Levels

In 2006, while a graduate student at Antioch University Seattle, there was an Open Space event where I tried to promote the idea of "replacing classrooms with diagnostic portfolios." A school is trying to teach specific things, so they should teach those things until point by point the students prove they know those things, and thus should abandon the classroom structure all together. Now, 10 years later, upper level admin are going rogue at MIT to do something very similar:
http://www.chronicle.com/article/MIT-Dean-Takes-Leave-to-Start/235121?cid=trend_right_a

Think of swimming lessons. They have groups of student at different levels, and when a student has mastered the level they are on, they move on to the next level, not before, and not after. Because if you don't teach swimming this way people drown.

A friend of mine tried to put her 14 year old son in her more talented-when-it-comes-to-swimming 11 year old son's swimming level, because she just figured the 14 year old could handle it. He ended puking up water in the pool gutter from his constant barely not drowning he was doing instead of swimming, and back in the more novice swimming class. He lost his tolerance for swimming lessons all together, and now he and his brothers are doing parkour classes instead.

As students are plummeted forward through classes on a rigid time line they don't have time to develop, least bit maintain, demonstrable skill. They find challenging material overwhelming, and often abandon the subject all together.

Taking the subject of mathematics for example, it is impossibly demanding for a teacher to be expected to get every single student to learn every single thing over the course of the school year. The result is a loss of interest in mathematics from students, bad over all test scores for the school, and not enough well prepared students for the future workforce.

What if instead we taught Math like we do swimming lessons. Instead of dividing students into classes and years, divide them into weeks-long levels, with one teacher per level, and the students stay in that level until they are competent at that level. This does not require a development in curriculum, because we already have Khan Academy. Just as the rogue MIT administration has determined that lectures and classrooms are extremely outdated in the face of things like Wikipedia, Youtube and other internet resources, it's time to stop torturing students instead of teaching them: