Perhaps in the first 3-5 grades, age segregation makes sense, but in later grades, achievement segregation makes more sense.

However, much of the initial achievement segregation is going to be driven by the child's home life: how much they get for breakfast, how much time parents spend with them going over the basics (Math, ABCs, etc.), and how much intellectual stimulation they get at home (dinner table news discussions, books, non-trash TV, etc.). How are you going to rebut charges of racism when poor African-American kids are put in lower groups (along with the poor white kids)?

I think I've read that article previously and I agree with it. It makes more sense to group children by ability than by age. And by that, I also mean by subject.

So, the kid who is behind in reading but advanced in math will be with older kids for math and younger kids in reading. The groups would naturally have some amount of age segregation, but it wouldn't be strict. Moreover, it would put an emphasis on mastery rather than just pushing kids through chronologically. If Jane misses two weeks because she gets the flu, she'll be less penalized in this sort of system than in one that just marches forward whatever happens. Similarly, when Joe reads a fascinating book on astronomy, he'll find he can breeze through the astronomy section really fast because he's already been exposed. This rewards learning for its own sake because you can move on (either in topic or to further depth).

I homeschool four children. They are roughly in two age groups nearly 7 and 10/11. They are in NONE of the same ability groups. I'm covering KG-12th grade material - across FOUR students!

So yes, it makes more sense to ability group. At least to me.

I was socially shunned, and there's an argument for keeping kids in a grade for social reasons, but frankly, I would have been better off in a grade where I was ignored by older kids rather than kicked around.

I think it makes so much sense. If all the classes were mixed age, then it wouldn't be considered weird to have someone older or younger than the median in the class. The problem with skipping or holding someone back now is that being the only 6 year old in a class of 8 year olds, or 10 year old in a class of 9 year olds is socially awkward. It wouldn't be if classes were age mixed, which they would be if we grouped by skill sets.

I think that would be a great idea. Let people progress as they are able.

I remember when I was in grade school and the teacher wouldn't let me read the Clifford books, claiming they were too easy for me. My other classmates were allowed to read them. Perhaps if class weren't segregated, I would have gotten to the Clifford books when they were appropriate for me.

It makes sense, and would be best for students overall, and would have been good for me. I can see some problems due to social pressures. But it would never be implemented on a large scale, for several reasons: the before mentioned accusations of racism; also class-ism; current political climate is very anti standardized tests, so who and how they get tested for advancement would be a nightmare.
For any who may think the current situation is fair, they just need to look at the Freakenomics topic of why many pro soccer players are born in the same month, and realize that happens to school and education with all students.

"However, much of the initial achievement segregation is going to be driven by the child's home life"

Yeah pretty much. I pretty much didn't exist to my parents and the idea that they would involve themselves in any of schooling lmao. Sadly this isn't really uncommon among Hispanics. There is something inherently cultural where the parents just do not want to deal with their kids futures. Certainly they will give platitudes about "bettering yourself" and "educating yourself" but that my friend is where it completely ends. They will not push you, they will not guide you, they will not in any way shape or form go out and figure out how to help you. Often from what I have seen is that they hinder and burden their children unintentionally.

I always feel that almost every change is geared towards students that have a positive home life and are trying to escape the contamination of those of us that didn't. I don't begrudge them but again I rarely see an actual solution to the real problem---the problem with schools is children with bad parents.

I always feel that almost every change is geared towards students that have a positive home life and are trying to escape the contamination of those of us that didn't. I don't begrudge them but again I rarely see an actual solution to the real problem---the problem with schools is children with bad parents. ~ Ppen at October 6, 2016 10:22 AM

The Five Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor.

The article hints around that you develop a present-oriented perspective instead of a future-oriented one.

I always feel that almost every change is geared towards students that have a positive home life and are trying to escape the contamination of those of us that didn't. I don't begrudge them but again I rarely see an actual solution to the real problem---the problem with schools is children with bad parents. ~ Ppen at October 6, 2016 10:22 AM

The Five Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor.

The article hints around that you develop a present-oriented perspective instead of a future-oriented one.

Good luck with the teachers unions. Without their blessing, nothing will go through.

Not gonna happen. The bulk of kids advanced for social reasons are black today; the race card is in the air on its way to you already for suggesting that some kids are better.

I'm having the race card thrown at me today on FB for suggesting that some whites are mentally inferior as a group because of demonstrated differences in brain capacity. Darwiniana.org will show you drastic differences in cognitive properties across eons, but do not dare to suggest that we are not one big homogenous, though unhappy family.

Remember: diversity can only be about color.

Nobody in the NFL or NBA inherited anything - it was all opportunity (of course not).

