“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal
things equal.”
~ Aristotle
America has been mired in political correctness for years. Teachers dare not suggest that students in urban schools might be actually… different. Our students are all the same, you understand. Some of them just know less and need a little extra support.
I’d like to state unequivocally that we are lying when we try to believe this more-palatable version of the facts. For the kids on the bottom of our academic heap, that little bit of extra support might as well be a Bandaid on a third-degree burn. Regular readers will know that I believe the only chance for our academically-disadvantaged students consists of a longer school day and longer school year. We have documented that inner-city students may start school with only a little over half the vocabulary that nearby suburban kids bring to the classroom. We have documented that those kids who are already behind tend to fall farther behind, absent intensive interventions.
But I’ll skip the school-year issue for now. I’d like to go back to the current grouping fashion. I vividly remember my first attempted group project, a Spanish presentation on different Spanish speaking countries. I’ll grant that any teacher’s first group work will have hitches, probably a few major hitches, but let me describe that experience. Presentation day arrived. Group One could not present. Two members were absent, I believe. Given that my roster had 35 kids but my classroom usually contained around 28, I should not have been surprised. No Child Left Behind attacked absenteeism as well as grades, recognizing that the much higher rates of absenteeism in impoverished and academically-disadvantaged districts creates many problems for students. High rates of absenteeism are excellent predictors for dropping out of school, not to mention the havoc that missing school creates for grades. But having one-fifth of that Spanish class absent was no rare occurence. I tried to move on to Group 2. They also had members absent. All members of Group 3 were present, but they had not expected to present; they did not have their posters or other visual materials. Group 4 was completely unready. Etc. We presented those countries to the class in spurts over the next week and a half. I rewrote my lesson plans as I went along.
I learned and I got better at structuring projects. But I’d like to tell a truth that never seems to hit the airwaves. It’s extremely difficult to do group work effectively once the absenteeism rate climbs up above 10% on average. In a lower-performing high school, in lower-level classes, that rate can hit 20% on cold, snowy days, as students who are waiting until they are old enough to officially drop out decide to stay home to play video games.
These pockmarked classes do not require a few academic nips and tucks. Only major surgery can rescue such classes. They also don’t need more group work and more team efforts. Group work wastes ridiculous amounts of time when a group can rarely form any version of a quorum. When members of the group only turn up half the time or less to work on projects, other members end up shouldering changing burdens. If the student assigned to explain the geological terrain of Costa Rica only turns up one day out of three, some other student will probably attack the terrain question — or the group will end up presenting yet another substandard effort in a year of substandard efforts. If students are supposed to teach each other, planned learning may slip through cracks in an already cracked lesson plan. Costa Rica’s terrain may forever be lost in the mists of half-glimpsed paragraphs that other group members merely skimmed, if they looked at Costa Rica’s terrain at all.
Teachers can find ways to work around these problems to some extent. But frequent group work still probably will do more harm than good in a school suffering from high rates of absenteeism. Individual work may be less fashionable according to modern educational theory, but plans that include reading book sections and then filling out worksheets will result in greater learning, at least for those motivated students who are clinging to their dreams while the kids on either side of them regularly leave empty holes in diminished classrooms.
Eduhonesty: Gloves off. Just because group work produced great results in Redmond, Washington, we cannot assume that same strategy will produce similar results in Detroit, Michigan. Classrooms in Detroit have far greater disciplinary and attendance challenges. That attendance and disciplinary data is out there, buried in academic and governmental documents. The truth we need to acknowledge is this: In many classes, frequent grouping will slow students down, rather than “enriching” their learning experience.
P.S. Again, we have to approach our students on a class-by-class basis. I’m all for early experiments with group projects. But if class dynamics pose too many challenges, teachers and administrators should remember that worksheets work. We too often accuse past educators of being boring presenters of stagnant material, of lecturing when they should have been asking critical thinking questions. But we don’t talk about the lack of learning from that past time, because learning was not particularly lacking. In fact, despite all sorts of test manipulation, the evidence suggests our students are no better at math today than they were thirty years ago. From a document titled “NAEP 2012 Trends in Academic Progress, Reading 1971–2012 | Mathematics 1973–2012” at https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2013456:
“Results from the 2012 NAEP (a test that has been given to America’s students since 1973 as part of government tracking of educational trends) long-term trend assessment show improvement in the mathematics knowledge and skills demonstrated by 9- and 13-year-olds in comparison to students their age in 1973, but no significant change in the overall performance of 17-year-olds.”
Sadly, the news is even worse when we look at reading scores. According to the same publication, seventeen-year olds in twelfth grade scored 12 points lower in 2012 than in 1971.