October 13, 2015 Testimony- Austina De Bonte

My name is Austina De Bonte. I have kids at Leota and Sunrise. I co-chair the Northshore Highly Capable Parent Advisory Board and am President of the state-wide organization NW Gifted Child Association. I have taken Nancy's challenge to continue attending board meetings until the Challenge issue is resolved, so I guess we'll get to know each other better over the coming months smile emoticon

Angie Hancock has already spoken about how the middle school task force is not looking at multiple perspectives of research. I agree this is a huge problem, and I hope that raising these issues will encourage the task force to start looking at a broader base of research. 

However, today I'm going to speak about a central piece of AMLE's own research that demonstrates a surprising thing - that heterogeneous classrooms, or mixed-ability grouping, is NOT correlated with high functioning middle schools. The study is titled The Status of Programs and Practices in America's Middle Schools: Results from Two National Studies, and is one of the five resources listed on the middle school task force's webpage. 

This paper compares statistics from two large studies. One study was done with a random sample of 827 middle schools, and the other studied 101 middle schools that were specifically selected as being "highly successful" by virtue of earning either the “Breakthrough Middle Schools” or “Schools to Watch” award designation. It compares the statistics of actual use of various AMLE recommendations in both the random set of schools as well as the “highly successful” schools.

The study measures the actual adoption of the many components that AMLE encourages in a middle school, ranging from advisory periods, professional development, standardized testing, electives, interdisciplinary teaming, common planning time, etc. Instructional Grouping Practices is only one issue that was studied, among dozens of others. 

Zooming into Instructional Grouping, the study has three main takeaways:

1. There has been a DECLINE in heterogeneous grouping in middle schools over the past two decades. 32% of schools used heterogeneous grouping in 1993 and only 23% of schools did in 2009. So in pragmatic use, schools have been choosing to move away from heterogeneous grouping, and these are small percentages regardless.

2. Heterogeneous grouping was one of the top four areas that was ranked as having NO IMPACT on standardized test scores. If heterogeneous grouping is not helping test scores, this would imply that the theoretical benefits of heterogenous grouping for struggling learners doesn’t actually happen.

3. But the clincher is number 3. When the study compared the random sample of middle schools with the “highly successful” middle schools, there was NO DIFFERENCE in heterogeneous grouping practices between the random schools and the “highly successful” ones. In fact, the highly successful schools had a slightly higher rate of using ability grouped classes for math, science, social studies, and language arts. 

In conclusion, this data shows that even the AMLE’s own research does not show any correlation between heterogeneous grouping and being a “highly successful” middle school, by their own definition. This is recent, robust data with large N numbers of schools, and it is clear on this point. 

Thank you.

Reference: The Status of Programs and Practices in America's Middle Schools: Results from Two National Studies Available from:http://wwwnew.nsd.org/Page/6900, or linked directly at http://www.amle.org/BrowsebyTopic/WhatsNew/WNDet.aspx