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."
Well, sorry to say it but DUH. Anybody who has ever gotten decent grades could tell you this. Not really new news.
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.
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.
No Child Left Behind is equivalent to No Child Gets Ahead.
This has always been blatantly obvious.
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.
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!
In other news, cows shit, grass grows, and pigs still in aeronautical R+D stage.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.
Siphoning away resources for "no shit sherlock" studies leaves little money for studies that would have provided some insight or solved some dispute.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Socialistic policies lead to uniform poverty. Story at 11.
I wonder if China and India similarly punish people for wanting to get ahead. Last I checked, our finest graduate programs are admitting higher and higher percentages of foreign high achievers due to a frightening lack of domestic ones. When are schools are more concerned with teaching junk science (global warming, polar bears, spotted owls), junk politics (socialism, marxism), and how to be spineless cowards, than they are with teaching math, science, history, and other factual subjects, it's not a surprise that we're falling farther and farther behind on the global scale.
As long as they don't get constantly mobbed/beaten up/terrorized by their "inferior" peers.
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).
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:)
I did terribly at sport at school. As a result I was not offered positions in any sports teams, and instead had to partake in "social sports" which were not competitive.
Did this affect me? Am I upset I wasn't treated as an equal, or giving copious amounts of extra coaching? Sure, I'd have loved to be talented at sports when I was young, but the fact was that I wasn't.
Turns out, later in life, I discovered an enjoyment for sports. I go to the gym, ride my bicycle, have a go at things.
All adults have the opportunity to work on something they didn't enjoy as kids. They can start reading history books, or re-learn some basic mathematics. That's the beauty of being an adult!
So why force kids into something they don't want at a young age? All the teachers will get is additional hostility and resistance.
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.-
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.
The worst thing about not challenging the top end of the bell curve is that those people don't get pushed enough to get good study habits and thus be able to do well in college. I barely studied for anything in high school (even taking only AP classes my senior year) and had a hard time when I did need to study while in college. The only reason I did well in high school is because I could mostly do it without studying and because I could avoid a lot of the homework and still do well (>A average). At least I got some work ethic having to deal with 5 AP exams in one year. I'm scared to think how I would have turned out if my school did not offer that many AP classes.
The major question that the US needs to answer is do we a) prioritize the high end of the bell curve to push the really smart kids or b) prioritize the low end of the bell curve to at least establish a minimum education standard. In an ideal world, the parents should be pushing their kids to at least be at the minimum and schools would not be afraid of saying "You fail". Unfortunately, in the US this is not the case and thus the question remains.
If we do want to prioritize the high end, that means really pushing kids and funneling money into college level course availability (and not community college but actual hard classes). This would, in an ideal world, make sense because the parents should be able to help get their kids to a minimum level but they shouldn't be expected to know enough about advanced topics. But, this would require hiring many teachers who are much smarter or at least more advanced than the teachers today which means that any attempt to push the boundaries will never work.
Those of us who have lived through these policies and understand how detrimental they are to the school system will be able to support change in the school system. I for one would rather my child be segregated so that he can get the attention he needs. Whether he ends up in the low end of the system or the high end. As long as both systems get the same funding then it shouldn't be a problem.
As many others have pointed out, this was very much to be expected. It requires exceptionally skilled teachers to be able to motivate a whole spectrum of students at the same time.
In a traditional classroom, communication has a star-shaped topology with the teacher in the center. The teacher is a very scarce resource, and although broadcasting is available, the broadcast can be tuned to either low-bandwidth or high-bandwidth students. If only low-bandwidth broadcasts are used, those which could go faster will get bored real quick.
There are all sorts of proposals out there to break the star-shaped topology and get students to collaborate and motivate each other; however, the teacher will still be a scarce resource, because all proposals require a level of coordination which will itself require time&effort.
