Slashdot Mirror
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."
Story of my school's life. I don't know what kicked it off, but in 1999 a group of parents got together to stop the awarding of best-in-school awards to the top students, because it had the effect (they claimed) of causing all the other students to feel they weren't as good at school. The idea being that three students would end up awarded for excelling, and seventy others in the same year would be indirectly labeled as inferior.
Within two years we had academic success awards removed, and all kinds of other awards, including ones for one total misfit who'd been caught multiple times shitting on the bleachers. He got an award for exemplary social behaviour or some such, because he went a couple months without taking a crap on school property.
Now the smart kids go without awards, but the dumb shits get an award for not smearing their own feces all over the place. Mediocrity ftw.
I think it is more important to make sure the whole population is well educated and informed than distilling every year's Nobel prize winners while leaving the masses in ignorance. The "success" of the current president is a terrible reminder of that lesson.
As a teacher in a results factory, can I just say: No Shit!
I work in the UK education system, which is governed by targets and league tables.
The focus from management is on the "borderline" kids, those who might just fail (below a C). There are lists put out, constant checks on their progress and their photos on a wall in the staff room.
Our Gifted and Talented program consists of going to the local university to "raise aspirations" once a year.
This is what happens when you govern by setting targets without any thought over the actual outcome. Train your teachers then trust them to do the job that they love.
Smaller classes are the obvious way to vastly improve things and lessen a host of problems. However, it's unpopular cause of having to employ more teachers, have more classrooms, etc.
Here in Ireland the govt. promised to reduce class sizes, and then... didn't do it. They later rewrote it as an "aspiration" and really, not even that.
Surprisingly enough, an environment of 35 kids average to a class is not proving sensible for discipline, teacher's sanity (and wage demands), accommodating immigrant children (poor English needs attention), accommodating slower learners, accommodating faster learners, or even allowing the entire syllabus to be taught at all (impracticality of various activities when kids are crammed wall-to-wall into classes).
Ireland is a great place to work and make money, but it's a disaster socially. It's like even more the "American Way" than America is. Come to Ireland for the American Dream. Except here you get to be clinically insane running SUVs for school runs what with European petrol prices. Even our beautiful countryside is really just regarded as one giant golf green.
In norway we've practiced "no child left behind" in the lower grade schools for the last 20 years (up til high school). I've never read any official studies about it but I can confirm that teachers are indeed spending a lot of their time getting the "slower" students through the curriculum.
It's interesting to read that the lack of attention indeed slows down the high achievers as well. I would be interesting to know how much attention they would require to achieve what they are good for. Optimally you leave no one behind and you make your bright minds excel!
Let us feed the high achievers with the tender meat from those hopeless dull kids. The good ones will grow both stronger and smarter without their annoyance
Dawkins Revisited: A person is shit's way of making more shit -- Steve Barnett, anthropologist.
This isn't a new problem. (I went to school in Texas, which has had standardized testing since long before Bush took office as either governor or president.) NCLB just made it worse.
I agree, however, that it is blatantly obvious that a system where your "success" as a school is determined by the percentage of students who pass leads itself to focusing disproportionate amounts of resources on the students who are most likely to fail.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
When I started high school I was the dux of the grade (split up across 5 classes). It was a boys school, and academic performance was looked down upon, so I was roughed up a fair bit, and was actually trying NOT to do well, but like it or not I still came dux.
The next year the Year Advisor thought it might be fun to take the worst performing kid from the bottom class and put him in the top class.
Guess who he targetted for a fight every day? That's right, the best performing kid in the top class - me.
So one day he gives me a good going over on the station after school.
Finally my parents woke up and sent me to a different school.
Needless to say I don't believe in mixing the stupid and lazy with the bright and talented. Physical assault is just not on, even between kids.
How so? I read only the executive summaries, but they seem to say that children with low grade made bigger gain than children with top grades.
It seems normal that starting from a low grade it is easy to move up; and that starting from already high grade takes a lot of effort to move even higher.
