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The slowdown of the multiage classroom: what was once a popular approach has fallen victim to NCLB demands for grade-level testing
School Administrator, March, 2005 by Priscilla Pardini
Stone, who teaches classes in multiage and early childhood education, says a multiage setting provides a richer learning environment. "Children bring multiple perspectives and hear multiple perspectives," she says. Anderson likes the "good spread of physical, mental and social experiences" that different-aged children bring to a classroom setting. "That's the way the rest of life is," he says.
Prevalence Overseas
By the early 1990s, interest in multiage education was running high, and a growing number of school districts were putting such programs in place. Jim Grant, founder and executive director of Staff Development for Educators, a Peterborough, N.H.-based company that provides staff development services, recalls that a national conference on multiage education about a decade ago drew 2,800 people. The movement, with its emphasis on developmentally appropriate practices, clearly held appeal for reformers looking for ways to restructure schools, a popular school reform notion at the time.
In response, Stone founded the National Multiage Institute in 1995. The institute offers graduate-level courses--predominantly for teachers, but also administrators--in multiage practices. It sponsors trips for educators who want to visit multiage classrooms in places such as Australia and New Zealand. Although there is currently no state-level certification process for teachers working in multiage settings, Stone is establishing university certification for students who complete 12 credits of academic work in multiage education.
No one is tracking the number of multiage classes operating nationwide, but Stone believes the number peaked in the late 1990s. Multiage classes continue to operate in every state and in public, private and charter schools, Stone says. In almost all cases, schools that offer multiage classes do so along with traditional, single-grade classes.
Even when interest in multiage education was at its height, the number of such programs was small, points out Christopher Roellke, chair of the education department at Vassar College. (Based on research in 12 states, DeWayne A. Mason and Janet Stimson put the number of nongraded and combination classes at 5 percent in 1996. That figure included programs set up in rural areas in response to sparse population.)
Roellke says multiage education is more prevalent in Canada, Europe and parts of Asia, and while some of that interest may be philosophically driven, he says use of the approach abroad is also largely because it is an economical way to deliver education in less heavily populated areas. Stone points out that the U.S. Department of Defense has put multiage education programs in place in Europe and Asia for the children of members of the U.S. Armed Forces. The move, she says, grew out of a five-year early childhood education initiative.
The movement's biggest boost may have come in 1990 when the Kentucky Education Reform Act embraced the multiage philosophy and mandated that every school in the state provide an ungraded primary program. Children were to be given the opportunity to progress from kindergarten through 3rd grade at their own pace.
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