Nationally mandated standard pants – because it’s horribly inefficient to have everyone wear a different size
Building on the debate Jay started the other day, Neal’s got a nice column on Pajamas Media today about subject-based ability grouping. The idea that all children progress at the same rate is nonsense, but the idea that they all progress at the same rate across all subjects at the same time is nonsense on stilts.
I see this in my own daughter’s education. She’s behind in speech and fine motor skills and needs extra help, which she’s not getting in her current school, where everyone does the same thing, on the assumption that kids the same age are all at the same place in their education and have the same needs. But she’s way ahead in anything dealing with symbol recognition – letters, numbers, colors – so she has to sit there bored out of her mind while her classmates slowly and laboriously learn how to count to ten when she can count to thirty.
So starting next year we’re putting her in a private school that uses exactly the approach Neal recommends on the basis of other countries’ experience – each child gets the challenge he or she needs, at the level he or she needs it, determined separately in each subject.
The squishy-wishies will object that “ability grouping” makes the kids who are ahead vain while demoralizing the kids who are behind. The first answer is that this wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem if public schools were allowed to teach good moral character in addition to academics. And the second answer is that it’s not smart in the long term to deal with people’s emotional and psychological problems by encouraging them to live a lie.
But I think the third answer is that ability grouping wouldn’t have this effect if you did it by subject. You’re not singling out the person as such as superior, you’re tracking particular abilities in each subject.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
As a parent I am all for this approach and have written about this idea several times at a long blog in my city. Oddly, no one as spoken up when I post my thoughts…let’s do it…
(Greg): “”The squishy-wishies will object that “ability grouping” makes the kids who are ahead vain while demoralizing the kids who are behind.”
Most children can be “the best” if schools offer enough different contests that no one can win them all. Einstein might have aced Physics and Math, but he probably would have flunked Carpentry and gotten pounded in Ju Jitsu. Furthermore, open-ended, self-paced curricula will instruct even an Einstein that, even within their area of expertise, others have more-specialized expertise which they do not (“I knew Kurt Godel, and you’re no Kurt Godel”).
More likely than vanity is Isaac Newton’s response: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Years ago, I took the grades which the Fordham Foundation and the Education Trust gave to States for their curricular standards, converted these grades into numbers on a 0-4 point scale, and applied the EXCEL correlation function to the NAEP median 8th grade Math score. The correlation was negative.
Fundamentally, the problems with national standards (or even US State-level standards) proceed from State (government, generally) intrusion into the education business. Children are not standard. The State (government, generally) cannot subsidize education without a definition of “education”, but then students, real classroom teachers, and taxpayers are bound by the State’s defintiion.
A measure of the elements of a set is an order relation on that set.
A test is a procedure of device for establishing a measure.
A standard is a unit of measurement. A yardstick is a standard. A kilogram weight is a standard.
Academic standards are to intellectual growth what yardsticks and kilogram weights are to physical growth. Platinum yardsticks will not make children any taller. Academic standards will not make children smarter. Nor will curricular standards make the US State-monopoly school system more effective. The most effective accountability mechanism which humans have yet devised is a policy which gives to unhappy customers the power to take their business elsewhere. The only standard with a prayer of improving US school system effectiveness is the parent standard: “Do I want my child in that school?”