Never does the executive summary say top graders performed worse.
I was the kid who liked to read and pursue other intellectual activities in school, and I got the shit kicked out of me on a regular basis.
;)
Taught me to harden the fuck up, and look after myself, which has served me well in my adult life.
Kids today...Coddled too much if you ask me.
Young whippersnappers, get off my lawn
Most highschools have AP classes for their brighter kids to help them get a leg up in university and hopefully get a few credits. As shitty as my school was with most things they did do one brilliant move that helped make up for a lot.
Dual enrollment. My highschool allowed us to take classes at the local community college that would count for highschool while simultaneously they would count as college classes. Since we had such a small school we actually managed to get the professors to come out to our school and teach a few of the classes so we wouldn't have to rearrange our class schedule or even drive over to the community college.
This obviously is only a feasible for junior/senior years but it's programs like this that I think can really help to allow the high achievers to challenge themselves and prepare for university in a meaningful way.
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
this is why, as a teacher, I only focus on the top students in the class.
I'm sorry, but if you aren't going to try your best, then I would be a fool to waste my time trying to reach you. bugger off. Go and fail in life.
I'm a teacher, I'm in charge of teaching. The 'learning' part is your job.
If you are making an effort, I will do everything I can to help and support you. But you still suck after getting extra help, I'm not going to sugar coat things or give you an 'A for effort'. Some kids are just dim. parents need to learn to deal with it.
I'm sorry for sounding so grumpy and uncaring in this post. It's been a long 2 weeks of solid speaking/listening tests, and I just failed 75% of my 1154 students, because they can speak absolutely zero English, even after 7 years of Education.
Then I was told to make my questions easier, because if a student gets less than 40 points, they have to repeat the year, and the school administration doesn't want to deal with that, so we prevent them from failing by lowering standards.
Then I learned that my "zero" I was giving my students is actually being entered in the books as a 15 out of 20.
that's right...if you absolutely nothing, if you are complete failure as a students, who has learned nothing after seven freaken years of school, you STILL get 75% on your test. pathetic.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. - Hanlon's Razor to the rescue.
Also, feeling that you could have been a Kwisatz Haderach were it not for stupifying schools is probably true. After all, we are physically indistinguishable from our ancestors 3000 years ago, but any engineer or doctor of today would seem to be a genius by classical Greek standards.
Nobody knows how 'best practices' education will look like in a few hundred years, or what miracles will be considered commonplace for teachers to teach. The government is only to blame for not implementing 'best practices' today, and listening to voters that seem to think that education is not a top priority. But blaming it for evil scheming to produce drones is giving them way too much credit. Hanlon's razor is correct here.
I teach English in Japan and this is a problem that I see every day. I have students in their third year of studying English who cannot speak or write a basic a basic declarative sentence such as "I am a student" as well as students in their first year who study outside of school and have much higher ability than that.
The lessons are purposely designed to be slow, supposedly so that students are able to follow along without difficulty, but what this really turns out to be is the good students being bored out of their minds and, thus, unable to focus and having their English studies fall behind, and the poor students still not doing a thing to improve themselves. And by their third year, why should they? It is virtually impossible for them to catch up in school and so unless they go through a lot of effort outside of school, which is made quite difficult by their 7-6, and sometimes weekends, schedules.
An obvious solution is to separate the students into higher ability students, in which I can teach them more difficult material, and lower ability students, to whom I could review the differences between the words "I", "me", and "my". But this goes totally against the Japanese "everyone must be carbon copies" principle and so will never, ever be implemented. (Maybe not never, but it would literally take an educational revolution.)
As I see it, not only do the good students suffer, but the poor students do not gain anything because even if I slow down to a turtle's pace, they still cannot catch up because I'm halfway through the marathon and they're passing the 1st mile marker, so to speak.