If you think grade inflation is a problem today, be ready for the illiterate to get A's because a school wants to show how fast it can push 'em out. They already get diplomas.

Ironically, students were once held back without regard to age if they didn't meet standards.

Now we don't do that because parents blame the school. There's your error precursor.

Fred (& Walter) on the schools...

The age segregation teaches kids age discrimination, another kind of separatism and bigotry. A 6th grader thinks they're too old to play with 4th graders, and 7th graders think a 6th grader is too young to hang out with them. And a 16 year old knows for damn sure that he or she can't (or shouldn't) be taught anything by a 14 year old. For older people there are laws to protect them from age discrimination in employment.

My daughters never went to school until they started college, older daughter when she was 15 and younger daughter when she was 14, and so were not socialized in age segregated institutions.

When younger daughter was 15 she got a part time job as a business math tutor in the math lab at the community college she went to. Most of her students were 18-20 year olds. She was good at tutoring, and her students were very happy with their improved test scores and grades. They said she was the only tutor who made math seem simple, and they recommended her to their peers.

That is until word got out that she was only 15. A lot of her students who had been socialized in highly regimented, age segregated environments (i.e. schools) became angry and indignant about having been tutored by a 15 year old. Many quit coming to see her, and a few protested to college administrators that a 15 year old should not be tutoring 18 and 19 year olds.

When college administrators found out Daughter was only 15 they fired her. Not because they agreed that a 15 year old should not tutor 18-19 year olds, but because for legal/technical reasons the college couldn't employ a 15 year old. When she was hired they just assumed she was at least 18; no one asked how old she was.

Both daughters didn't know what to make of all this. Not being socialized in age segregated institutions, they didn't know that chronological age, not having anything to do with knowledge and ability in math, had anything to do with who could teach whom. This concerned older Daughter too, because at the time, at the age of 16, she was employed part time as a tutor in the college's computer science lab.

It all worked out for good. When Russian immigrants and Asian foreign exchange students found out Daughter was available for tutoring in math, biology and English, they made appointments and came to our home, and paid her quite well to tutor them. A few of her Russian students were in their 30's and 40's.

Age segregation is stupid.

I was in an elementary school program where the first- through third-graders were in one classroom, while the fourth- through sixth-graders were in another.

It worked very well.

However, much of the initial achievement segregation is going to be driven by the child's home life: how much they get for breakfast, how much time parents spend with them going over the basics (Math, ABCs, etc.), and how much intellectual stimulation they get at home (dinner table news discussions, books, non-trash TV, etc.).

Yup. Also known as "shitty parenting" vs. "parents doing their jobs" — which doesn't stop at letting the school transport, feed, teach and babysit your kids.

"Many quit coming to see her, and a few protested to college administrators that a 15 year old should not be tutoring 18 and 19 year olds."

Hey, look! Opportunity!

Your 15-year-old cutie gets advanced into her senior year of public high school with the 18- and 19-year-old jocks. Wow, are they fit. Gee, they have their own cars...

Ready to prosecute?

Your ten-year-old is a genius. Sure, he has less hair than a peach, he'll be fine in classes with guys that shave.

Ready to prosecute?

There are some schools where this would work, but clearly making it public policy would be stupid.

I seem to recall a generation that put Neil and Buzz on the Moon with slide rules and mainframes with less computing power than your smartphone. Just what was wrong with their education?

"There was nothing special about the class of 1964, or about King George High, except for those of us who were in it. Our yearbook looked like ten thousand others across America, portraits with acne removed in the photo lab, the basket ball team exactly like everybody else’s, the cheerleaders conventionally glorious, conventional adolescent good-byes in ball-point pen—but without misspelling or bad grammar.

We, largely rural kids of the small-town South, represented without knowing it a culture, an approach to existence, and a devastating principle: You can’t impose decency, honesty, good behavior, or responsibility. They are in the culture, or they are not. If they are, you don't need laws, police, and supervison. If they are not, laws won't much help. And this is why the US is over, at least as the country we knew." - Fred Reed

Whittier High School, once the alma mater of businessmen and a President (Nixon, err, OK) now brags that it has put a (one, single) student in Harvard.
Brags.

Age segregated classrooms are a horrible idea. However it is a clearly defined standard and method of sorting the class initially, at least.

The really smart kids will learn anywhere, and the bottom ones wont learn adequately anywhere. Public school is geared for the average student, who is typical for their age.

The only thing worse would be leaving the grade placement to the whims of ill educated boneheads that populate the administrations of the public achools in this country.

there's an argument for keeping kids in a grade for social reasons

While I'm sure an argument exists, I have no idea what a good one would be. I've heard every reason under the sun about school and socialization as a homeschooling mom, and not one makes sense to me.

