Failing Our Geniuses

saintlupus writes "Time has an interesting article about the failure of the US educational system to properly deal with gifted students. For example, up to ten times as much money is spent nationwide on educating 'developmentally disabled' students as gifted ones. Does No Child Left Behind mean that nobody can get ahead, either?"

Comments

No Child Left Behind doesn't matter

[faloi]

The public education system has been failing gifted students since long before No Child Left Behind.

Re:No Child Left Behind doesn't matter

[clragon]

It's no surprise. Some cultures love their smart people. The Asian's love their smart people. They glorify them, they treat them with a lot of respect, and view them as a source of national pride.

I lived in China for the first 10 years of my life, so I know the Chinese culture well.

You said Asians love their smart people, it's true, but only under certain perimeters. The first problem is how do you define "smart"? Are smart kids the ones with the highest IQ test scores? Are they the ones that get the highest marks in class? Or are they the ones that can sell the most cookies to neighbors?

In China, IQ Scores are redundant and are not paid any attention to by the education system. Here however (In Canada), it is used to determine if a child is able to enter the gifted program in elementary school.

What the Chinese actually value is someone who can learn fast, think fast with flexibility and without making many mistakes. Although one might argue those people can be called "smart", but smart is too general a word in English and could be referring to a wide rage of characteristics. See, the Chinese does not value IQ or "gifted-ness" because it doesn't reflect what a person could accomplish. Instead, to get into the fast-track classes in China a child has to be placed in the top 40 in his or her grade (this is according to the middle school I was going to go to, there were 60 kids per class and 8 classes per grade.) So instead of getting the kids to take a IQ test of which they have no control over the results, getting into the fast-track classes becomes a competition between students so the winners are respected. In Canada, the gifted kids doesn't "beat" others to get into gifted classes, so there is much less of a reason for other kids to respect them.

One type of smart person the Chinese frown upon are people who stay home and study the textbooks all day, but can't carry the knowledge over and apply it to the real life. It wouldn't matter if the person has the highest mark in the class, if he or she can't solve simple social problems then they will receive little respect.

This is very similar to the definition of a Nerd in the western culture. However, one key difference is the clear line drawn between a "nerd" and a smart person in China, while here in Canada it is assumed anyone who has the highest mark in the class must be a nerd.

Answering the hypothetical question

[A beautiful mind]

Does No Child Left Behind mean that nobody can get ahead, either?

Yes. "Not leaving a child behind", in educational context means lowering the level of the education for the average and the smart students.

Anyone with half a brain would tune education for the average person, or very slightly above the average to encourage improvement and the stupid/disabled and smart kids would get special programs to help their development the best. Leaving no man behind is a stupid analogy to the problem, as the stupid kid who can't learn more drags down the kids who can.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It depends...

[weston]

... on whether or not the gifted student is smart enough to figure out how to use resources to direct their own learning.

I'm one of the first people to admit there are problems with many public schools. I went through an education to be a secondary math teacher. I stopped after student teaching because I realized I didn't want to deal with a lot of the issues.

But when I look back over my public education -- in Utah, where per pupil spending traditionally lags pretty far behind many other places -- I have to admit it was pretty damn good overall. When they realized I was breezing through all the reading primers in first grade, they made sure I knew how to use the school library and pointed me at a few particular topics. I got after school access to some of the first computers the schools had. My parents helped, taking me to the local library and enrolling me in community classes, but the staff was helpful. That was elementary school. My high school had a full quiver of AP classes and the teachers were, by and large, good. And they had a program where advanced students could also take courses from the public community college. All in a small-government, relatively low income and not large tax-base state.

I daresay I didn't get near as much out of my public education as I could have if I were more focused and ambitious. One guy took all of the computer science classes, took advantage of after school lab time to learn everything he could about the unix minicomputer we had and C, and got a job not long out of high school working as a sysadmin for a salary that a lot of college grads don't get. Couple of people I knew used some pretty advanced language skills to work as au pairs or English teachers in foreign countries. Me, I learned to play nethack in the lab after school. :)

The point? I think most of the smart kids -- especially if they have any kind of decent direction from parents, or a counselor, or some kind of mentor -- can take advantage of the existing system just fine, and learn to find resources outside of it to further their own goals.

