Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia (R-24) is a 20-year veteran educator with experience in both traditional public and public charter schools. She is a former English teacher and school principal, and currently serves as a school district administrator in North Jersey. She serves on the Assembly Education Committee and is also a member of the Joint Committee on the Public Schools.

Somewhere along the way, education stopped organizing classrooms around how children actually learn and started organizing them around how adults wish learning worked. 

Kids don’t learn at the same pace; they never have. Some grasp concepts quickly and tune out when instruction crawls. Some need repetition, guided practice, and additional processing time before skills sink in. Some excel in math while struggling in reading comprehension. Some students arrive significantly behind grade level but don’t qualify for special education services because there is no disability; they need a different pace, more reinforcement, and smaller instructional jumps before moving on.

Yet despite these blatantly obvious realities, schools increasingly push heterogeneous classrooms that combine students with dramatically different academic needs and expect one teacher to effectively serve all of them at once.

Take a fairly typical classroom roster in New Jersey. A newer teacher walks into a room of twenty-five students: three are classified and are pulled out for ELA and math several times per week but remain in the classroom for other subjects and require accommodations and modifications; two have behavioral intervention plans; two are English language learners; five are significantly above grade level and should be moving at an accelerated pace. Four are performing well below grade level but are not classified because their struggles stem from skill gaps, inconsistent foundations, processing speed, or simply needing more time and reinforcement. The remaining students are roughly on grade level.

That teacher is expected to simultaneously differentiate instruction, manage behaviors, implement modifications and accommodations, provide enrichment, remediate learning gaps, support language acquisition, administer assessments, document interventions, and maintain grade-level rigor. 

The education world keeps pretending this is just a matter of teacher effort or training. It isn’t. It’s a structural problem; classrooms all over the country are buckling under it, and the paltry academic results reflect that.

The highest-performing students often spend large portions of the year insufficiently challenged because instruction can’t consistently move at the pace they’re capable of handling. Students who require more support become overwhelmed and discouraged because the spread of needs in the room is too wide. Then there’s the student nobody talks about nearly enough: the kid quietly performing on grade level; not failing enough for intervention; not excelling enough for enrichment; just sitting in the middle, becoming “educational wallpaper” while teacher attention shifts toward either acceleration or crisis management. 

Teachers know this dynamic very well, even if they won’t say it out loud.

What’s remarkable is how often criticism of homogeneous grouping gets treated as morally suspect instead of educationally practical. And it’s no surprise that the research around heterogeneous classrooms is far less positive than many advocates admit.

A 2026 study from University College London and the Education Endowment Foundation found that high-performing students made less academic progress in mixed-attainment math classrooms, while lower-performing students did not experience significant academic gains from the structure itself. Researchers also acknowledged the enormous instructional demands placed on teachers trying to manage broad academic differences in one room.

Other studies examining mixed-attainment instruction raised similar concerns. Even research generally favorable toward de-tracking repeatedly notes that heterogeneous classrooms only work well under conditions many schools simply do not have: highly trained veteran teachers; interventionists; co-teaching models; smaller class sizes; extensive planning time; strong curricula; and major behavioral supports. Instead, many schools hand massive instructional gaps to relatively inexperienced teachers and tell them to “go differentiate.”

That doesn’t mean schools should revive rigid tracking systems that permanently label and pigeonhole kids at young ages or lock students into fixed academic lanes with no mobility. Critics of traditional tracking are right that some systems historically created inequities and low expectations that limited opportunity. But education has now swung so far in the opposite direction that some schools behave as though acknowledging academic differences itself is inappropriate.

It isn’t. It’s reality.

Students who require additional processing time benefit from classrooms where instruction moves at a pace that allows concepts to sink in before the class plows ahead. Students capable of advanced analytical work deserve classrooms where instruction consistently challenges them instead of repeatedly slowing to accommodate enormous differences in readiness. Students performing on grade level deserve classrooms where they are not perpetually overshadowed by remediation demands or behavioral disruptions.

That requires more than six small groups packed inside one massively “differentiated classroom”. It requires distinct instructional classroom placements with appropriate pacing, specifically in math and ELA. Not permanent academic “castes” or rigid labels assigned in the third grade. We don’t want to go backwards into systems that permanently pigeonhole children. Instead, students should be reassessed quarterly and move fluidly based on demonstrated mastery, growth, and readiness. A student struggling in reading may excel in math. Another may need slower pacing in algebra but fly forward in analytical writing. Kids develop unevenly; schools should reflect that reality instead of pretending identical classroom placement serves everyone equally.

And no, asking one teacher to simultaneously run six instructional levels inside one classroom is not coherent academic placement. It’s an emotional, unsound coping mechanism for a system that’s unwilling to admit that pacing, readiness, and what teachers can realistically execute still matter.

Right now teachers are being asked to pull off the impossible every single day. When classrooms contain enormous differences in academic readiness, everyone else gets less.

Meanwhile, New Jersey’s academic trajectory should concern anyone paying attention. In sharp contrast to Mississippi, the unexpected pioneers of remarkable literacy gains now widely referred to as the “Mississippi Miracle,” New Jersey is stagnating and in some areas slowly and reliably moving backward. Roughly half of New Jersey high school graduates entering college require remedial coursework in English or math. That should alarm every parent and policymaker in the country. Students are graduating with transcripts suggesting “readiness” while families spend additional money and colleges spend enormous amounts of time reteaching foundational skills that should have been mastered years earlier.

Lack of rigor; grade inflation; weakened standards; social promotion; and reluctance to even acknowledge academic differences are all part of the problem. Schools should maintain high expectations for every child, but high expectations without instructional structures that make learning possible are meaningless.

Equity does not mean pretending all students have identical academic needs. Real equity means giving students instruction that genuinely matches their readiness, pacing, and capacity so they can actually grow. Most importantly, it means building systems teachers can realistically implement instead of burdening them with instructional expectations no human being can consistently sustain.

Education policy has spent years trying to engineer classrooms around ideological comfort. It’s time to return to instructional reality to better serve students and properly support the educators tasked with teaching them.