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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."
It's all about finance really. If you pay more teachers to teach smaller classes, most of these issues go away. The other thing is that children with learning disabilities get taught by themselves or in small groups because they are a special case. I would say the same should be available to gifted children.
Interestingly, these sort of braindead policies never seem to apply to sports in schools. The focus is definitely on pushing and supporting the most athletic and physically skilled students, while those who are not good at sports are left to flail around and just do time. This makes a lot of sense, since not everyone /needs/ to be a hot football or tennis player.. but for some reason society feels that "everyone" has to be of average intelligence, which is just wrong (and totally impossible statistically).
Not the same AC so I can only reply on the first question:
I was both, that is having an easy time in school and often being in fights (both starting and defending). I totally agree that violence is not something that should be in schools, but I don't think for a second that separating the "stupid" kids from the "bright" kids helps.
Also, really smart people often have a really hard time in school and kids with good/great marks != geniuses.
I think a bigger problem (and with a less obvious solution) is how to spot the bright people, and keep them motivated and interested during schools. I mean, high school teachers aren't members of that group of people and tend to see creative solutions as failure rather than brilliance.
Yeah, I think lots of people have been saying this for years. It's completely obvious, but unfortunately some people won't listen to even the most obvious things until you can say, "a study proved it." And of course, you never hear about any studies that prove obvious but politically-incorrect ideas.
Anyway, yes, of course, kids don't simply raise themselves. Smart kids, dumb kids, it doesn't matter, they need people to pay attention to them, teach them, tell them what to do, be given examples of what to be, etc. Attention is a limited resource, and the more attention to pay to some kids, the less you pay to others. So if you pay all your attention to the problem kids and the dumb kids, the well-behaved kids and the smart kids suffer.
And no, really, the smart kids don't take care of themselves. All kids need attention.
This was true when I was in school 20+ years ago. The reason this is deemed news is because it makes people with an axe to grind (i.e. people who are against NCLB) all warm and angry inside.
It's completely obvious, but unfortunately some people won't listen to even the most obvious things until you can say, "a study proved it."
I don't think this is quite true -- if it were, there wouldn't be so many morons rubbing organic garlic on their feet to try to get rid of their headaches. "Obvious" is subjective, and can often be misleading. If there were more people that evaluated studies before making a decision, the world would be a much better place (and, no, we wouldn't have the "No Child Left Behind" act.Define "working hard". Then please illustrate why it should be the highest standard.
Especially since you bring up "genetic lottery". If succeeding for certain people in certain endeavors is effortless, does that make their successes any less valuable?
And how about the ancillary benefits to talented individual's achievements:
If Salk didn't find it difficult to find a polio vaccine would that diminish its utility?
If Homer just sat down and bashed out the Illiad in a weekend does that lessen it value?
While I personally laud "hard work", this idea of elevating effort over value smacks of the Protestant Work Ethic run amok.
This is common, but from a kid's perspective, most would rather be sitting quietly or reading a book than doing more *work* than everyone else has to do.
:-)
My son is in 6th grade and has been at the top of his class since he joined school. He finished the No Child Left Behind mastery tests usually in 20 minutes or less even when the test was supposed to take between 60 and 90 minutes. Even given that, he scored in the 97th - 99th percentile for scores for the last three years (4th, 5th, 6th grade). He gets his smarts from his mother, but gets his motivation, or lack of it, from me.
I say all this because my experience with him and some of his classmates is exactly as described. In fact, we worry that the smart kids are rushing to get done just so they can get to the free time or reading time that much earlier. It almost becomes a race. If it wasn't for the fact that my son's scores are high, we'd have done somethign about it. The thing is, he was asked to be in an academically gifted program and he hated it, not because it wasn't interesting, but because it was more work!
I can see your point, but until we return to a policy of creating "smart kid" classes and "not-so-smart kid" classes, instead of the enforced homogeneous classes we have nowadays, it is unlikely that teachers will be able to cope with students that move at such different speeds. They try all kinds of strategies, like pairing the smart kids together into challenging reading groups, or assigning targeted homework, but 80% of the day is done together with everyone.
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Damn if I type this a thousand times.
Compare any big city school system, take the total dollars spent and divide it by the number of students. For some reason many consider that unfair and want to reduce the dollars used. Do the same for some county schools. If its anything like where I live the city is nearly 3x the cost per student and the grades are worse.
Why?
Admin and feel good people. In other words not hiring teachers but hiring more cronies of friends of politicians, family members, and feed good skill sets that have no bearing on real education. Some places have more grief counselors than nurses! Look at their class sizes compared to the county schools. If they are higher in the city and they are spending more money per student then start asking questions. Considering the disrepair some city schools are in its hard to believe it gets eaten up by building maintenance.
Then we hit the fairness wall. Its not fair to give the better achieving students more, let alone let them be separate from those who cannot or WILL NOT learn. Throw in lots of zero tolerance rules about scissors, aspirin, and the like, and money is diverted to troubled schools who have more students than ever before. In some systems its not fair to celebrate the high achievers! It also isn't fair to test some students now because of race. Apparently race makes people incapable of being tested, I never knew math could form allegiances.
NCLB isn't the problem. The problem is school systems who game the system. They divert money and attention from where it should be.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I agree. If we continue on with the cake analogy, we have to change it a little bit. Let's assume we have a cake eating contest, and that the goal is to eat the entire cake as fast as possible. It would make sense to give the largest pieces to those who can eat the most cake. For those that don't want to eat as much cake, they can still help out by eating a little. But they shouldn't be given the biggest helping, because it won't help you win the competition. Assuming cake eating is the goal, you shouldn't lower the standards for everyone to make the non-cake eaters feel like they are doing a better job. I'm not so sure I'm ok with the way things are going with kids. We have to treat all the kids like they are the best at everything. When that simply isn't true. When I was a kid, and I played baseball, I always played the field, and was always near the end of the batting lineup. What I learned from that, was that I just wasn't a good baseball player. And I'm ok with that. I was always encouraged to practice, and I wasn't put down. But there was no way I was going to get a chance to play pitcher or shortstop. You see these people on American idle that sing like a cat in heat trapped under a truck, and they think they can sing. That's because everybody has hid the truth from them. That they really can't sing, but people are too afraid to hurt their self esteem.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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Actually, it's the smart kids that DON'T come from well-off homes with attentive parents that suffer more from lack of attention from the teacher. The well-off kids will get the attention from their parents, and possibly from private tutors, or maybe even private schools. The smart kids who's parents are struggling just to get by, on the other hand, are VERY much in need of the teacher's attention. They are the ones who suffer the most from the "give all the time-attention-resources to the slower kids" policies.
Now, if a scientific study has been made and has conclusive results (which happens less often than we'd like to think), you should initially have reason to believe it. But stopping there is just intellectually lazy (or ignorant). You should look into the context of the "study". Find out who "they" are (and more to the point, who's funding them). Find out how strong the correlation was (you've studied statistics haven't you?). Find out if there is a consensus in the scientific community about this "study". Find out if there are any conflicting studies. Etc.
I'm not saying you need to detailed analysis on every study you come across. All it takes is a few minutes of searching to gain a better understanding of the context that surrounds a "study" (assuming the referenced "study" even occurred in the first place). Doing this, you can avoid many of the conspiracies or frauds out there that prey on the intellectually lazy.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.