The ones with developmental disabilities, by contrast, are often the one with issues that are actually keeping them from getting even a fraction out of the system. That's why a disproportionate amount of resources are directed there.

None of this is to say there shouldn't be some changes in how things are done. I'm just a tad skeptical of sweeping statements like "no one can get ahead." My observation is that's simply false.

Re:of course

[SatanicPuppy]

Actually I was in a tracked school...I graduated in the early 90's, so that should give you a data point. I moved into the system in 9th grade, and was immediately shunted into the "standard" classes, where an "A" average was a 4.0 (As opposed to the Remedial classes where it was 3.0 and the Accelerated classes where it was 5.0). I stayed there until my junior year, when the first round of standardized tests swept through and I outscored almost the entire school. Got put into the accelerated track my senior year and my GPA literally doubled.

On the one hand, as someone who experienced both sides, I really appreciated being in the advanced classes. It was night and day; better people, better work, better pace. On the other hand, it sucked hard being stuck in the standard track (there was no provision for smart kids there, because if you were smart, you wouldn't be there), and no real effort was ever made to reevaluate students once they ended up in a track.

I think tracking is in many ways too rigid, but I don't know of a better way to do it. Lumping all kids together is awful.

Tracking

[Descalzo]

As another responder already said, it has been called 'tracking,' though I don't know if it's illegal. My school district frowns most heavily upon it, and prefers to deal with it in-class. But what if a student is 'mis-tracked?' If it's a track in which the student is re-evaluated annually then that kid is going to be really messed up for a year. I have been toying with the idea of regrouping on a weekly basis. The problem with a weekly basis is that it's hard to make a week as meaningful as a year. It's a hard question, one teachers and administrators are trying to solve.

On a related topic, it's odd that if a student has an IQ of 70, that's like 2 standard deviations below the norm, and the student is identified as intellectually disabled. Failing to identify and serve this student's needs is going to get your school into an enormous amount of trouble.
Then you have another student with an IQ of 130. This student is no more normal than the other. He is intellectually gifted. Failing to identify or serve this student's needs will not even earn anyone a slap on the wrist.

This problem will get solved when a slashdotter decides he has enough money to take this comparison all the way to the Supreme Court.

Um, No... Not Necessarily...

[morari]

Does No Child Left Behind mean that nobody can get ahead, either? The school system has always been set up to cater to the lowest common denominator.

I am officially a genius. I spent years in alternative classes, set aside to cater to my unique "gift". These classes occurred one day out of the week, in which we left the confines of the normal teachers' textbooks and sat around solving slightly more abstract problems. Some really fun projects took place as well, but they were few and far between. Afterwards we were still required to make up the work that we had "missed" in normal class that day and we received no special credit for our alternative work. It was akin to gym class, where the only way to get something other than "Satisfactory" on your report card was to not participate at all. This was up to the halfway point in junior highschool, afterwards I was traditionally home schooled and then attended an online academy.

Even for the regular kids, school is meant to be slow and plodding. You cannot get a head, but you can fall behind. The teacher is there to slowly explain things so that everyone can attempt to comprehend them. If that means boring 80% of the children that could manage fine without, then so be it! The public education system really isn't about learning though, is it? It's about molding youth into the form that civilization sees as beneficial. It is social conditioning with the intent of forcing you into being a productive member of society. You're made to memorize things while never truly understanding, and many of said subjects aren't nearly as valuable as others that aren't even taught at all. Of course, what is and isn't valuable is largely dependent upon what talents you have. I for one was never given the opportunity to indulge any of my interests in a school setting. Everything I know (save for some advanced mathematics and science) were self taught. My lifelong talents further guided me in the direction that I wanted to take my life and now contribute to a very satisfying lifestyle.

Not everyone can be successfully self employed, but anyone can find something that they like and make it their own if they only try. Too many of us get caught up in being or competing with the proverbially Joneses to live a happy life, and much of that is due to the social conditioning we encounter throughout youth. Many are not told or cannot see this when it is happening, only to be too far assimilated into the machine or much too beaten down by it to do anything once they do realize. Don't let that happen.

