Ah, the old inferiority/superiority complex. Count me in.

I think that applies to most of us.

I had the opposite of skipping grades. My birthday is late so I should have been younger than most of my class. Instead, mom wanted me to go to school with another little girl (who became my "best friend" until middle school) who didn't test up to my grade and whose mother was friends with mine. It was like bizarro social promotion.

that one can, indeed, have too many sequins, that ruby slippers are not the norm, and that using chocolate perfume is not neccesarily the most grown up of choices.

Nuh uh! if you try to tell me this again I will shove my fingers in my ears and hum.

Not that I dress as enchantingly as Fay, but it is important to have the option.

I know we had different levels of reading and spelling and probably math when I was in Elementary school, but that was ages ago and my niecephews were homeschooled and/or Waldorfed so I have no idea what's "normal" these days.

But - you guys must differentiate too, though, right? I mean, I get that it's not going to be as extreme as us, maybe, since our kids don't get promoted to a new grade, they just, you know, get older and thus are in your class regardless of whether they're whizz kids or special needs. But it isn't normal to have every kid working on the exact same thing, surely? Or is it? Maybe you can afford to do that, if kids are all being held back and promoted so that your class genuinely DOES have kids who are on the same kind of level? (But even then - how would that work? Because any given kid will have areas that they're stronger in and areas that they're weaker in, so just because they're a high flyer in Maths doesn't mean they're a great reader/writer/sciencegeek/artist/whatever...)

When I was growing up I'm pretty sure different reading, etc. groups within a class were the norm. It certainly was in my school. The "don't be eliteist" trend seems to be in the last ten or twenty years.

From the article:

Test scores rose dramatically in 2004 and 2005. But official discomfort persisted. In the 2005-06 academic year, Roberson was instructed to halt performance-based grouping, for at least one year, "to see if it really had an impact on student performance." Students returned to mixed-ability classrooms. Test scores fell.

My son's class just started "book club" (he is in 5th grade). The kids are grouped into reading circles and each circle has a different set of books - with different reading levels.

That just made me realize I forgot to ask him which book his group is reading. Must remember to ask tonight. For free reading he is zooming through a reread of all the HP books.

The "don't be eliteist" trend seems to be in the last ten or twenty years.

wanders off mumbling about the goddamned hippies

Differentiation is the norm in modern teaching, Fay, never fear. It's considered extremely important in elementary and middle school (up to about age 13), though we certainly strive to do so in the upper grades too.

Differentiation is the norm in modern teaching, Fay, never fear. It's considered extremely important in elementary and middle school (up to about age 13), though we certainly strive to do so in the upper grades too

Huh. That news must not have gotten to the town where I grew up, then -- as of a few years ago, a bunch of parents were still fighting what seemed like a losing battle to bring back reading groups. And when my older sister was in high school, they had what different class levels starting in eighth grade, but by the time I was there, four years later, that started in eleventh grade.

Also, and I realize this is a separate issue, but I feel like ranting about it anyway -- with the standardized testing, lots of times, it only counts pass/fail rates. So when I was volunteer tutoring in a school in New Orleans (this was a few years before No Child Left Behind, but there was a similar state program), I was working with kids in a fourth grade class. The kids we were assigned to work with were the ones who were reading just below a fourth grade level, the ones who could get up to the fourth grade level with a bit of work. There were also some kids in the class who were reading at somewhere around a first or second grade level, but since the school had limited resources, our efforts had to be focused on the kids who might get up to the "pass" range, not the ones who might improve a whole lot but still be failing.

this was a few years before No Child Left Behind, but there was a similar state program

LATIP/LATEP or something? I remember that. It even required teachers to have a certain amount of flair. Dude. I was at a magnet school. We don't need big glossy posters to memorize the presidents.