Montgomery School's New Take On Ability Grouping Yields Results

"Here, the children know that if they work hard, they can move," said Yvonne Hudson, a fifth-grade teacher of accelerated reading and math. "I've had children tell me, 'Ms. Hudson, I'm going to be in your class next year.' "

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Last week, the school held a Closing the Gap dinner, with a five-course meal for families of improved students and a speech by the school board's president, Nancy Navarro. Parents of students who exited the gap told how they got out.

In spring 2006, 113 black and Hispanic children at the school were rated basic, the lowest of three performance levels, on the Maryland School Assessment. Last spring, the number shrank to 51.

Ability grouping, the generic term for what Rock View is doing, is a controversial practice in public education. Nonetheless, most elementary schools in the region group students by ability within classrooms for reading instruction, and a growing number place students in performance-based classes for math.

The technique is most effective, and most palatable, when teachers are "genuinely, constantly reevaluating the students' performance and particularly moving them forward when they show positive growth," said Robert Slavin, a Johns Hopkins University researcher who has studied the practice.

Roberson, a former special education teacher who was raised in Hampton, Va., moves around campus on an electric scooter, which she uses because of rheumatoid arthritis. She stops to greet students with hugs.

She arrived at Rock View six years ago and found that students' families had a range of incomes and education. Some parents worked at NASA, some cleaned houses and others collected welfare. Test scores were in the dumps across the board. "They shouldn't have been," she said, "because you had bright children."

The school served a growing immigrant population, and nearly half of all students qualified for subsidized meals.

Roberson decided that regrouping students by performance level would make the most of her limited staff, which was struggling to deliver lessons to a student body with wide-ranging abilities.

"When you have all the students who are academically alike for 90 minutes and you don't have to split them up and give 30 minutes to each group, you get more bang for your buck," she said.

School system administrators were uncomfortable with the arrangement. Nothing resembling tracking was going on in the county. Few, if any, elementary schools grouped children into classrooms by ability to the extent that Roberson was proposing.

"I told the powers that be, 'Just let me do it,' " Roberson recalled.