When I was in highschool I was in the top percentile of the school. The some of the smartest kids were just as bad as the dumbest kids. Instead of resorting to physical violence they went on verbal diatribes and basically were just being douches. My school was an inner city school with a nationally recognized magnet program (to boost the grades). I grew up with these guys and they weren't necessarily bullies but they could smell fresh blood in the water. If you were meek you were an easy target. A lot of them have been told they were dumb or remedial their entire life and some douchebag that likes to remind them by insulting their intelligence only drives the knife deeper. My friends came from all walks of life and I respected their opinions and helped them when I could (homework, food, money). Because of the company I kept no one tried to fight me because I was smart and had good grades. I never resorted to calling anyone stupid. And you learn there is a lot of different smart. Some were great musicians and composers, rappers, poets, and negotiators. I've had to intervene on a few occasions where a friend in the smart class just didn't have the "street smarts" to avoid a bad situation. I do believe the No Child Left Behind Act is doing a great disservice to everyone. It strips the schools of their ability to educate and reduces them to diploma mills. I was their when the last woodshop class came to an end. There were no plans made to replace it with any options. Just get the kids to take and pass the test.
I'll put it out there, I'm an advanced learner, and here's what I've seen through my old learning "career". It was an excellent program at first, but over the years things really dropped off.
In the second grade, while attending John J Blair Elementary in Wilmington, NC, I was tested in the top percentile of the school. This allowed me to go every Tuesday on a bus to a special learning center downtown where we were taught logic puzzles (you find a dead body hanging from ceiling, pool of water under him, how did he die?) how to work with C64 computers and how to perform basic coding. That was 1987, and I was 8.
Then, a school restructuring took place in the districts. I was moved to Blunt Elementary, half an hour farther away. This was a very poor school, but due to the increase of advanced students coming in, they hired an A.G. (Academically Gifted) teacher. We met twice a week for a few hours to work on basic Latin, mind puzzles, logic, etc. I was in that program from 3rd to 5th grade.
I then moved to Leland Middle School, in Leland, NC. Things were dropped another notch. There was a similar A.G. structure there, but just for math and English. For Math, we basically met privately with the Math teacher of the next grade up and learned their topics. For English, we had a dedicated instructor that taught us in a outside structure next to the special-needs room. There we learned writing skills, more advanced Latin (and how to use it to break apart words and sentences). Budget cuts came along, so much so that the school implemented half days every other week. Instead of having a dedicated Math and English teacher, we simply attended the classes of the next grade up with those students. In 8th grade more budget cuts came. With no where to send us, they had us just sit through normal Math and English courses with the rest of our grade... relearning information we already knew. The administration was defensive and noted that it would help us build our skills by helping the others in the course - pure BS. We sat, bored, for the whole year.
Family issues arose, and I attended high school in Woodstown, NJ. There was no program in place here; it was a farming community. They had their 4-H, and that was it. There was no support for those who broke apart from the norm. As such, as a teenager, I rebelled and made life Hell for those around me. I was stuck, bored, relearning material I was taught years earlier. After three years of fighting, my parents and I convinced the administration to let me attend college courses at night. From what I hear, it's now an official part of their system for the advanced students.
Over the years I've seen how budget cuts and overall lack of caring has changed curriculum and delivery styles through the school systems. At the end, as the "smart" students, the administration felt that we were best left to our devices while they focused on getting everyone else up to par. Even worse was when they forced us to help them teach the other students, sometimes forcing us into mentorship programs, and buddy systems where we would have to call our buddies each night to ensure they did their homework correctly.
Luckily, I grew up to be a teacher... but not for schools. I develop and teach computer forensic techniques. But, I remembered my lessons from growing up. Every exercise I teach is built with multiple difficulty structures, and there are layers of hidden material that I push the advanced students to find. Having one single system to train all students will not work, as the teachers will just focus their attention on the students falling behind. There is a whole generation of very smart and advanced children, many of whom do not have the support they need at home (I was lucky to have a father that bought me QuickC for my 11th birthday). These kids will grow up bored and frustrated. They will lash out and adults will assume it just to be because of angst or the need for Ritalin, when the kid just wants to learn.