Re:of course

[Aladrin]

You fail to take a few things into account:

1) If the kid isn't gifted, they won't WANT to be in a harder class.
2) If the kid isn't gifted, they will do extremely poorly in a harder class.
3) If the kid isn't gifted, his friends will tease him unmercifully for being in the harder class. (Gifted kids don't have friends. Everyone teases them anyhow.)

I was in the 'GIFTED' program in elementary school. I learned a lot of things there that I would never have had a chance to learn at that age otherwise, but the class itself wasn't that much harder. What -was- harder was that I also had to do all my regular schoolwork as well. The other teachers singled me out for being in GIFTED, too. For instance, 1 year ahead of everyone else, I had to make sentences from my spelling words. I eventually got so bored with it, I started to make stories from them. And then so bored I used the words -in order- to make stories.

In middle school, they had another program that wasn't nearly as good, and a year after I left elem. school, they cancelled the GIFTED program, and the middle school one right after I went to high school. Those schools have nothing of the sort now until High School, where their are Advance Placement (AP) classes that are harder, but not really any more interesting, and dual-enrollment (colleges classes at the high school).

Without those classes, I would not have gotten into computers in 4th grade (Apple IIe!) and definitely wouldn't be who I am today. I have to wonder if I'd have the same sense of purpose without it. My sister doesn't have that sense... She only had 1 year of GIFTED and none of the one in middle school, I think. She got straight A's the entire way through school, with the exception of a band teacher who said 'nobody should get all A's' and gave her a B solely for that reason. She duel-enrolled in high school early and completed 4 years of highschool and 2 years of college in only 3 years. (Yes, she graduated both in the same year.) She burnt out on that, but that's another story. She's in college for Pharmacy now and getting straight A's as always.

Without those classes, I'd have been bored stiff. I'd definitely have a lot of time on my hands to get in trouble with.

Yes, we are failing our geniuses. (I am not genius level IQ. Any geniuses in the same situation would be very poorly handled indeed.)

Re:of course

[thrawn_aj]

anyone know if they've ever tried splitting the smarter/average/dumb kids up into their own classes permanently from 5th or so through 12th, as in they hardly ever see the other groups anymore except between classes and at lunch?

Yes. I went to school (through high school) in India and I was lucky enough to be in such a system as you describe. That is one reason why the whole idea of "jocks" and "geeks" and "nerds" was so alien to me until I came to the US. In my day, the person we strived to compete with and get ahead of was the super-geek-jock :P - the guy/gal who did everything right. Kinda nice when you think about it. That gave me an edge that I have never regretted. My 3.5 years of college in the US (and I say this in a good way) were the most relaxing in my life, even with a physics major and I ended up learning a LOT of other stuff as well (I love liberal arts schools :D).

To give you an idea of what the system was:

Starting with the 3rd grade, the entire school (10 classes per grade level with about 50 students each = A CR**load of students :P), was put into the running. Classes were named from A through J and your initial class was determined by a criterion that no one seemed to know :P. However, after that, it was all merit-based. Your class (A - J) in the next grade was determined by how well you did in the current grade (exams, etc.) Upward mobility was the key and with it came the chance to be with the smart kids and learn from them. Oh it was farking beautiful :D. And it didn't really hurt anyone either - if you wanted to be a fuckup, you had full freedom to do so, without bothering the sincere kids and as a bonus you got to hang out with other fuckups like yourself :D. Win-win! Everyone's happy.

Of course, it couldn't last. The parents whose kids were in the loser classes saw this as a social stigma (albeit well-deserved). I heard that they discontinued this practice a few years ago so my hometown in India should be reaching full mediocrity right about now :P.

Re:To flesh that out some

[iamhassi]

"exceptional people will be bored no matter what you put in front of them."

Not to boast any but I was in grade school in the 80s and I would finish classroom assignments much faster than all of my peers. After helping all the students immediately around me understand and complete their assignments I would get out of my seat and help other students.

Teachers labeled me hyperactive and moved my seat into the corner and used tape to create a box around my seat, telling me I'd be punished if I left the box. Later I was put on Ritalin, which was brand new in the 80s. That helped, but I wish instead of medicating me I would have been allowed see how far I could have gone.

