Will Nongraded Schools Apply Lessons Learned?
The re-emergence of nongraded programs, Gutierrez and Slavin note, is a response to problems still unsolved in our schools — especially the tension between retention and social promotion and the rejection of traditional forms of ability grouping. The main lesson learned from earlier research on nongraded schools, the researchers suggest, is that “the effects of nongraded organization are strongest when … nongrading is used as a grouping strategy but not as a framework for individualized instruction.” Research conducted separately on both individualized instruction and open education (as well as this review) has consistently found that these methods fail to improve student achievement, making it “unlikely that the nongraded elementary schools of the 1990s will, like those of the early 1970s, embrace these methods. As a result, it is more likely that the nongraded programs of the 1990s will resemble the simpler forms found in this review to be instructionally effective.” Cooperative L
