Grade Levels: A Quick History

The management tool that ate the mission of school

What Are Grade Levels?

Above Grade Level is a publication about the heart of gifted & talented education: academic acceleration. Although high-ability learners may also have non-academic special needs, the main goal of GT education ought to be simply not holding gifted kids back at core academics.

However, it is impossible to talk about academic acceleration without reference to “grade levels.” In the absence of some yardstick for expected academic progress, how can we say whether a student is (or should be) “ahead”—or, for that matter, “behind”?

Schools didn’t just start springing one day from American soil with age-based labels on their classrooms. Where did grade levels come from? What was the point?

Before Grades: The One-Room Schoolhouse

In America’s early and pre-industrial days, away-from-home education was provided relatively informally and hyper-locally in the form of the one-room schoolhouse. There, a single teacher would rotate across subgroups of ~20–40 students, dispensing direct instruction and various tasks for them to complete together or individually.

Since most one-room schoolhouse students were learning plenty of practical skills back home on the farm, teachers focused on instilling basic literacy and math while infusing the process with Christian values (perhaps with supplements of geography and history for good measure). Students tended to attend the one-room schoolhouse sparingly and sporadically—before they went to work in factories, youth were still in high demand as farmhands.

In current terms, we’d call these one-room schoolhouses “mixed-age” and “mixed-ability,” and they operated under even stronger “local control” than we still see in America today. Students weren’t “tracked” exactly, but the one-room schoolhouse offered some degree of curricular “differentiation” depending on the teacher and group size and profile.

Early Grading

By the mid-19th century, several forces pushed American schools toward grading. In short, efficiency and scale won:

• City superintendents embraced the zeitgeist of “scientific management” and reorganized schools for throughput.

• State lawmakers lengthened the school year and made attendance compulsory to build a common civic culture, assimilate immigrants, and curb child labor.

• As rail, roads, and trolley lines spread, districts pulled students from wider areas into larger schools—district schools that needed more internal organization than their townie, one-room predecessors.

The first “grading” actually involved merely dividing students into wide age groups: primary vs. grammar school. Then some “two-headed” grammar schools in Massachusetts experimented with splitting their mixed-age student body in half for separate “reading” and “writing” departments. (“reading” covered geography/history; “writing” covered math... still with me??)

The separate headmasters of these double departments did not coordinate well, so students often failed to make good progress and were ranked against each other in reportedly confusing ways. Shuffling books from one department to the other added further annoyance.

The Prussian Influence

Thus the district school was primed for the further organizational experimentation soon urged by Horace Mann and other reformers who took their cues from the Prussian system. The already roughly age-graded and double-headed schools could be taken to their next streamlined level with single headmasters and homogeneous, age-based classes run by a single teacher each.

When the contemporary grade system (one teacher and one grade per room) was kicked off by the Quincy Grammar School in Boston in 1848, it seemed to promise improved cohesiveness across curricular areas and continuous progression. Yearly markers for progress and yearly grade-level advancement would enhance student motivation. Students would no longer fall through the cracks, languishing at the bottom of mixed-subject rooms.

Carnegie Units Seal the Deal

While broad social and technological changes may have overdetermined America’s shift toward age-based grade levels for younger students, it was one specific 1906 convention of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that finished cementing time-based academic measurement for a full century and beyond.

At the time, American secondary schools were quite inconsistent in their aims and content, with some focusing on a more classical education featuring Greek and Latin while others offered vocational courses, etc. Andrew Carnegie was concerned that college professors were having to work far into their dotage, so his Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching created a pension system for them.

However, in order to participate in the Carnegie professor pension plan, colleges would be required to standardize both their admissions process and degree offerings. High schools would provide transcript information denominated in “Carnegie units,” each representing 120 hours of class spread over the academic year. Colleges would offer degrees similarly organized around 120 “credit hours,” with most courses equating to 3 credits (approximately 3 hours of class meetings plus ~6 hours of additional work per week, for a ~15-week semester).

Although secondary schools and colleges did naturally use exams to advance and graduate their students, these were not standardized like the mastery tests available today and so they could not serve the function of homogenizing admissions and degree criteria. The few parties advocating for mastery at this time were drowned out of the debate.

Standardization’s Compromise

At the time, time-based measures of high school and college courses must have seemed much better than nothing. Yet there was never to be any rigorous, systemic measurement or enforcement of student seat time (beyond the financial aspect of how to assign and pay teachers or charge students tuition).

Although the high school and college credit-hour systems don’t explicitly tie curriculum to age, their theoretical basis in “hours per course” makes it unduly difficult for students to move more quickly than is conventionally expected.

However, by 1938, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching had administered comprehensive exams to college students and found that units taken correlated poorly with actual educational attainment. Rather than demonstrating a smooth progression in educational attainment throughout college, a good chunk of freshmen scored at the expected senior level (and vice versa…). By the way, the stagnant score situation in high school is about the same, even today. Seat time simply doesn’t equal learning.

In a foreword to that 1938 Carnegie report, “The Student and His Knowledge,” a commentator predicted that American education would soon migrate to the next level, some system “based upon the attainments of minds thoroughly stored and competent.” Yet, 87 years later, this still hasn’t occurred. A few intrepid souls tinker with mastery and competency. Everyone else is forced to play along in lockstep.

Grade Level Grammar

This one-two punch just won’t die: early grade levels standardized who should be in a classroom and then Carnegie units standardized what counts as a course at all. No major education reform has succeeded in weakening this age- and time-based mindset. On the contrary, many reforms (e.g., No Child Left Behind and Common Core) have only strengthened the age- and time-based status quo.

Tyack and Cuban called it “the grammar of schooling,” while psychologist Philip Jackson called it “the hidden curriculum.” In any case, wonks, ethnographers, and critics of wide-ranging political stripes all observe that school, in effect, teaches more than just the facts on a textbook’s page.

Age- and time-based standardization of education sends the message that it’s more important for students to do their time, however inefficient, than to learn what they need to know and move on. Is this really one of the first lessons that we want our children to internalize?

The Upshot for Parents

For over 100 years, American schools and teachers have depended on age-based grade levels and knock-on time-based credits in order to function. Training, funding, and regulation are all closely tied to these conventions.

When you seek accelerated learning for your child, you are asking the system to run against its very grain. And what is the benefit of doing this, from the institutional perspective of the school or teacher?

The system will not receive more funding if a student starts early or finishes school sooner—they may well receive less. Your student may have already hit the standardized test score ceilings, so moving them ahead may actually worsen school score averages on paper.

Individual teachers and administrators may see the costs of the standardizations they’ve inherited, but their willingness and ability to work around them is sadly low at baseline.

P.S.: I promise that some future installments of Above Grade Level will be more constructive, e.g. practical routes out of the grade-level box - what acceleration actually looks like, how to ask for it, and what to do when the answer is “no.”

But, for now, stay tuned and subscribe for one more downer next week: Grade Levels Never Worked