Age-Based Grade Levels Are More Important Than People Think
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why keeping students in age-based cohorts serves crucial social functions that are often overlooked in debates about grade-level alternatives.
Key Takeaways
- Learning is a social experience - Age-based cohorts provide the social context students need for healthy development
- Alternatives create new problems - Multi-age grouping and competency-based progression sound appealing but disrupt important peer relationships
- The social structure matters as much as the academic one - Students benefit from growing up alongside peers at the same developmental stage
Transcript
Are age-based grade levels a bad idea?
I see so many people who are just ready to throw out grade levels because they feel like grade levels hold kids back, right?
If you're in this grade level at this age, you should be learning this set of stuff.
A lot of people say, well, my kid could be learning faster.
Or they say that kid didn't learn what they were supposed to, they failed, so they need to repeat the previous grade.
And I think we're just very casual in a way that we shouldn't be.
about moving kids away from their age cohort.
I think grade level has a great value that we overlook too easily in that it is your peer group.
It is your social network.
It is your whole world socially.
And we should be very careful about breaking that for a kid.
We should be very thoughtful and very deliberate about things like retention, just as a family is very thoughtful and deliberate about moving while their kids are in school, right?
Like you can do that.
People do it all the time.
But it's a big deal and we shouldn't pretend like it's not a big deal.
We shouldn't act like we can take a kid who is not passing their classes and just have them repeat the grade and that's no big deal.
It is a big deal.
We should sometimes do it, but we should be very careful about it because it is essentially a, I don't want to overstate this, but it's kind of a social death, right?
To say basically you never get to have classes with any of your friends again because you're having to repeat a grade.
That is a big deal.
And if we were to do that as a punishment, we would say, well, wait a minute.
That's way too severe a punishment.
And yes, there are practical reasons to do it, but it is a big deal.
It is legitimate for kids to have friends in their grade level who are their same age.
There is value to that.
If you think back about your high school years, one reason most of us see high school as kind of the good old days, and we remember that fondly, and the music from that time is just so meaningful to us, is because we had a peer cohort.
If I think about my grad school experience, some of it was cohort and some of it was non-cohort, and the non-cohort classes that I took just...
don't have that feeling for me.
The cohort is powerful because it is social, because it has meaning for a group of people, not just individuals taking a class.
And I think we have to be very careful not to break learning into just this kind of individualistic experience that we should try to speed run through.
I feel like so many people want to get rid of grade levels so that they can rush their kid through.
And I have to ask why.
This is not a race.
Childhood is not a race.
Yes, you should learn as much as you can, but it's not a race.
Like, you've got 13 years and then you've got college.
Like, we are not trying to break some sort of world record here.
What matters a lot more than speed to me is quality.
I think the speed of progression in our grade level standards is appropriate.
I don't have a huge problem with that, as long as there are options for advanced classes, especially advanced.
in middle school and high school but it's not a race we should mostly keep kids with kids their age let me know what you think