Traditional Schools? There is a Better Way: Mastery Education

The traditional grade level approach to education has been a failure for over fifty years. Putting children of the same age group into the same class year after year and expecting all to succeed has never worked. The cream rise to the top and are slowed down, or punished because of boredom, until reaching their potential is an impossibility. The bottom of the heap are kept there. Unable to keep up, they fall farther and farther behind their peers. The results are the college bound find universities having to teach high school courses, and the bottom dwellers are dropout bound.

There is a much better method to education that will allow all to succeed. Eliminate all grade levels. Instead, develop a mastery based advancement system. Each major subject area; reading, writing, and math, is subdivided into smaller units that would need to be mastered before advancing to the next level. For example; math would start with a unit of reading, reciting, and writing numbers from 1 to 100, then would come a unit of addition up to two number by two number adding. Next may be two number by two number subtraction, etc. As each level is mastered the student is advanced to the next class level. If the level is not mastered, the student continues to study that level until it is mastered. It may take one week for a particular student to master a level, while at the same time it may take another student a month of practice to achieve success at the same level.

Mastery would be judged as reached upon scoring 90% or greater on a competency test. Such a test could be administered as soon as the teacher, or a parent, believes the student has complete comprehension of the material, not on a predetermined calendar date.