In an age of "political correctness" and avoiding lawsuits the only thing a Government can accept is a "study".
Any time you divide people up (e.g. male/female, white/black, young/old, bright/slow) offence will be taken. So statistics must be used to back up any conclusions.
Where a conclusive statistical study does not exist a Government is forced to treat everyone as equals. Thus a study is required if segregating people based on academic performance is the best thing for the people.
It's just the same with the poor ...
... ~10% of people are poor.
You know who exactly are poor, right ? It's the 10% lowest earners.
And in a total surprise, everybody is totally shocked and utterly amazed
Now think : if everybody made 10x the wage of donald trump, had a planet to him/herself and an army of robot servants to comply with his/her every whim, would obviously still be 10% "poor" people.
Socialists started doing this since even the poorest people alive (in America) in 2007 have better lives, more money, more options, more entertainment than even the president had in 1940. Just about everything except the size of the appartment compares favorably.
But when people start equalizing society, I always think of the blind. Some people, you see are blind. Now this is clearly a disadvantage. And with some the problems are so severe that they cannot ever be fixed (e.g. myelin problems on the optic nerve, there won't be a treatment for at least 200 years for that one), so how do you create equality ?
There is only one option : stick everybody's eyes out. That'd be equal.
Long live equality, right ? The only equality on this world is equal misery.
Instead, if we can somehow munster the necessary intelligence anywhere near congress, let's just STRICTLY limit ourselves to equality before law, nothing more (and this means starting by throwing out any and all "positive discrimination" practices).
I was in a similar situation (didn't have to study to do well in high school) except we didn't have an AP program. I grew up in a red-neck town not unlike South Park where the school rewarded our losing athletic teams and wouldn't give a dime to our prize-winning band. We (the band) had to raise our own money (for instruments, etc.) and get community members to teach pro bono jazz classes before school (which started at 7AM for some reason). The result was that I simply stopped going to most of my classes. I managed to graduate by abusing the school charter and challenging the classes I had failed for a "P" instead of a real grade... Only after my mother threw a fit and had me retroactively un-suspended because one of the school officials called her a bad parent.
Our truancy officer referred to the collective group of intelligent, bored-out-of-our-minds, drug-using slackers as "eggheads" and regularly berated us for not being more like "his athletes" (he also coached our losing wrestling team). Another of his ilk had the bright idea to pair me (the egghead) up with the dumbest misfit in the class (common practice for some reason). When he was arrested and couldn't complete our group project I was taught "a lesson about shared responsibility" by having to do the whole project myself. He spelled Columbia "Clumbia". He was also expelled after being sent to juvie (jail for kids) and I was again taught "a lesson about shared responsibility" by having to finish the semester with no partner for the group activities.
Most of that being small town antics I still can't believe that the state (or even federal) government never stepped in to set some sort of guidelines to catch the part of the bell curve that were neither over-achievers nor mentally challenged, but were bored out of our skulls (e.g., I finished the entire science curriculum my sophomore year).
So what became of me? I went to my state college and discovered a world where one could be truly academically independent--the smart kids could take challenging classes, the over-achievers could join clubs and be pre-med, and we had all kinds of top-notch sports teams.
I wound up with a PhD, but what of my fellow lazy nerds from high school? Unfortunately most of them lacked family support and wound up getting jobs instead of graduating. They are still working at those jobs and despite being happy and as smart as ever (and having found a great community of disaffected intellectuals) their minds could be advancing civilization instead of playing WoW.
In the end the meat grinder of mediocrity took the average kids and the above average kids and the below average kids and floated them into comfortable lives. It also took the mentally disabled kids and the mentally gifted kids (the top and bottom 1%) and shoe-horned them into minimum wage jobs. We always blamed the travesty of our educational experiences on Reagan's purging of free thought from public schools (by claiming everything had a liberal bias), but I can't even imagine what is happening with No Child Left Behind.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Um,no. This is a result of "mainstreaming" and social promotion, both of which have existed long before NCLB.
