Streaming in schools perpetuates low, inescapable expectations

Many readers may have experienced streaming or ability grouping, at primary and/or secondary school, and over the past 70+ years it has become entrenched in our education system.
While it was introduced with the best of intentions, years of research has made it demonstrably clear, that it is not good for students, even if they are bright. It is damaging for all students. If I had my way, it would be phased out of our schools in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Streaming and ability grouping are teaching practices which are pernicious, ubiquitous, and inequitable. Streaming (in secondary schools) and ability grouping (in primary schools) involve sorting students into groups from those that teachers believe are more capable down to those who are believed to be less capable. The problem is …well, where do I start?
Contrary to popular perception, the evidence is clear that sorting students into groups does not increase student achievement. There is no evidence that high achievers will be disadvantaged by working with low achievers either, another persistent belief.
We do have evidence, however, that students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, Māori, and Pasifika are disproportionately placed in the lower groups, even when their achievement results indicate that they could be performing at higher levels. Grouping helps to maintain the social strata, severely impacting some students’ future possibilities.
It gets worse; the ability group into which students are placed in primary school predicts the stream that they are assigned to in secondary school, which, in turn, often predicts students’ life chances – even accounting for initial achievement.
Grouping tends to have an enduring effect. Once students are placed into separate groups, they’re taught different things (supposedly to cater for their ability) so they learn different things. Those in the lowest groups become trapped in a perpetuation of low expectations from which they cannot escape.
It makes intuitive sense that students in the highest groups would often feel pressure to succeed whereas those in the lowest groups would feel disheartened. Can you imagine turning up to school day after day knowing that you are considered ‘dumb’? These groups are salient and pervasive, with a student’s position in the academic hierarchy reinforced daily.
Need I go on? Well, yes; research has also shown that when students from the lowest groups are placed in the top groups, within one year, they close the gap and perform at the same levels as their so-called high-performing peers. Conversely, students in classes of those with teachers who have high expectations for all students make, on average, two years’ academic growth in one year. When I investigated what high expectation teachers did differently, one key factor was that they did not ability-group their students.
In 2019, Tokona te Raki (an organisation set up to address equity in education, employment and income for Māori) published He Awa Ara Rau – A Journey of Many Paths. This report tracked over 70,000 Māori students on their educational journey and into employment.
The report identified the negative effects of streaming as one of the most significant barriers to Māori achieving at high levels. This resulted in representatives from the Ministry of Education and the Mātauranga Iwi Leaders Group charging Tokona te Raki with bringing together education leaders (including myself) from across the sector to design a plan to end streaming in Aotearoa.
This plan is called Kōkirihia and has the aim of ending ability grouping and streaming by 2030. The implementation team involves representatives from 21 different educational organisations. We are also involving rangatahi and whānau so that they become aware of the widespread and damaging practices of streaming and ability grouping in schools and how these are affecting their children’s futures.
Because of my work in high expectation teaching, or HET. I am part of the implementation team because HET involves a viable alternative to streaming and ability grouping.
High expectation teachers institute three key principles: employing mixed and flexible grouping, fostering a warm class climate, and using goal setting to increase student motivation and engagement.
High expectation teaching is, in many ways, the opposite of streaming and ability grouping. It involves students working in mixed ability groups and in flexible groups, coupled with high-level learning opportunities for all. Flexible grouping involves teachers forming workshops that students opt into (with the occasional teacher suggestion) where specific skills are taught in line with student needs.
It’s a style of teaching that involves different students being taught different skills every day – the groups are constantly changing and not solely teacher-determined. Teachers often include collaborative activities that use all students’ strengths; collaborative and cooperative activities have been shown to have large effects on student learning.
All students are challenged, and get to participate in high-level, exciting activities that markedly increase learning, motivation and engagement.
High expectation teachers foster very warm relationships with all their students. They learn about them academically as well as personally; they take an interest in their students’ lives. They support them emotionally as well as in their learning. Positive teacher-student relationships have one of the largest effects on student academic outcomes. High expectation teachers foster positive relationships between students; students are expected to support each other.
High expectation teachers use skill-based goal setting with their students. Having clear goals is motivating and engaging for students. They know exactly how to improve and constantly see themselves making progress.
Importantly, all teachers can be taught to implement HET principles and when they do, an experimental study that I conducted showed that all students (no matter their school, SES, class-level, gender or ethnicity) significantly out-performed a control group of students whose teachers were not taught HET principles.
Next steps in the implementation of Kōkirihia include developing a toolkit of web resources for teachers, a database of schools committed to ending streaming and ability grouping and schools willing to act as resource schools for others wanting to end these persistent but incredibly harmful teaching practices.