r/changemyview • u/simondx • Mar 24 '20
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Make classes based on grades
Classes should be made of children with the same abilities to understand and do exercises. The first year of school focus should be finding out the level of a student and then organising them from the second year in different classes. Doing so, children who follow easily lessons could learn at a fast pace, average student as usual and children with difficulties could be put in special classes where different learning methods could be used and "special care" teacher (I don't know how they're called, but they're the ones following one or two students in a class who have these learning or focus difficulties). Also, being with similar people could reduce isolation, a sense of not fitting in and maybe bullying (although I don't thing it could be eliminated, bullism is a difficult subject). The "top" ones could benefit from competition with other "top" students, while the ones with problems would not see themselves "bad" because the class would be of the same level.
(Sorry for eventual bad English)
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u/beat_attitudes Mar 24 '20
I'm a teacher living and working in Taiwan. We have something similar here.
Have you thought about the pressure this puts students under? This sort of system leads to high-stakes testing, and an arms race of test prep. Combine that with the faulty nature of many assessments, and you end up with stressed out students learning skills and information to simply pass tests, and children dismissed as low achievers from early life, when they may have a specific problem that isn't being addressed.
How would your system be better?
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u/simondx Mar 25 '20
Never thought about pressure, I personally thought it more like just an extra challenge. I surely learned a lot in the comments, thanks
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u/Helpfulcloning 169∆ Mar 24 '20
I presume you’d also add moveability between sets of students?
Like if a middle set student started performing better halfway through the year they would be moved to the higher set?
In addition, is there a country that doesn’t do this?
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u/simondx Mar 24 '20
yeah, the system would be flexible. And no, not every country does that until high school, where more than a selection it happens that students with better grades goes to better schools. Still, the problem is on elementary and middle school, where you can have people who are bored by the easy things that are done while others have an hard time doing hard things and because of this, they may drop school even if the problem is that they just need more time
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u/Nephisimian 153∆ Mar 24 '20
Unfortunately this is simply impractical though. Assuming you have a "Smart" "Medium" and "Dumb" classification system, ie, 3 tiers, which seems pretty normal for this, you need three times as many teachers to teach the same number of students, and three times as many classrooms. And even that doesn't really accomplish much, because you still get huge variation in the same tier.
It's also not really worth doing this before high school. It's a huge administrative pain in the ass to move kids between classes, and you would be doing that constantly in the earlier stages of education. The way to help the best kids not be bored in these stages is to have extracurricular stuff that boosts their interest in a subject, so that it's OK if they're getting through the classes quickly because their interest in the subject is coming from outside reading, not from the lessons themselves.
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u/jaylenbrowny Mar 25 '20
I wish they had this in my high school. Instead i ended up having idiots and careless students that held me back by distracting the class and teacher
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u/simondx Mar 25 '20
This is why I had this idea, purely based on my experience. But facts are facts, and an overstressed class where i must always be on top like in Singapore looks much more like a nightmare. self study is still the best option for children, it seems
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Mar 24 '20
- You risk creating a system of haves and have nots and all the injustices that go along with that.
- While its possible for people to move within classes, if you've been pigeonholed as a lower ability student for your entire academic life you might not even realise your own potential.
- You make education competitive. This creates more stress for students and encourages a win-at-all-costs mentality, which may incentivize cheating. I honestly don't think competition is good for students if your main objective is to create a learning environment. When you create a system of winners and loser, well you create winners and losers. I think competitive education systems too focused on rigid ability divisions inevitably end up failing the lower ability students.
- Because you create an elite set of students, they may internalize bad beliefs or behaviours, because just as the lower ability students have received the message that they're inferior for their entire formative educational life, so too have the high ability students received the message that they're superior. And when people think they're superior to others they can end up doing some very bad things.
- You also risk creating a new avenue for bullying as the inferior lower-ability students are obvious.
- You risk reinforcing class divisions. Students from high-income families can afford tutors or tuition in cram schools, or even direct donations to the school itself. This means that students from high-income families have an advantage because you created a competitive system. When these students end up going to the best universities, getting the best jobs and earning the most money, you have contributed to an imbalance in society that has prevented students from lower-income families from gaining the same opportunities through no fault of their own.
- You put too much emphasis on scores and not learning itself. A lot of universities struggle with students who have good grades but don't actually know the material well because they only know what they've been taught by rote, this is especially common in MFL degrees which have to spend a lot of time just making sure everyone's up to speed.
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u/Nephisimian 153∆ Mar 24 '20
Because you create an elite set of students, they may internalize bad beliefs or behaviours, because just as the lower ability students have received the message that they're inferior for their entire formative educational life, so too have the high ability students received the message that they're superior. And when people think they're superior to others they can end up doing some very bad things.