Re:To flesh that out some

[adamruck]

What most people don't understand is that all of the following are true:

a) Crappy brain + gifted drive = mediocre career
b) Mediocre brain + mediocre drive = mediocre career
c) Gifted brain + crappy drive = mediocre career

Being "gifted" doesn't mean shit without a lot of other good attributes. Even if you have a gifted brains AND drive, if you have really crappy anger management, your still screwed. Schooling is only 1 part of a much much much larger equation.

I would suggest visiting this page to see what some famous people have said about the subject.

http://creatingminds.org/quotes/effort.htm

Re:of course

[hxnwix]

My jHS and HS provided three tracks: one for the unmotivated, one for those either naturally attentive & quick or studious and one for everybody else.

It worked well when teachers made sensible placement recommendations; keeping students with similar motivations and interests together serves the same function as university selectivity. In those cases where teachers irrationally recommended toward lower tiers, slighted students who wished to migrate (back) to a higher tier in a subject enrolled in summer school. Occasionally, some teachers recommended that a student take a remedial summer class, automatically preventing advancement.

In my case, for example, a certain teacher recommended that I take remedial algebra the summer before entering highschool. The school sent an enrollment form to my parents' house, which I intercepted and destroyed, enabling me to request another enrollment form - this one blank. I submitted it, enrolling myself in summer honors geometry, placing myself one year ahead of the curve, one tier up :-) I'm immensely glad that I did - it meant that I had already taken calculus BC when it came time to take AP physics, and it also enabled me to take calc IV off campus.

Neither my early education in manipulating bureaucracy nor my immersion in physics-as-Newton-intended-it would have been possible in the standard egalitarian gulag. I don't foresee sending my children to a public school; the opportunities and the quality of education are simply gone. Fortunately, they were strong enough in my day that I can afford to send my offspring to private school. TBQH, that's probably the goal of NCLB: to privatize quality elementary education, thereby further stratifying society and protecting the ignorance of the conservative voting block, who will, in bigotry and fear, will continue to vote consistently against their own interests.

Re:of course

[Bluesman]

Or he had a 2.5 average due to boredom and frustration, and moving him to the advanced class gave him the motivation to get the A.

This isn't unheard of. In 1st grade I was considered "slow" and was at the bottom of my class. The teacher assumed I was stupid. I was bored and daydreamed constantly instead of doing the color, cut and paste dittos, which were assinine.

After maxing out a standardized IQ test (a fact that the school tried to hide from my parents) my parents thankfully realized what the problem was and sent me to a private school, where I excelled.

I'm so thankful that I went to grade school twenty years ago, instead of today. Today I would have been diagnosed with ADHD, put on drugs, and gone through life labelled a dunce.

Public schools really get my dander up, because this sort of thing is so common. There is so much blame to go around, and all of it is well-deserved. Bad teachers who don't give a crap, teachers unions, stupid politics, PTO moms who bulldoze the schoolboard into making ridiculously bad decisions...I could go on and on. There is hardly a punishment great enough for people responsible for ruining promising childrens' lives.

Home schooling used to seem like such a wacky idea, but my wife and I are seriously considering it instead of dealing with all this crap. That my tax money still goes to supporting a hopelessly broken system that does almost more harm than good pisses me off to no end.

Re:To flesh that out some

[ShieldW0lf]

Snobbish, but true.

Exceptional people don't need to be spoon fed, they find repetition boring, and they find the necessity to waste their days proving to their intellectual inferiors that they can complete rudimentary tasks.

Hell, I knew how to read, print, add and subtract when I was 4 years old. You think there was a day of my life that I found school challenging? I used to finish all my classwork and all my homework homework and two paperback novels a day before school finished for the day, and I was still spending lots of time staring vacantly out the window.

I have no regard for the education system. All it ever did, throughout my life, was hold me back, slow me down, and force me to be surrounded by violent stupid monkeys.

Re:To flesh that out some

[zacronos]

From "The Dispossessed", by Ursula LeGuin:

They were superbly trained these students. Their minds were fine, keen, ready. When they weren't working, they rested. They were not blunted and distracted by a dozen other obligations. They never fell asleep in class because they were tired from having worked on rotational duty the day before. Their society maintained them in complete freedom from want, distractions, and cares.

What they were free to do, however, was another question. It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative.

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing.

