If you want to be a faster runner, research says you should run more often and farther. I used this “run more” strategy over the past year and, I kid you not, my performance has improved quite drastically. Sometimes plain ol’ common sense is the answer to life’s many problems.
We tend to ignore this when we think about advanced education. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why it is such a complicated topic, given that it is easy to boil down: A significant percentage of students are capable of learning more quickly and deeply than standard grade-level curricula and instruction allow; those students should have opportunities to learn every day they are in school, even if they are several grade levels ahead in a certain subject.
Yet in practice, meeting the needs of talented students is anything but straightforward. Advanced education is often seen by educators and activists as unnecessary or even harmful. Talented people have given decades to advocate for advanced learners, with substantial research to back them up, yet their victories are measured in the tiniest increments. Of course, there are exceptions (see examples from Kentucky and New Jersey), but few would argue that advocacy for gifted education is easy.
We have ceded a big rhetorical advantage to opponents of gifted education by acting as though meeting the needs of advanced students isn’t just common sense. By allowing critics to act as though their antipathy toward academic excellence is the reasonable position, we are put on the defensive and our effectiveness as advocates is limited. Our stance should be clear: Students who are ready for more advanced work should have access to it.
As a case in point, Fordham's Advance newsletter published this interesting piece by Jessica Berg, an educator in Rockford, Illinois. Jessica describes her school’s efforts to implement flexible grouping in K–2 reading, using a strategy that groups students by readiness level rather than grade. As she puts it, “we’ve gone all in on regrouping by skill level, regardless of grade. We have five-year-olds and seven-year-olds learning side by side, because that’s where they are in their reading journey. Nobody learns at exactly the same pace. And that’s OK. In fact, it’s powerful.”
Indeed! It’s also common sense.
I applaud Jessica and her colleagues for moving in the direction of flexible readiness grouping, which is strongly supported by research. Even better, they are implementing it across grade levels, which is fantastic. People will look back in 20 years and wonder why we were grouping by age rather than readiness for so long into the 21st century.
I take at face value her comments about how changing mindsets regarding appropriate instruction and grouping is a big hurdle. It certainly matches my experiences working in districts! But at the same time, why are these mindsets so strong? If two students in the same grade are learning at two different levels of readiness, providing them with similar instruction makes little sense and is, to be frank, a radical approach to education.
For example, Jessica notes that traditionally “students stayed in their grade-level classrooms throughout the day, and we delivered reading instruction accordingly. On paper, that seemed like the right approach” (emphasis added). My immediate question upon reading that was, “Why did that seem like the right approach?”
I suspect it’s because most of our educator prep programs rarely discuss advanced students and how to support them, and if they do, it’s often more about stereotypes (“Gifted kids are fine on their own!”). I’ve taught in many such programs and saw firsthand the skepticism and negativity my colleagues had toward advanced learning. Jessica sums up the need succinctly: “Our diverse learners needed diverse instruction. That shift in mindset was the beginning of everything.” We need to start shifting the attitudes of prep program leaders, or these radical grade-level groupings will continue to dominate our children’s classrooms.
Let me point to another example, one that shows the power of the “this is all common sense” approach in practice. A positive trend in education policy is the number of states and districts implementing automatic enrollment (AE) policies. AE is straightforward: If a student performs well in a given subject one year, they are automatically placed in an advanced course the following year (unless their parents opt out). Initial results suggest that AE significantly increases both the number of students receiving advanced instruction and subsequent student achievement.
AE legislation has passed quite easily in many states, with nearly unanimous approval in many legislative chambers. In talking to advocates in those states, they point to one factor that helps explain the rapid growth of AE: Legislators can easily understand it, and it seems logical. Legislators are often surprised that students in their state aren’t already automatically placed in advanced courses if they are working at advanced levels! Allowing students who do well to have the opportunity to continue doing well seems obvious.
These examples illustrate a better, more productive way to frame advanced education. If some students are ready for higher-level work, their schools ought to provide it. Of course, reframing the debate is the easy step—educators still need to design and implement effective strategies for advanced education. The flexible grouping and automatic enrollment strategies mentioned above approach that challenge differently, but both start with the same commonsense principle: Readiness should matter more than age, family, or happenstance when designing learning opportunities.
I’ve tried this reframing a few times, with promising results. For example, I was part of a team evaluating a large district’s advanced programs. As we conducted a focus group with the district’s equity advisory team, the members of that team each called for the elimination of all advanced programming in the district due to equity concerns. As I sat there listening, it occurred to me that their position didn’t make a lot of sense, although they were portraying it as the obvious solution to the problem. After nearly an hour of strident comments, I tried to reframe the discussion: “If I understand correctly, you’re calling for the elimination of all advanced services. [vigorously nodding heads all around the room] Is that what you really want, or do you just want a level playing field? In other words, do you want to deny every student advanced services, or expand services to all qualified students?” The room went completely silent. Then the team leader said, “We want the level playing field, obviously.” From that point forward, we had a constructive conversation about needed reforms, and the “solution” of eliminating advanced services for everyone was never mentioned again. Reframing the conversation to make program elimination the radical perspective led to a much more productive discussion.
Voltaire once noted that “common sense is not so common.” We should recognize that common sense often gets lost in policy debates about advanced education. Let’s work to claim the commonsense high ground when we discuss the needs of gifted and advanced students.