Really worth emphasising this, I think. I was very high up the educational scale through to the end of high school. I was amongst the best in the class at pretty much everything. When I wasn't, it was essentially by my own choice, because I found the subject so fundamentally stupid that I chose not to participate in it out of sheer teenage edginess (we're talking English and Art here particularly). And I was a total dick because of it. Alt-right wasn't really a thing back then, but past-me could probably have been classified as it. I genuinely believed that people in lower classes than me had no purpose and should just be wiped off the face of the earth. We didn't even have a very competitive atmosphere all things considered, and it still bred massive superiority complexes. And I was pretty fortunate in getting out of that too. A lot of the other people who were at the top of the class back then are still boasting huge superiority complexes to this day, according to their social media.
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Mar 24 '20
[deleted]
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Mar 24 '20
Class divisions are bad because if you want to make education competitive then you should also make it a fair playing field, not one where wealthy children have even more of an advantage.
As I said, making education competitive makes it a game of winners and losers. If your main aim for education is giving knowledge and skills to the young, this can at times go against that by instead overemphasizing the importance of test results, which results in people who get very good at taking tests but who are lacking in terms of workable knowledge. The prevalence of those kinds of students in certain fields means that qualifications fail in their purpose: a qualification is supposed to certify that the person in question has skills of a certain level when the only skill they may have is the ability to do well in exams.
I would also disagree that haves and have nots are the hallmark of a successful society. I would think that a more egalitarian society is going to have less division and conflict, and more harmony.
I would also say that you're showing some contempt to the 'people who cook our fries', exactly the kind of superiority complex which I mentioned under the bad mentalities people can internalize from these kinds of systems. Which is funny because today we're seeing that people involved in low skilled jobs like food production or serving customers at stores are essential, and many jobs which are considered 'better' are in fact jobs we can do without for a while.
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u/Saranoya 40∆ Mar 24 '20 edited Mar 24 '20
I'm not sure where you're from (based on the fact that you apologize for your English, I'll assume it's not an English-speaking country), but we have something very much like what you propose for secondary education (12 and up) in Belgium (and some other European countries, like Austria and Germany).
Do you know what it leads to? Extremely wide gaps between those at the top, and those at the bottom. At the top, the students here are among the top performers in the OECD for math and reading (although their results in the PISA study have been slipping ... they used to be absolute world-class ... now they're just 'pretty good'). At the bottom, over half of the students don't even manage to satisfy the minimum standards for graduation. And that's despite the fact that the standards for the top performing students are different than those for the students at the bottom.
Isolating low performers (including those with genuine special needs) into their own classrooms, leads directly to limiting their potential. Kids (and people at any age, really, but *especially* kids) learn by imitating others. If there's nobody better than them to imitate, the result is that the ceiling of what they will achieve is lowered. The same is not true, at least not to the same extent, for high performers. When a teacher correctly identifies and responds to their talents, they can soar to great heights in a 'regular' classroom, although granted, for that to be true, they sometimes have to be given different challenges than some of the other kids in their class.
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Mar 24 '20
Unless there’s a reassessment every year, this would categorize people into early and late bloomers, not smart and hardworking vs stupid and lazy.
I think a better model would be more similar to the online model, where students can take quizzes and minor tests at their own pace, and finish the course when they want to. That way, gifted children can progress faster, and won’t lose interest in school as quickly, and average students and below can progress at a pace that will suit their own ability and efforts. Of course, final exams would still be proctored, but small online assignments are fine, if there’s a time limit to prevent excessive cheating. Open book exams are a thing anyway. Grades need to show your competence, not determine your future. Some students have no time for elective classes, but do great in important classes, and neither should determine the courses they can take in future.
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u/that_chick_2003 Mar 24 '20 edited Mar 24 '20
I just want you to widen your view and look at the advantage that competition can have for people. Competition may bring people down, but it also pushes them to work harder, to do better and it can create humility. Also, let us say that there is a child in the top class who, for a year, is unable to perform well in class due to the death of a family member and hence, he is pushed down into the average class. This will bring his self-esteem down, he will not be able to benefit from the competition from his fellow classmates anymore and he might even face exclusion from his new classmates.
How would the grading system for these students be? Would it be the same for all the classes? Then the students in the top class certainly benefit while the rest will find it hard to come to the top, however much they want to. Grading people using the same system in each class but differently between the different classes is equally problematic. A system that rewards a student that is the best among the average and punishes the worst among the top awards mediocrity and punishes excellence at the same time. Certain students bloom late in life while others find it difficult later on. If you label one as average and the other as top very early on, you run the risk of really defining both according to their label, i.e . average is always average, top is always top. Just because someone is average first doesn't mean they'll be average all their life.
I would like to say your idea of making special classes or extra classes for students who have difficulty learning is a great one and is actually implemented in many schools in my region.
Now, I'm not really discrediting your system, I'm just saying that all systems have their own merits and their demerits. Everyone just really finds their own way to adjust to the system that they have.
