I’m a middle school math teacher and I’m absolutely convinced that the way we arbitrarily group kids is at the core of the decay in public schools. One of the societal changes that has snuck up on us is the huge mobility and diversity of today vs. that of the one room school in ‘Kansas’.
My school has 38% student turnover each year and my district has no retention or placement policy other than age and/or the grade of the school you came from. We have 4-5 year grade span of abilities in a classroom, forced to sit through a highly scripted (meaning no individulization at all) delivery system.
Even though most of the teachers I work with readily recognize this as a problem, they are not positioned to change it. So much of this situation is driven by archaic structural deficiencies, no significant change will come from within this dino.
I’ve written much more on the structural issues at When Galaxies Collide
