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.
Posted by Greg Forster 
Jay P. Greene's Blog 