I saw the same thing back in school and I graduated in 1986.
This is just more Busch bashing.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I'm not sure why Swizec's comment was modded funny - this is an accepted and understood explanation of secondary education.
He has merely paraphrased the creators of the compulsory secondary education system (as shall I):
"We need not thinkers, writers or men of science - we need only for the children to do perfectly what their parents do imperfectly."
While not an exact quote, this is the mission statement for all secondary education systems across the world - yet as the system gets more gentrified, few will admit it as readily as it was admitted at the beginning of the 20th century.
The model, and impetus, for such a system was the emergence of factories / sweatshops - the secondary education system was designed to provide grist for those mills and that is all.
This is why these schools are having such problems today, yet students taught by competing methods (Montessori, et al) consistently outperform traditional secondary schooling - the standard secondary education system is still unable to adapt past its rote-learning, just-enough-information, style of teaching - which is phenomenally unsuccessful in a modern world where everyone needs to have a broad range of knowledge and skills to be useful.
The best thing anyone can do in a system like that is ignore it and work to teach yourself.
I'm not saying that many people actually evaluate studies. I'm saying they literally just need to hear the magic words "studies prove". It may be that there are people rubbing garlic on their feet to get rid of headaches (hadn't heard that), but I assure you a lot more would if there were a rumor that "studies had proven" that garlic on the feet was a good headache cure. Get someone to say on TV that "studies have proven" it, and everyone will do it.
Anyway, I said *some* people won't believe obvious things until you say that "studies have proven it". You respond by providing an example where other people have believed something that's not at all obvious without having evaluated any studies. So your example obviously doesn't serve to rebut but claim.
But yeah, some things are counter-intuitive, and so you can't always trust "obvious"="true". I don't agree, though, that "obvious" is completely subjective, nor the implication that obvious things should be ignored until proven. Obvious things should, under most circumstances and for most purposes, be assumed to be true until otherwise proven.
I would explain further or try to give examples, but I think the truth of my claims are rather obvious.
I remember i was looking at being a teacher once, so I was tagging along with a teacher in class. This one test, the smart girl finished early, and told the teacher. So they teacher just told her to sit quietly and wait for the end of the lesson (which was the end of the test for everyone else). I was dumbstruck, the kid was sitting there for 20 minutes, doing nothing, when she could have been doing some work!
Why not just get rid of the whole grade system. It should be clear by now that not everyone learns the same things at the same speed.
I for example accel at math and science, but I can't spell or form a sentence worth a shit.
People are different.
My daughter is in a similar situation (she just finished 2nd grade), but we've worked with the teacher and bought a few extra grade level workbooks - 2nd and 3rd grade, covering math, writing, etc. Now when v2.0 finishes something early (which she often does), her teacher finds a few pages worth of stuff to do that is similar to what the class is working on in the book and has her do it. Occasionally instead of "more" work, v2.0 is allowed to do some extra "fun" reading as well.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
There's a lot of assumption in this thread that testing well means you actually _are_ a 'superior' member of society, and will inevitably lead to your becoming an adult who contributes more to the whole than those with lower performance levels -- and thus, of _course_ we should be focusing on those children. Aren't they the ones who will make the world better for us all? But is that really true? It leads very quickly to two questions I'd ask: First, how much of a correlation is there, in the end, between high marks in school and success in the life that begins after graduation? Is there no way you can become a success if you didn't test well? Second, what _is_ a success? If you teach a bad-tempered child who had a poor family life to become an adult who yes, holds a low-paying service job, but does it well and builds a caring, compassionate life for their famliy -- is that a success or a failure? There's no doubt that a teacher who was able to devote the necessary attention to a child in that situation can make a difference.
