Wisconsin Center for Education Research (Twitter):
Research shows that ability grouping helps underrepresented students become included in gifted programs. @MSANachieve #MSANinstitute shrink the excellence gap.
“Ability Grouping
Although often unpopular because of its association with tracking, ability grouping has been shown to increase the number of underrepresented students identified as high achieving over time (e.g., Card & Giuliano, 2014; Gentry, 2014; Robinson, 2008). The hypothesized mechanism for these effects is that grouping strategies tend to narrow the range of achievement that any single teacher is expected to instruct in a general classroom setting (see Firmender, Reis, & Sweeny, 2013; Peters, Rambo-Hernandez, Makel, Matthews, & Plucker, 2017), although Rogers and Feller (2016) have recently provided evidence that minimizing peer comparisons between low- and high-performing students may also facilitate positive grouping benefits.”
“They’re all rich, white kids and they’ll do just fine” — NOT! (2006!)