Just to start, school is the most artificial environment ever. Nowhere else do you exist with people born within 12 months of you ALL day. So, if we use that as a model of proper socialization, or socialization for adult life, that's kinda stupid since it's nothing like life outside of school. For that matter, it's not like life in college (which is what schools are ostensibly prepping kids for).

Second, a mixed-age group allows people to socialize with MORE people. This gives more opportunities for a wider variety of associations and interactions.

It also takes some pressure off socially - because it removes some competition. Kids know there are aged-based differences (by the time they are school-aged anyway), so they don't expect to be "on par" with everyone, and if somebody is advanced, they kinda assume they are a bit older. I saw this happen in a mixed age group of kids myself (one kid was assumed to be three years older than he actually was).

"Second, a mixed-age group allows people to socialize with MORE people. This gives more opportunities for a wider variety of associations and interactions."

Wow. Did you even go to school? A public one?

Schools FORCE people into proximity. I just cited two of the "wider variety of associations and interactions" above.

And schools aren't supposed to be social opportunities first; students just look for the opportunity.

How does this help teach anything?

Public schools are failing right and left because everything BUT classes occupy a student's time, and parents in many cases are wary of criminal assault on their child. When did you hear anything about "home schooling" in the 1960s?

I think I like the idea of segregating by age where the kids should all be about the same size, such as for P.E., but different, somewhat self-selecting groups for other activities. It is encouraging to read about so many examples of mixed-aged learning environments where all the students learned and generally got along well, but speaking as someone who has siblings of different ages, how will you prevent the big kids from picking on the younger kids?

Public schools are failing right and left because everything BUT classes occupy a student's time, and parents in many cases are wary of criminal assault on their child.

If public schools are failing, it's because they've become an entitlement baby-sitting program where the system is responsible not just for education, but for feeding, transport, psychological services, "after-school care" and quite a bit more.

When parents bitch that schools need to get back to the "3 Rs," I stand up and cheer. Can we get rid of the buses, the free lunches, the counselors, and all the in loco parentis bullshit and make the people who made the kids responsible for their actions?

Maggie: "...but speaking as someone who has siblings of different ages, how will you prevent the big kids from picking on the younger kids?"

You probably can't.

Fred Reed quoted in Radwaste's post above: "You can’t impose decency, honesty, good behavior, or responsibility. They are in the culture, or they are not. If they are, you don't need laws, police, and supervison. If they are not, laws won't much help. And this is why the US is over, at least as the country we knew."

Isolating, educating and socializing kids in an authoritarian, highly regimented, age segregated, fenced-in institution doesn't prepare them for anything in the real world. But I don't advocate mixing ages in those institutions either. Bullying is already too big of a problem there. Giving the strong greater access to the weak in that culture would make it even worse.

Highly individualized instruction certainly sounds great... but it also isn't practical at the moment.

In an ideal world all education would be geared to the specific needs of each child.

That being said... in an ideal world all clothing for children would be custom tailored.

When we as a society are willing to pay the associated financial cost of custom education then we can start a conversation about how to implement.

Until then this feels a lot like someone going into Macy's and demanding to know why the available clothing off the rack isn't custom fit to their 7 year old.

If you want custom tailored clothing you shouldn't expect it at department store prices.

As it stands the registers in public schools are in the neighbor hood of 30-35 students per classroom.

That is far too many students to provide the proper differentiated instruction that would accommodate each individual students specific educational needs/interests.

This problem will persist no matter how you rearrange the students into different groups (age segregated or otherwise).

I find it interesting in this discussion that no one has brought up the concept of gifted programs that help to separate out the more advanced students from the average students within a particular age group. These sorts of programs help to alleviate student boredom without the social issue of putting 10 year old students in the same classroom as 15 year old students.

The reality is that even within these gifted programs there is a wide delta in academic ability. Our educational system is simply not constructed to handle students who are in the tails of the distribution. For such students extracurricular projects and education are required to challenge them.

Shannon Says:

"Just to start, school is the most artificial environment ever. Nowhere else do you exist with people born within 12 months of you ALL day. So, if we use that as a model of proper socialization, or socialization for adult life, that's kinda stupid since it's nothing like life outside of school. For that matter, it's not like life in college (which is what schools are ostensibly prepping kids for)."

All of modern society is "artificial" so I am not exactly sure what your criticism is here.

In modern societies we tend to be born in sterile hospitals before being driven home in climate controlled automobiles on carefully engineered highway systems to homes with indoor plumbing and dozens of electronic devices including those for practically instantaneous communication across the globe. None of this is "natural"... so why should schools approximate some "natural" state when everything else in modern society is so carefully designed and engineered?