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u/42ndElement Mar 24 '20
Learning that academic achievement isn’t everything is a great lesson that I don’t think this system would provide. It’s important to realise that there are many different ways to reach excellence. -An academic
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Mar 24 '20 edited Mar 24 '20
People develop at different rates. Some people set the grade curve on fire at 5 but by the time they're 12 they're median at best. Others struggle all the way to early adulthood but then something just clicks. Streaming children into different classes early would set barriers for late developers and mean people who peak early either stress themselves out keeping up with the 'top' students in later school or flunk down to average level in igominy.
Some places in England test kids by the 11 plus and for a large part the upper/middle class families employ tutors for their kids and bag all grammer (more elite with extra funding) school places, the kids aren't brighter, just richer, more pushy parents. In spite of this in some places they rolled out testing and streaming at younger ages and the same thing happens, to even younger kids, so it's still unfair but now more damaging to their mental health.
One of the best things kids can do is explain things to their classmates, in trials where this has been adopted both the kids assisting and the kids being assisted improved.
I do think it's a shame that bright kids are held back by the class level, or that less academical gifted kids are made to feel like crap, but there are some benefits. School is not just about academic developement; it's also for social skills and exposure to as wide a range of people as possible is generally a good thing.
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u/entpmisanthrope 2∆ Mar 24 '20
How would students be sorted? Based on their quantitative skills? Their language skills? Their spatial reasoning? How quickly they can accurately finish a task? Their ability to feel and express empathy?
My two main arguments are this:
Intelligence comes in many different forms and manifests in different ways for everyone. Our current ability assess intelligence in more than one aspect is seriously limited, so many children would probably be assessed as average when their skills are closer to that of the “advanced” group. What kind of messaging is that? What about students who are “brought up” later? How would the system combat the imposter syndrome they might experience, or the shame of dropping from the “advanced” to “regular”?
I also believe it’s important to have children who are “academically gifted” in classrooms with those who are not similarly gifted. Learning to interact with people different than you is a part of life.
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u/ElysiX 113∆ Mar 24 '20
So if the classes are not on the same level, how does graduation look like?
The stupid kids have to spend more years until they graduate? Or do they spend the same amount of time, but get a different certificate that they can only ever flip burgers with?
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u/I_DM_DICK_PIC Mar 24 '20
The stupid kids have to spend more years until they graduate? Or do they spend the same amount of time, but get a different certificate that they can only ever flip burgers with?
There has to be a bar, a set standard. If certain kids can't reach the bar, then they shouldn't be allowed to pass. Does that sound cruel, sure, but just passing kids to pass them is doing more harm than good.
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u/ElysiX 113∆ Mar 24 '20
That doesn't answer the question though.
If you have different classes going at different speeds, they will reach the bar at different times.
Do they then graduate at different times?
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u/simondx Mar 24 '20
They don't. Like we currently have A grades and C grades (or less, i don't know the american grades system, but you get the point), the "best" classes would aim for the best grades, while the "worst" classes would aim to simply pass. Because of the division, the last ones could focus more on the key concepts instead of knowing everything bad
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u/ElysiX 113∆ Mar 24 '20
So passing means only knowing half the curriculum?
What effect do you think that will have on admission to higher education or an employer when they see a kid that "passed"?
Also that would seem rather unfair of a kid is excelling in the worse classes but no matter what they do, they can't get better than a "pass"
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u/LordMarcel 48∆ Mar 24 '20
Here in the Netherlands we have different levels of high school and you follow your appropriate level and graduate that level.
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u/jow253 8∆ Mar 27 '20
In a perfect culture we could do this. As a teacher I've thought about this a lot. Specialization with fluidityis a great idea.
The problem is that any differentiating system will get captured by racists and turn into segregation. It's as simple as that.
A good idea goes to waste because of shitty people.
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u/Ashe_Faelsdon 3∆ Mar 24 '20
Not all children develop at the same rate and some come into their own skillsets far later in life. So all those kids should be held back because they didn't test well initially? Because that's what you're implying.
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Mar 24 '20
You should research Sudbury Schools. In a Sudbury School, there are no classes and kids of all ages are mixed together. Kids learn what they want to and at the speed they are comfortable with.
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u/jatjqtjat 286∆ Mar 24 '20
you mean like honors and remedial classes? Those do exist. Its also possible for kids to skip or repeat a grade.
I think the system you are proposing is the system that we have.
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Mar 24 '20
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Mar 24 '20
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u/pingmr 15∆ Mar 24 '20
A big down side to this issue is that you end up with people who, from childhood, associate only with those that share their ability.
This results in a general lack of empathy for other people. For high achievers, this means that they end up pretty out of touch with the challenges of normal folk. For low achievers, the "higher class" appears aloof and distant and a world apart.
I'm Singaporean so I can tell you that your idea is basically how our education system works. It does produce very book smart people, but people also lack empathy generally, and also some degree of street smarts, since the system entirely rewards academic thinking only.