"Well, of course," Shevek said, troubled. "If you do not want to do the work, you should not do it."

It's a very interesting fiction book which explores several "what if we did things *that* way instead?" ideas with regard to society; education is one of those touched on. I highly recommend it. From your comments, you in particular may find some ideas that resonate with you.

Re:To flesh that out some

[Brad Eleven]

Hear, hear. The analogy about drinking resonates. The bored student just stirs the water with the straw--the thirst for knowledge makes you want to pick up the bucket and chug. There's an ocean of difference between the student who just wants to please the teacher and the one who transcends the concept of the student/teacher relationship in favor of satisfying profound curiosity about the subject. Recall that Newton didn't even need a teacher; he was happy to sit in his room and poke himself in the eye with a blunt knitting needle to better understand how the human eye perceives and processes light.

It wasn't until I realized that I wanted to understand computers--after trying theater, music, flipping burgers, working in a warehouse, transcribing Russian, teaching mentally retarded adults--that I really got motivated. I had developed this irrational fear of math, and when I realized that the curriculum for CS was a based on a math major, I hesitated for about 45 seconds. Then I just gritted my teeth and drove to the university and got started. Two months later I was in my first programming course, fifteen months after that I was interning as a sysadmin, eight more months and I had a UNIX system to myself with an assignment that required me to learn C in order to use a database API to "mechanize" purchasing for a regional phone company. Between internships, I'd ask my professors for more and they'd work with me to develop independent studies. During my final semester, the campus recruiters were peeing their pants because I already had a resume. Twenty years later, it's still all about digging in to figure out what's in it for me. Work has only been boring when I've forgotten this and found myself fulfilling someone else's ambition. Many times, it's been these very forums that remind me of this. Past the frosty piss and trolls, some of you have reawakened the curiosity because it's obvious that you know more than I do.

It's not--it can't be about being led the whole way. At some point, you have to realize--as in make real for yourself--that you want something bad enough to stay focused, to stay interested. My favorite professor used to present new programming concepts and then say, "Now go and convince yourself that this works."

This is not unlike the difference between playing around with, say, Perl, and having the language be the vehicle to get something that you want. I couldn't ever get math for math's sake, but when I saw it as the way to get and keep accounts on the computers at school, I saw the teachers in a different light.

And, of course, they weren't public school teachers, which is the matter at hand. Also, they could tell that I was after something. There's a noticeable difference to any teacher in the student who is engaged, who asks questions that indicate that he or she is committed to going beyond the subject matter of the course.

It also helped that I was paying my own way that time around. Your mileage may vary.

It's an entirely different experience when you're somehow in it for yourself. Up until my second time in college, I'd just been filling squares, trying to do what someone else told me. I thought there was something wrong with me because I knew I was intelligent, but I couldn't seem to get anything done. Straight A's with no plan is not going to bring anyone happiness. I didn't grok grammar by passing English in elementary school. I got it in Discrete Math. That unlocked what had been only rote memorization.

Then again, I did meet the guys who formed the Butthole Surfers while pretending to study Drama, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. Sometimes the value of an experience isn't apparent without the benefit of hindsight. Come to think of it, none of it was a waste. Even the sloppy attempts at "enriched" and "advanced" courses in middle school were valuable exposure to the subject matter. I developed the distinctions after I got myself aligned with what I wanted.

Re:Do you also own a cat with a diamond collar?

[Inverted Intellect]

For anyone with an IQ above 130, public school is an undeniable waste of time. I have to disagree with you on that. For me it was not a waste of time. It was actively harmful. I got extremely good grades about the first six years of elementary, degrading after that, going into mediocrity and failure later on. You see, I never learned discipline because I wasn't given assignments that challenged me early on. This is also due to a lack of drive on my part, but the school system is also to blame as they never thought I might need a different kind of help. When I started getting mediocre grades, I was described as a "bright, promising student who needs to live up to his potential." I kept completing the occasional assignment which I happened to have an interest in in a competent manner, prompting more of that kind of comment. I've largely failed to live up to this supposed potential.

Re:Do you also own a cat with a diamond collar?

