A friend (who’s studying to be an elementary school teacher) and I were talking about ability grouping for elementary school students, which they’re now apparently being told not to do. The evidence they’ve been given for this recommendation by textbooks and professors has been mostly anecdotal, with maybe a few mentions of studies thrown in, which is depressing but not surprising.
I looked at a few meta-analyses and it seems like flexible ability groups for one or two subjects in the context of a heterogeneous classroom have a positive effect on average achievement, although I say this with low confidence.
I could tell her that, but I don’t think she’d change her mind, since the effects seem to vary by ability level and are negative for the lowest-achieving kids. She’d say what matters is that we help the kids who need it the most, the high-achieving kids will be fine on their own.
Which made me wonder, if we can choose to either improve the achievement of low-ability or high-ability kids by a certain amount, which is a greater utilitarian good? My intuition says the high-ability kids, since they’re more likely to create lots of value with their education by e.g. curing cancer or inventing the computer. I’m not sure though. Would I be less successful now if my elementary school education had been 5% worse? I always had the resources and the motivation to learn stuff outside of school, which a lot of kids don’t.
Also I think we should put nonzero weight on what makes kids happiest while they’re in school. I know my happiest memories from elementary school are things like when I was in the highest spelling group and I got to pick words like “brachiosaurus” instead of “about” and research their Latin and Greek roots, when I got to do things that were actually interesting for a change. Maybe the lowest-achieving kids were made less happy by the ability grouping, I don’t know.
(I started elementary school in a very diverse school district. By third grade, the top ten kids in my grade had all left because it was clear the teachers didn’t care about teaching us, leaving our classmates without the benefits of heterogeneity. If you sacrifice the high-achieving kids on the altar of closing the achievement gap they will opt out of your educational system.)
If you’re talking about global utility then it’s likely best to boost the top kids. Utility generation by people functions along a power law, most of the value comes from the top performers (doing things like investing the computer). They’ll be “successful” in any system that doesn’t actively try and hurt them, but that means getting a decent engineering job instead of founding SpaceX.
On the other hand, if the goal of your system is to make all the kids have happy lives. Only a small percentage of kids really need help to be happy and have good life outcomes, and someone really needs to help them.
You likely want at least one system doing the first, just like you want one system doing the second.
Yeah I guess what I value is pretty different from what education people value: most of the utility is in the rest of the world/far future/whatever but people involved in the American educational system probably care about something more like “make current Americans happier.”