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Helping Some Students May Harm High Achievers
palegray.net writes "According to a new study performed by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, increased emphasis on helping students with a history of lower academic achievement results in lower performance for high achievers. This trend appears to be related to the No Child Left Behind Act. Essentially, programs designed to devote a large number of resources to assisting students who are deemed to be 'significantly behind' leave little room for encouraging continued academic growth for higher-performing students."
No. It's not about finance.
It's about finding ways to challenge the studnets.
When I was in elementary and junior high, the school split us into classes based on academic results so far.
It worked very well. There was far less variation between the bottom and top of the class and the teachers could do a much better job of teaching to the class.
This is now deemed to be prejudicial and so the school no longer does this. The students are the losers across the board.
I know no one actually RTFA, but it actually says that scores have gone up for all levels of students. Scores have gone up HIGHER for lower students, but they've still gone up for higher students as well. It's just that raising the very top is much harder than raising the bottom, so there's been more progress on the latter. There is NOTHING in the article that says top students are WORSE off now than before NCLB (as asinine as the law is in other ways).
Make cheese not war 8:)
PARENTING. Your kid may be a rock or a rocket scientist, but without good parenting, they will never reach their full potential, figure out what their particular gifts are, or 'learn how to learn'. Whatever ones' opinion of No Child Left Behind and other well-intended public policies, no policy has anything close to the impact of good parenting and good teaching. The study and its implications are not relevant to the individual family - good parenting is.
In the Netherlands (which is in Europe), it's not so bad.
Note: various things I've written here don't translate well. I don't use the words for various school types the same way as others, so some names will look funny to your eyes.
There are often several primary schools to choose from. They differ in religious affiliation (the common choices are catholic, protestant, and secular), but also in method (besides "normal" schools, there are also free (as in freedom) schools and Montessori schools) and level of education. Still, they all fit in with the rest of the system, so, by the time you graduate from them, you have at least learned the same basics as others.
High school is where it really gets interesting. There are various levels of high school. The system has undergone some reforms in recent times, but, last time I looked, there were VMBO, HAVO, and VWO, in order of increasing level. So, although it is not politically correct to say this, the most intelligent kids go to VWO, the least intelligent go to VMBO. I could go on and on, but the take home message is that there is a separation there: VMBO is more practically oriented; it teaches you to work, so to speak. VWO is more academically oriented, and is the only one that grants access to university. So the VWO kids don't get bogged down by the VMBO kids who don't understand algebra, and the VMBO kids don't have to learn all the academic stuff they aren't going to need for their jobs anyway.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.