that describes what a student knows at a given point in time; ability implies an innate quality that cannot change and that limits success. As we made this commitment personally, we shared it with our faculty. Our language began to change, and so did the way we viewed students. Discussions about the labels placed on students and the beliefs they represent can help a faculty that is embarking on a detracking reform question constructs and practices that they have taken for granted. Being conscious of our own language can help us understand how deeply ingrained the culture of student sorting is. Language awareness is also likely to help uncover other justifications for tracking. > Both students and adults mistake labels such as "gifted," "honors student," "average," "remedial," "LD" and "MMR" for certification of overall ability or worth. These labels teach students that if the school does not identify them as capable in earlier grades, they should not expect to do well later. Everyone without the "gifted" label has the de facto label of "not gifted." The resource classroom is a low status place and students who go there are low status students. The result of all this is that most students have needlessly low self-concepts and schools have low expectations. Few students or teachers can defy those identities and expectations. These labeling effects permeate the entire school and social culture.

dolni 6y ago
To be blunt, this sounds like a lot of flowery-language bullshit that isn't backed by anything. Anybody who has been through education has observed that there are the people who "get it" and the people who struggle. And similarly, if you take an expert in some field and have them start explaining concepts to a random person that are at the very edge of the expert's knowledge, said person will be completely lost. This is a real thing we all can relate to. The idea that "we all can do it" because "we're all equals" is doing a disservice to the kids who struggle. You better prepare them by putting them in courses that are matched to their level and challenge them appropriately. You can't take someone who weighs 600 lbs, say "okay, go run a marathon" and expect success. Even if that person really wants to suceed. What you can do is train them in a way that is tailored to them, and eventually they may be able to run that marathon. One idea I agree with is that we should evaluate kids more regularly to see how their abilities change over time. If they show improvement, their coursework should be adjusted accordingly. But all this "not sorting" kids stuff? That's just nonsense.

decafninja 6y ago

Considering that there are legacy admissions, sports admissions, and students that get in because daddy & mommy donated a new wing to the library, etc. does it really matter? There are also students that are smart and capable, but just unmotivated, or going through life issues, etc. Some people are there to just get a piece of paper that shows they graduated from a top school, regardless if their GPA was a A or a C; and that school name on that piece of paper could still open doors a lesser school might not. It's kind of like FAANG. You could have an engineer with FAANG on their resume who otherwise did relatively unremarkable work. Another person has only no-name companies but has accomplished a lot. Yet the FAANG alumni is the one who will have recruiters and employers groveling to hire them, not the other guy.

jjk166 6y ago

I don't think that assumption is valid if you look more closely at what is actually happening in a school. Typically kids are learning a series of loosely related concepts that require different skillsets to process. If for one person integrals are intuitive but vectors are not, while for another vectors are intuitive while integrals are not, both would average roughly the same rate of learning, but you are still faced with the same dilemma - either you're slowing down to make sure the one student gets the concept they struggle with at the expense of the one who wasn't struggling or you move ahead quickly at the expense of the straggler. Both students would appear to be equal performers but that doesn't mean it made sense to group them together. While perhaps classes could be designed to have good correlation between concepts, you certainly couldn't do so for a well rounded education - there is absolutely no reason to believe someone who learns mathematical concepts quickly would also pick up literary concepts quickly. There may be small populations who do learn everything quickly and others that learn everything slowly, but certainly the overwhelming majority of the population would fall in-between.

dolni 6y ago
Point taken and I agree with the examples you provided. I would argue this is not quite the problem you make it out to be, because generally speaking, people tend to be strong or weak in a subject overall. If you're generally good at math, getting tripped up by vectors is not a death knell for pursuing coursework at that level. But there is a massive divide between the ability of someone "generally good" at math and "generally bad" at math. Tests do a really good job of capturing that, actually.
- jjk166 6y ago
  Yeah, the problem is more with the schools. At least until post-secondary education, you don't go to school for just a narrow range of subjects. You might be excellent at math but does that mean you can keep up with people who are excellent at history? Unless we expect people to hyperspecialize from a young age (which would have disastrous consequences), we need schools to be able to deal with people at various different levels of proficiency.