The entire reason age segregation exists is in an attempt to put people at similar developmental states in contact with one another. While I agree that this system is imperfect, the concept behind it isn't complete nonsense. Proper socialization requires that you be surrounded primarily by people who are more or less on a level cognitive playing field with you.

By the time people reach college age most (but not all) of ones cognitive development has taken place. This isn't true for 6 year old children... or 12 year old children for that matter.

It simply doesn't make sense to try and model the socialization of a 6 year old after the types of interactions they are likely to have when they are 30... they simply aren't at that stage yet.

Just to put things into context, most adults don't spend their day being guided by individuals who are 7 times older than they are.

If we want to model the school environment after the work environment I suppose we should have 12 year 12 year old children in charge of instructing the 6 year old children in the same way that 25 year old adults will tend to work for people who are about twice as old as they are.

The reason we socialize children differently than adults socialize is because children are fundamentally different than adults in that 1 year for them means a great deal more than for an adult. Put simply, the difference between a 7 year old and a 10 year old is MUCH larger than the difference between a 50 year old and a 53 year old.

When I was in school they were trying to do some development matching. There was a gifted program but it was quite political to get in. For example, my neighbor got in (justly so) then the younger sister got in because he did even though she didn't pass the mark on the test.

I was very advanced when it came to math and science but well behind in English because of a learning disability. I didn't really fit in to the system. I got to do the math workbook on my own. And I got some extra reading help. THe problem is to have classes for each level on a number of subjects was just too much. You would need something like jr high setup

Has this become more rigid in recent years? In schools where there was no "gifted program" I'd go one grade "up" for reading and math, and so did several other kids.

The difference in maturity /was/ a factor. In first grade, they temporarily put me in second-grade reading, but then pulled me out because I was caught coloring in my book and getting ink all over my hands. (They got to use pens.) I was also too nervous to talk in a room full of kids who seemed like grown-ups.

Then I entered GATE, which was a better fit, because the other kids were as smart as me, but they also were my age. GATE did an experimental program in my second-grade year where they mixed second and third grade together for a while. I think that had advantages for me, but I'm not sure it did for the third-graders.

Anyway, starting in 5th grade they divided everyone by skill level anyway for math and reading, and as soon as you hit junior high (7th grade), the classes were age-agnostic within a range. Some age clustering occurs as a result of pre-requisites: If you have to take Biology before Chemistry, and Chemistry before Physics, then you won't have freshmen in Physics simply because they haven't had time to meet the requirements yet.

I can't see putting a precocious 11-year-old in a lit class with 17-year-olds. Intelligence isn't the only factor. There's the mature content you're reading, the responsibility to produce papers, and the interaction in the classroom.

///I would have been better off in a grade where I was ignored by older kids rather than kicked around. --Amy///

In 5th or 6th grade, as part of some experiment, I took the SAT. This required me to sit in an auditorium full of teenagers. They did NOT ignore me. They were vicious.

Public schools are a source of many problems, from wasting kids' time (which some see as a virtue) to subjecting them to bullying, both by other kids and by the bureaucrats who run the schools.

I would abolish them, and simply require that all children take annual exams until they achieve the proficiency level of high school graduates. Then if kids don't perform at their age level, have a social worker investigate why (and have the potential ability to take them from their parents).

This would give both parents and kids the freedom to get them educated in ways that will neither over-regiment them nor over-enrich bureaucrats.

Insufficient Poison Says:

"Then I entered GATE, which was a better fit, because the other kids were as smart as me, but they also were my age."

Your experience with a talented and gifted program mirrors my own. I much preferred to be around children my own age when I was young who could keep up with an accelerated learning pace as opposed to "skipping ahead".

There is a fundamental difference between learning faster and having to catch up to students who were already ahead of you.

Jumping a grade means you are instantly put behind the older students and need to catch up (plus you are put into an awkward social situation where all of those students know one another already and you are the "new kid"... who also happens to be younger than they are). The problem there is that you are either behind trying to catch up, or once you catch up you then start to pull ahead and the problem starts all over again.

For elementary students I am a big fan of these kinds of programs.

For middle school and high school I like the advanced placement model.

This lets students who are strong in a particular subject to learn at an accelerated pace where their talents/interests happen to be.

That model doesn't work quite so well for small children as we don't shuttle them around from subject to subject. They are usually better with the consistency and stability of a classroom teacher for most of the day.

All of the points you bring up for why we tend to segregate by age are valid. Regardless of how smart someone happens to be, emotional development and impulse control is still likely to be very different between a 10 year old and a 16 year old.

Ironically, students were once held back without regard to age if they didn't meet standards.

Now we don't do that because parents blame the school. There's your error precursor.

Fixed the link!