Editor’s note: This is an adapted excerpt from the author’s recent Fordham Institute report, “Think Again: Are Education Programs for High Achievers Inherently Inequitable?”
An overdue reckoning with racial injustice has led to countless changes and reconsiderations in American life. In the realm of education, those changes include a wave of district-led equity initiatives, many of which take a skeptical view of programs for high achievers, including “gifted” education, honors courses, and selective high schools. Such programs have historically tended to serve a disproportionately low number of Black, Hispanic, and Native American students when compared with district-wide demographics. In some places—from Boston and New York City to Chicago and San Francisco—advocates called for, and got, their elimination or complete overhaul.
One problem with these efforts is that ample research has long shown that well-designed, well-implemented advanced education works for students. Such forms of it as acceleration, flexible readiness groupings, and pre-differentiated, prescriptive curricula have significant positive effects, including for participating marginalized students.
Another problem is that the research doesn’t support the alternative to advanced education programs—which is grouping all same-age students in the same classrooms and asking teachers to differentiate their instruction (something commonly referred to as “differentiated instruction). In fact, no high-quality research shows that this sort of heterogeneous differentiation can work at scale for the full range of student readiness levels that are typically present in American classrooms. And several large-scale meta-analyses say it doesn’t work.
Yet such heterogeneous grouping pops up all the time as a silver-bullet solution to inequities. Indeed, this belief that they alone are sufficient for effectively educating everyone seems to explain leaders’ decisions to scrap (or consider scrapping) advanced programs. We see the belief in the power of heterogeneous grouping in major education outlets in headlines like “The Advantages of Heterogeneous Student Groups in Math” and in instructional frameworks like those of Stanford Professor Jo Boaler, whose views informed recent shifts in math policy in The Golden State.
To be sure, differentiation within heterogeneous classrooms is a normal part of effective schooling. As Holly Hertberg-Davis of the University of Virginia writes in a 2009 article: “Differentiation has been shown, even in small doses, to have an impact on student achievement and attitudes toward learning,” according to a 2005 study. And she adds that research suggests “Differentiation of instruction both within the regular classroom and within homogeneous settings is critical to addressing the needs of all high-ability learners, including twice-exceptional students, underachievers, students from underserved populations, and highly gifted students.”
Yet there’s a difference between using differentiated instruction in heterogeneous classrooms as part of a continuum of services designed to maximize the education of all students and using it as the main or only approach to educating all students, including high achievers. There are a few evidence-based reasons that underscore this distinction.
The first is the magnitude of achievement-level variance in the typical American classroom. A 2022 study, for example, “found that the typical American classroom includes students that span three to seven grade levels of achievement mastery. This translates to a fifth-grade classroom that includes students who have yet to master second-grade math content, as well as those who have already mastered eighth-grade math content.” A year earlier, another study used international test data from TIMSS and found that “the typical American fourth-grade classroom includes students achieving at all four international benchmarks in math…meaning that the entire possible range of student performance is present in the typical fourth-grade classroom.” Further research suggests that the pandemic only made this variance larger.
Providing effective instruction in a single classroom to students at so many different readiness levels is a very tall order for the great majority of teachers, regardless of training, experience, or resources.
Another problem with using differentiation in heterogeneous classrooms as the primary method of educating all students is that teachers just don’t seem to do it. Hertberg-Davis and Carol Tomlinson of the University of Virginia, for example, conducted a large study on the practice wherein teachers were aided by substantial professional development and coaching. Yet when they tried to measure the effect on student learning three years later, they “couldn’t answer the question,” Hertberg-Davis said, “because no one was actually differentiating.”
The reason for this oversight is likely that differentiation is difficult to do well at scale. National surveys in 2008 and 2010 both found that eight in ten teachers find the practice “very” or “somewhat” difficult. And in a 2010 Education Week article, education consultant Mike Schmoker wrote about his experience observing educators trying to differentiate instruction in their classrooms: “In every case, differentiated instruction seemed to complicate teachers’ work, requiring them to procure and assemble multiple sets of materials…and it dumbed down instruction.” When working with educators, Jonathan Plucker, a professor of education at Johns Hopkins University who has studied advanced education for decades, regularly remarks that differentiation is the most advanced teaching skill and that most preparation programs don't train teachers to do it well. It also takes years of practice and requires substantial support.
As for the effects on advanced students in particular, in Hertberg-Davis’s aforementioned 2009 article, she concludes that “research indicates that teachers in heterogeneous classrooms tend not to include gifted students in the group of students they believe most need differentiation.” “When teachers do differentiate,” she adds, “they tend to focus their efforts on the more struggling learners in the classroom, believing that gifted students do not ‘need’ differentiation.” In other words, high achievers tend not to be a priority—which isn’t too surprising considering the push (and policy pressure) to boost low-achievers’ outcomes.
Worse, most states require very little in the way of training educators for the needs of high-achieving students.
The upshot is that heterogeneous classroom groupings and differentiation of instruction within them have a place in any continuum of services for students, including high achievers—but by itself, it does not and probably cannot meet the educational needs of advanced learners. It certainly does not have the proven academic benefits of interventions like acceleration and readiness groupings in separate classrooms. And research suggests it cannot be scaled well across our country’s large number of diverse educators, classrooms, and schools.
