Teaching Age Groups Together

Re “Grouping Kids by Age Should Have Vanished With the Little Red Schoolhouse,” Commentary, April 26: Your headline seems inappropriate. In the little red schoolhouse, kids of all ages and grades often were taught in one room -- or two grades (50 kids) at the same time. When I and others started grammar school in the ‘30s, the first and second, third and fourth, and fifth and sixth grades were taught together.

As a result, five of us skipped the fourth grade and entered the fifth, where we did well. I started high school at age 12, testing at the level of a 17-year-old. We graduated high school (grade 12) at 16. The bell curve predicts that only one, at most, out of a group of 25 will test two standard deviations in IQ above average. Is it possible that teaching two grades together works to greatly increase the IQ of at least 20%, and perhaps all, of the students?

At my school, a kid’s first day of school was not kindergarten but first grade. We were taught to read using phonics. I still remember the first day of school with cat, bat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat and vat on the blackboard. It clued you in on how to read right off the bat.

It might have helped that the suburban school was Catholic, relying on brown-bag lunches and cheap public transportation; the boys wore coats and ties, religion was taught daily, and the catechism was memorized. However, teaching the grades together using phonics, spelling bees and arithmetic drills seem to me to be the major causes of our success. The schools could try it to see if it helps meet the new federal requirements and stems the flight of students to private schools.

Raymond J. Rostan

Orange

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Experienced educators are well aware that school clocks and children’s developmental needs are often not in sync. Blending students socially, especially at the primary levels, offers opportunities for supporting academic performance in real time, flexibility in learning styles and timely interventions, while promoting the tenet, “Know your students well.”

Students, teachers and families become real partners over the two- or three-year span in a multi-age environment. A visit to a multi-age classroom facilitated by skillful, research-minded teachers is an educational delight of the highest order. The elementary schools of Beaufort, S.C., were mentioned in the article. I’d like to mention a few local examples in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Researcher/teacher Susan Courtney and Richard Rogers at Norwood Elementary School in Central L.A. have presented an excellent example of a multi-age classroom promoting academic achievement for 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds for the past decade. Santa Monica Elementary School offers an example of a school organized around multi-age classrooms at work. Alternatives to the lock-step advancement of students need to be noticed and studied to rethink the traditional organizational models of school.

Rita Flynn Edd

Field Supervision, UCLA

Principal Leadership

Institute, Los Angeles

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The original little red schoolhouse classroom was not segregated by age but included all the children in the small community. Age separation came in when the classroom size in numbers of students got too large. We parents should have no problem going to developmental promotion -- after the newness wears off and if it is handled properly by the school systems.

Bill Rogers

Mission Viejo