I actually had to deal with this a lot, I tried to be the over achiever but my anxiety got me stuck in 'Special Education', which was supposed to be divided into Emotionally Disabled, Physically Disabled, and Mentally Disabled, but a kid that was put in either one was treated crippled, stupid and crazy.
It was a 'free ride', I didn't really have to do anything to get along, but these classes always had textbooks from at least 4 'grades' below me and the teachers seldom knew anything besides reading the book and answering the questions and letting kids fool around without going too far.
This would have been just fine if it wasn't so frustrating for me to not feel like I was learning anything. No one could seem to understand why I was bringing in my own encyclopedias to read.
Even though I was supposed to get the attention of my 'IEP', or 'Individual Education Plan', it was always 'coping with other students better' and 'being on time for class'.
Trying to force me to learn social skills was a futile attempt, all I needed was my nose in a book that was actually interesting instead of carefully phrased for someone half my age.
This was all before the No Child Left Behind bit, and I don't know what it might have done for those classes, but those classes were the ones that needed the funding instead of the scrapings from the bottom of the pot.
So if what this article suggests is true, I would have been damned either way.
I think it's more the case that no child is getting the education and attention they need. It's only more obvious now that the students that give a damn about their education are getting hurt too.
What the education system needs is more educators and smaller classes and some actual regard for individual needs instead of the varsity segregation clique garbage.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
What we need to fix the education problems in America (eventually) are some big hit TV shows that glamorize the life of a teacher.
I remember reading this survey years ago wherein they asked recent law school graduates what their original inspiration to become a lawyer was. Something like 90% of them said L.A. Law. Thanks, TV producers, we didn't have enough lawyers.
A lot of people naturally gravitate towards one career or another, but I get the feeling that there are still a lot of smart people in each generation who could be successful in a lot of different fields but whom will gravitate towards whatever career is seen as exciting or prestigious. I think if we can just find a way to make teacher that profession, over time the average quality of teachers will increase and the quality of education in this country will improve. Currently, since teachers get little respect and little money, it's a career of either people who really love to teach and are willing to do it despite the downsides, or people too lazy or unqualified to make it in a more challenging field. Imagine the quality of teachers if it instead was the field of those who love it, but also of driven achievers instead of yahoos who want the summer off.
Back when I was at primary school (in the mid 70s) in the UK, this kind of stuff was rampant.
A quick note to all of you guys that say "Well, the bright guys will just teach themselves".. That doesn't work, for exactly the same reason you say the less academically apt (not necessarily less skilled; just their skills aren't academic. Live with that, as I'm less skilled in the non-academic skills than countless others, and I value them as much as they value me). Kids, being kids, haven't seen enough of the world to know what's on offer.
On the reading side, I lucked out in that my folks taught me (read LOTR by the time I was 5 1/2). All the basic Math I picked up on no problems. Then, for the next 4 years in that place, I had to keep reading the 'Peter and Jane' books in big letters. I wasn't allowed to use the time to get my own reading material in at my level. I had to sit in class with this one children's book with a reading age at least 10 years below my abilities, and dutifully trot up to the teacher to demonstrate that I could read this little book, despite many complaints from me (and my folks) that I should be allowed to read my own stuff, or at least have my own book in class. Denied.
Not quite so lucky on the Math.. My father worked late (ran his own business, so couldn't spend loads of time with me), and my mum just wasn't a math person. I learned what I could from what I was introduced to, but had problems working out what the progression was from there. And speed went at the pace of the slowest (no kid left behind). Result of that (which went on right though the years 'till age 11) was that I got private tuition to get me through all the things my school hadn't taught that were subjects on entrance exams for the good schools. I picked it up no problem, but NOBODY had ever previously told me what to look for next. I'd picked up math books myself, but, lacking the theory that was assumed, it was hard to find a book at the right level for me to learn properly.
Even the "Academically Inclined" don't teach themselves. They need to be shown, and guided. Encouraged, not held back.