[Brickwall]

I have to echo your comments, and would like to add some perspective of my own. I too was a gifted child, who could read before I started kindergarten. I remember getting our first "Dick and Jane" type reader in Grade 1 (that would be in 1961; yes, I'm a geezer). The first page was a picture of a young boy with the single word "Sandy" underneath. (IIRC, the entire book introduced some 50+ words.) The teacher took five minutes to go over that page, during which time I read the entire book. When she asked me what I thought of Sandy, I babbled on for thirty seconds about the boy, his sister, his dog, his teacher, etc. The teacher hauled me out of my seat, pulled me onto her lap, and gave me a few smacks on the ass - not at all painful, just a little humiliating. "That'll teach you to read ahead!" she said. In fact, it didn't, but it did teach me that school was not all concerned that I progress as quickly as possible.

In Grade 3, I was skipped (they compressed 3 and 4 into one year for the five of us - four girls and me). The next year, I started Grade 5 - in a class with my older sister which continued until Grade 9, an affront for which she has never entirely forgiven me. I was also a year younger than all the other boys in the class, which meant that I was always the smallest and lightest kid in the class; since the iron code of the schoolyard prevented me from playing games with my age peers in Grade 4, I was always chosen in the last few for sports and games. Doubtless, this contributed to my smart mouth and my rep as "class rebel".

All this was endured within the public school system. In Grade 10, I was admitted to a boys' school in Toronto, modeled on the English schools such as Eton. No phony egalitarianism there! There were two types of classes (or "forms" as they were known) - A-forms, and B-forms. The A-forms were considered the brighter students, and we took seven academic subjects. The B-forms were the lesser lights, and they took 6 classes and a mandatory study hall. In addition, on every report card (of which there were five a year), my ranking in the class ("2 out of 22") was duly noted. Unlike Orwell, I mostly enjoyed my years there; I was still bored from time to time, but many of my classmates had also been skipped, and so I was generally surrounded by bright kids. It also helped that the school teams were Under-15's, Under-16's, etc., so my competition for sports teams was against kids my own age, which helped soothe some of the inferiority I had experienced in public school. (It's no fun always being the shrimp!)

Now I have two daughters, 10 and 13, who have both been accepted into the PACE program at our local school. (PACE is the "Program for Academic and Creative Extension") Now, instead of skipping kids, they are brought together with other bright kids of their own age, where they explore subjects in greater depth than the standard classes. Frankly, I think this works better than skipping them. While both girls admit they are bored from time to time, they also work on more projects and have developed a greater understanding of the material than the standard stream allows. And neither of them have suffered from the social problems that I felt; both have lots of friends and seem well integrated into their classes.

From my perspective, I think the girls' school is doing a good job of challenging them academically without short-changing them socially. As I noted, they are bored at times, but I think all good students will experience those moments; I'm sure there are times their classmates wish my girls were picking something up a little faster.

Of course, this is just one school board, and I don't know what's going on in other boards in Ontario, let alone in Canada. I won't even try to comment on any other country's system.

Re:To flesh that out some

[Toddlerbob]

Success isn't about intelligence: it's also about discipline, energy, drive, and attitude. A surplus of the last four can even mitigate against weaknesses in brain power.

I've spent the last twenty years teaching a "gifted" section in an Elementary school. Your comment (and also the rest of it, which I have not quoted) express exactly my point of view on the subject. When kids entered my class, they ceased to be the elite within their former classes, and instead became just another kid in the class, and, often for the first time, had to develop some discipline and drive.

Although I do have some egalitarian-inspired sympathy with the folks who want all students heterogeneously thrown into the same class (except they somehow still don't want the special ed kids and the out-of-control kids, of course), my experience is that "gifted" kids cannot be properly challenged in such a setting, if only because much of the challenge in a class comes, not from the teacher, but from the other young minds in the community.

Also, most teachers I know spend most of their time helping the kids on the bottom of the class. The idea of a teacher who only favors bright students with his attentions is, as far as I've seen, a myth. In thirty years of teaching I have yet to meet one. Of course, your mileage may vary, since I've only one lifetime of observations. This tendency of teachers to reach the bottom students at the expense of the top ones was true long before the No Child Left Behind Act, with it's disaggregation of students' test results, increased the pressure to focus on the bottom of the class. It's bound up with the reasons why most teachers become teachers in the first place.