Ode to the One-Room Schoolhouse

By Barbara Berst Adams

Eight-year-old Elizabeth snuggled in the lap of twelve-year-old Kelsey as they read a starry together. Elizabeth held the book and read, while Kelsey found ways to help her understand the words that stumped her. As I witnessed this scene in a mixed-age public school classroom, I saw something I was yearning to offer my own children: placement in the loving village that it takes to raise a child. I was a volunteer researcher for the school district my children attended, gathering information and working alongside one of their more innovative teachers, as well as a paid teacher of after-school art and craft programs. Before creating that teacher's own multiage classroom, we observed many other successful ones. The information I would discover opened my eyes to a new way of seeing education.

According to the report "Nongraded Primary Education," written by Joan Gaustad and funded by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), US Department of Education, mass public education was created in the mid-1800s from the need for an efficient, economical system capable of handling large numbers of students. Graded education--the practice of classifying and dividing students by age--spread rapidly throughout the US and has remained the standard until the present. In an effort to return to a more natural way of learning, many experimental nongraded programs were tried in the 1960s and early 1970s, but they failed due to inadequate understanding, lack of administrative and community support, and poorly planned implementation. But in the 1990s, educators and citizens were reevaluating their schools and proposing reforms to meet the needs of diverse social and economic groups. Nongraded primary education became a key component of many reform proposals, including the Kentucky Educational Reform Act and the Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century. The newer nongraded model appearing in some public and private schools today is supported by additional decades of research and refined by the study of successful programs.

As public schools observe the growth of homeschooling and other options for children, new ways of educating are seeping into mainstream schools to accommodate a society with changing values. For my family's situation, homeschooling was, at best, a part-time option. We could not afford the various wonderful private schools in our area. So here I was, volunteering in the public school system in my search to find an option that would nurture individual children's differences even as it encouraged cooperation among them.

One of the most intriguing options I discovered was the mixed-age classroom, in which different ages and grade levels are deliberately combined in one class--kindergarten through second grade, for example, or fourth through sixth. Schools that eliminate the use of grade levels are usually called multiage, while those that combine different grade levels but still use grade levels within the classroom are more often called multigrade, though the terms are often used interchangeably. Another variation is the split-level classroom, in which two traditional grades, such as fifth and sixth, are combined. My children ultimately attended a classroom that combined four different traditional grades. As a parent volunteer who both helped create this mixed-age classroom and chose this system for her children, I saw many advantages, as well as some challenges.

Advantages

Did we lose something valuable when we lost the one-room schoolhouse? Perhaps so. Russell Yates of Chimacum Elementary School in Chimacum, Washington, teaches a class that combines the third, fourth, and fifth grades. "I have taught sixth, fourth, and third single-grade classes," he says. "In all of those classes, I found management and discipline to be a relatively major issue. It seemed that no matter what I did as a teacher, students were too competitive with one another. Students seemed to believe that since they were all the same age, they should all be at the same academic level, with exactly the same skills and abilities. The children who varied from the norm, both above and below the average ability of the class, were pressured by the students to conform. If they didn't conform, then they were made fun of, or were ostracized to a certain extent."