From where I am now. I'm successful, and have done pretty well for myself. However, I know enough to know I'd have been able to better myself even more, if I'd been able to get more of the basics done at an earlier age, giving me a more thorough grounding to spend my later time concentrating on the more advanced topics.
And simply saying "I could have taught myself".. Well, in a lot of things, I did.. But it cost time to work out how to do it, where to find the information (pre internet, and honestly, you don't always get the right answer from google), and sometimes, you can just miss whole topics (or misunderstand something that a teacher with the right knowledge could put right in minutes).
It's not a disaster, but it's an irritation, to know I could have been better with just a little bit of time and encouragement (or even just the words "You may want to try this book in your own time", rather than the "This is what we teach, and we don't move on until the class is ready").
One size does NOT fit all. Tests are NOT the answer to everything. You CANNOT have everyone with the same academic education. People are different. Education should be about finding someone's talents, and nurturing those talents to the best of the kid's abilities.. For all that I'm pretty good academically (though yes, I do know quite a few that blow me away in that arena), without people doing the non-academic stuff really well, I'd be royally screwed in any job I did. We need all kinds of talents, and they all need to be trained and worked on.
Otherwise, China and places like that, where they do compete to try and keep up in every area (so the brightest from each set of talents gravitate upwards faster) will walk all over us in technology and science in the very near future. Have a good look at history, and you'll see the results of that course writ large.
I'm a glorified teaching assistant in Japanese schools. They call us Assistant English Teachers.
I'm watching the system here every day. About all we can learn from it is that it's just a variation of the push-everyone-down-to-the-same-level approach.
Oh. And standardized tests are way too one-dimensional.
Violence? I stopped a homosexual rape today.
As an educator, I can tell you that it's not quite this easy, but it's close. The major issue is how NCLB actually measures "success". Generally, there are four categories for a student to score in:
Below the Standard
Approaching the Standard
Meeting the Standard
Exceeding the Standard
The way the law is written, a certain number of students need to Meet or Exceed the "standard".
If you're a school with a fair number of kids "exceeding", but a lot "approaching" the standard (which is nebulous and changes from year to year and state to state) it makes far more sense to stop trying to get the kids in the top category to improve, as they can't, nor does it gain you anything. The only metric which will show that you're improving as a school is if more of the kids below the standard move up towards it. If kids above it fall, it's not a big deal, as long as they don't fall out of the "meets the standard" category.
If it was a school average, or a correlation coefficient or something like that, it would make sense to help the smart kids. But because it's a straight "% meeting or exceeding the standard", there is no benefit in pushing or even caring about the smart kids.
There is only one judge in American education today, and it's whether or not your school can leap over the moving and wispy NCLB "meets the standard" bar. It's stupid, poorly designed, and utterly worthless as a metric to determine school success. But it's simple enough that stupid people can understand how their school is doing, and thus we will use it as an excuse to prop up a pretty shoddy education system. The bright kids will continue to get put down, and the dumb kids will be given enough support that they will all poke their noses above the standard, and everyone will be happy that their school "met the standard".
And yes, I say this as a teacher.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Any teacher will tell you that school is not fair. Throughout any given day, dozens of "unfair" things are done... education is inherently unfair. Students with behavioral disorders (autism, adhd, other ebd issues) will often be given tasks that other students clamor for, just to make them feel useful and helpful. It may take their mind off a current escalating situation that may have erupted in a breakdown for them. Student discipline is even "unfair". Higher achieving students might get away with less than a student with an emotional/behavioral issues because more is expected from them.
I'll be the first to say that it would be great if education could be fair... but in practice it can't.
The problem is that Europe is dominated by liberal politics. To quote from a column by George Will:
Today conservatives tend to favor freedom, and consequently are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes. Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.
Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism's goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market's role in allocating wealth and opportunity. end quote
It even prompted a debate in Sweden under the title lagom samhaelet (the mediocrity society). Critics of this policy complained, "Where will our future leaders come from?" Sweden sent a team to climb Mount Everest. On the final day, instead of being told to give it their all, they were told orka lagom killar (make a decent try guys). They gave up just a few meters from the summit.
