All Our Children Learning: New Views on the Work of Benjamin S. Bloom

The gaps in the achievement of different groups of students have been evident for decades.

[Page 102]In recent years, achievement gaps among different groups of students have attracted renewed scrutiny. Recognizing that a highly skilled workforce is essential for success in today's global economy, public officials have enacted new legislation that requires schools to focus on high levels of achievement for all students. These new laws compel school leaders to report student achievement results separately for various poverty, ethnicity, language, and disability subgroups. Not only must these leaders identify any achievement gaps among these different subgroups, they also must take specific steps to close them.

Over the years, educational researchers have studied these educational disparities extensively and have learned a great deal about reducing them. Unfortunately, many of those proposing new programs and strategies to close achievement gaps seem unaware of this important knowledge base. As a result, they simply “rediscover” well-established principles and end up making little real progress. To succeed in our efforts to close achievement gaps and to reach our goal of helping all students learn well, we must recognize this hard-earned knowledge base and then find ways to extend and enhance it in the context of today's classrooms and schools.

This chapter describes the work of one of the foremost contributors to that knowledge base: Benjamin S. Bloom. We will consider how Bloom conceptualized and addressed the problem of achievement gaps, as well as the success that he and his students achieved in resolving the problem through the use of mastery learning. We then will describe the essential elements of mastery learning, discuss common misinterpretations, and conclude with a summary of the research on its effects in various school contexts.