My Mother Said This Would Happen: More Groups and More Tests in Shifting Classrooms. Grouping students by ability level in the classroom is back. "Ability grouping and its close cousin, tracking, in which children take different classes based on their proficiency levels, fell out of favor in the late 1980s and the 1990s as critics charged that they perpetuated inequality by trapping poor and minority students in low-level groups," Vivian Yee wrote in The Times's Education section. But the practice of separating children into groups according to strengths, weaknesses and achievement has undergone a stealth return: Along with the rise of the Common Core curriculum, the return of ability grouping marks the swing of the education pendulum back in the direction of rigorous standards and evaluation, and even as a parent of children who may be affected by the swing, I'm still observing it somewhat in awe - because my mother predicted it all in a somewhat off-the-cuff remark made five years ago after a visit to my oldest son's first grade classroom. "They're at that whole touchy-feely stage of teaching," she said, after observing the class singing songs about recycling and completing an "animal report" that was supposed to engage them in increasing reading comprehension through investigation. My son, busy hiding the fact that he couldn't read, quickly learned that anything that began with a capital letter and ended with that little dot thing, if copied, would qualify as a "fact" and please his busy teacher. By the time he's in sixth grade, that pendulum will swing back, they'll start testing them and getting more demanding, and he's going to be in real trouble. My mother spent decades teaching in various classrooms across the Midwest before retiring a few years ago, and she has seen the cant of the education establishment run the gamut from "learn by doing" through "learn by testing" a number of times. I am not an education professional, or even a journalist who covers education vigorously. I'm a parent and a layperson - but I'm both awed and dismayed by how easily an experienced teacher with no ax to grind was able to assess exactly were things stood, and predict what was to come. As a parent, I can see the arguments on both sides of the debate on dividing children by ability level highlighted in Ms. Yee's article (Grouping Students by Ability Regains Favor in Classroom). I have one child who looks at that group placement and declares "see? I'm not good at math," and one who's the bored troublemaker when faced with grade-level worksheets. I also have children who thrive at different ends of that "learn by doing"/"learn by testing" pendulum. What I see, as a layperson, are no easy solutions and no one-size-fits all strategies in a nation that loves to standardize and is always on the lookout for things that can "scale." What I did, as a parent, was to put my son in a pendulum-free, single educational philosophy private school that suited him, and that we are fortunate to be able to access and afford. As a public-school graduate and advocate, I have many regrets about that decision. As, again, a parent, watching that pendulum swing, I'm grateful that we could and did make that choice, and my only regret is that it's one not everyone has. Have your children been caught up in difficult shifts and swings of educational philosophy, on a school, state or national level? What did you do? In another decade, will we be reading about the move away from testing, toward cooperative learning and back into all-inclusive groups in the classrooms? Maybe I should ask my mother.