Inside a Multiage Classroom

DEVENS, Massachusetts—It looks like a typical class in a suburban high school. The teacher, Barbara Curtin, discusses the differences between mean, mode, and median while her students at the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School sit in clusters of three or four at tables around the room. A second teacher, Lorin Hill, is there to help. All fairly standard, but for one dramatic difference—the mix of students.

Curtin’s class includes both ninth- and 10th-graders. Sometimes she even has a precocious eighth-grader or two and a couple of struggling 11th-graders. That’s because Parker offers what may be the nation’s most ambitious and comprehensive take on multiage education in middle and high school, breaking grades 7 to 12 into three divisions, with each division blending two grades together.  

Multiage education is not a return to the one-room schoolhouse of yore, in which students of all ages learned different subjects in one space. Instead, students from (typically) two grades learn together in an environment that, advocates say, encourages cooperation and mentoring while allowing struggling students enough time to master material.

A long-time staple of Montessori schools, multiage classrooms spread to progressive elementary schools in the 1990s, although their use was always just one ingredient in a mix intended to provide more personalized instruction.

But the