Paradoxically, after decades of this wrong-headed policy, Sweden seems very enterprising, very prosperous and well supplied by good leaders. I can't explain it.
The experience I had and saw was not unique as I found out later.
So the real question is not the ideal of small grouping the "gifted" students: we already do that, the question is what to do with them once they have been sequestered.
The only thing I can think of is acceleration. Get them out of that school system as fast as they can manage. We frequently hear stories about 8-10 year olds in college as some insane genius, but really they where probably just accelerated where many who should have been where not
Same situation in Canada. They teach to the lowest common denominator.
When our son was one year ahead of his peers in math, my wife and I were called to a meeting with an Educational Specialist from the school. They suggected that our son sit out math for a year to give the other children time to catch up. Our responese was "If he was a hockey star would you sit him out a season to give the other players a chance to catch up?"
We ended up going to the Minister of Education, they overruled the Educational Specialist and moved our son ahead a grade.
Sure, but the smart kid isn't there to serve. He is there to be taught. If you pair him with a slow kid with the justification that it will help motivate the slow one at the expense of the smart one, you need to start paying the smart kids.
t
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.
You try "sitting quietly" for an hour of so in an exam room. It is just so much more fun than work, especially when it's a multi-day test - oh boy, another hour of sitting quietly tomorrow! Let me tell you, I would have gladly read the phone book if it had been an option, but outside material (even if it was only for use after the test) was never allowed in these tests when I was in high school way back in the olden days of the 1990s. In fact, I did manage to pass some time after a math test once by staring at log tables, so I imagine that a phone book would have been good for at least an hour. You were lucky if you could even get a piece of paper to doodle on in these types of tests. I remember that I was only able to get through one of them because I had a few Weird Al albums memorized, and that wore thin after two or three days. As far as I'm concerned, "sitting quietly" is nothing short of psychological abuse. And yes, I am bitter; some things just can not be forgiven.
Lets not get lost in the tangents. The no child left behind act was directly responsible for the removal of ethics courses from grade and high schools. There was not enough funding for both. It should not have taken a study to realize this was a bad idea.
It could be argued that the no child left behind act is largely responsible for our corrupt, money hungry, and materialistic society today.
Now if we could only convince society that critical thinking and evaluation skills are more important than obedient children we might make real progress.
Back when I was in elementary school, we actually had a really good gifted program. You had to take two separate IQ tests with different examiners and have a "sufficiently high" IQ both times to get in. The tests were several hours long apiece, and little toy puzzles were involved amid math and vocabulary. They never told you the results, but for several hundred kids here were only a handful of students in the program--twelve I think. It was a big deal when we got someone new. They were unbelievably bright and the program excused you from some classes to read books of your choosing, got you access to independent tutors (I learned algebra in third grade), and brought you to a number of quiz-style and little engineering competitions.
Then some parents complained, and they lowered the standards so that anyone could get in if their parents called and asked.
I eventually stopped going because the program became so prohibitively overcrowded with people who never wanted to do any of the high-level activities. They wanted to sit and talk. At that point, it boasted as many people that barely qualified at an average skill level much less a gifted skill level. Bottom line is, every parent wants their kid to be the a genius. Everyone can tell you that placing a below-average student in a room with geniuses will not make this a reality. I guess the idea is that if your child receives the treatment developed for the best of the best, or becomes friends with much brighter students, maybe your child will have some extra opportunities to improve. It's a large-scale prisoner's dilemma: if the better and worse students are separate and receive the training suited to their abilities, they both do better. If just one or two of the average students were mixed with the best ones, it might benefit them immensely. However, when all of the students are aggregated together, no one receives training best suited to their skill level and everyone suffers.
That's why I don't have much hope of this situation ever being rectified. In the prisoner's dilemma, everyone ends up uniformly crappy.
~Ben
You just got troll'd!