Proposed solutions (all of them well-known):
- More teachers = more time-per-student
- Better teachers = greater student motivation, broader spectrum
- External support (from parents, society to teacher's efforts) = motivated students and teachers
News at eleven...Oh joy, so I get to spend my afternoons, evenings and weekends hunting down books in libraries while the washout gets it spoonfed, to end up with the same degree he does.
Is there some opt-in to be dumb?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is a classic conflict in public education. Who is the target student such that the level of difficulty can be set?
If a teacher tries to keep the slower students up to speed it always hurts the better students.
And then there is the real mode of teaching from which our concept of "High School" flows. Instead of being concerned with individuals the school decides to consider society. Therefore the trick is to teach at a level of difficulty such that a few of the brighter students, who have no difficulties, can not, after making great effort pass the courses.
What was done in Europe years ago at about the end of the sixth grade there was a sorting out. People of normal abilities were assigned to industrial arts such as cooking. Those courses were not a joke as they usually are in the US. For example a cook might receive training from seventh grade on up to about two fulls years of college and then after all the years he has already been trained be assigned as an apprentice and finally declared a chef.
More academically able students were then assigned to college type paths which were rigorous to the extreme. The one flaw in that mode is what do you do with the youngster who finds he has reached his level at the end of the "High School" when his path was academic. They ended up in the military as common soldiers or in the mines.
It could be summed up that one could almost judge the quality of the university by the number of student suicides each semester. If the kids are being pushed hard enough and they are all the A student types then the proof of the university is the number of students that crack like an egg.
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.
When sharing a cake, if you give more to the hungry students the portions for those who aren't hungry have to be smaller
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.
Makes more sense to invest a larger portion the funds in areas where it will be utilized to greater effect.
The athletic department?
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
... the intelligent kids have fewer and fewer excuses with places like MIT offering their challenging courses for FREE - http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
I'm getting tired of the "all the intelligent people are victims", what really needs to be done is to have good guidance counsellors and to know about these internet resources, many intelligent kids can get the help they need from professors on the net and whatnot now. They have all the ability, what they need most is to have a map to be pointed in the right direction.
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 just started teaching this year. I'm not young either. I gave up my programming job to teach English to Japanese students.
/. we love to complain about bad programmers who can hide in a large organization, spewing out horrible code while management gives them raises. But think about teaching for a bit. Here you have a profession where the success of the students (and hence the teacher) can literally be manipulated by the teacher. You can intentionally give them questions they can't answer (because you never taught them) or you can give them all the answers to the test the day before.
Here on
So to combat this you get standardized testing. If too many people fail the standard tests, then the teacher is bad. But what does that do? It means that the smart teacher will teach only what's on the test. And they will ensure that each student can score well on the test, ability be damned. It's all about the test.
This creates a curriculum which is meaningless. Just a bunch of hoops to jump through in order for the teacher to get their bonus (they get bonuses here in Japan... Does that happen other places?) Got a bright student that actually wants to learn something relevant? -- "Shut up kid. Talking to you costs me my bonus. You can already pass the test." Got a student struggling that needs to understand? -- "Just frickin' memorize this damn thing, OK? I don't care that you can't use it in real life. You only need it for the exam. Got it?"
The gaming potential here is enormous. I'm actually surprised that my school doesn't operate like that. Although we are one of the lowest ranked schools in the prefecture. So perhaps lack of need to achieve test results makes life better here. Most of the teachers are amazing, actually.
But it really begs the question. How the hell do you measure the success of teachers? They hold all the cards and there's no obvious objective measure that I can see....
This is one reason why school vouchers are so important, so that parents of smart kids can rescue them by putting them in a proper learning environment, regardless of their economic situation.
So, while there is a major effort to get struggling kids better scores, which is very good, this goal of NARROWING the gap can only be achieved if the top students don't get even better scores.
At my age (I'm 44), I am one of the few people who experienced the public education system in Canada both before and after this type of policy (NCLB) took effect. I was always a high achiever, and despite getting a late start in kindergarten (I was almost 6), I quickly learned the work and accelerated several grades. I was still 6 in grade 3.
Sometime during grade 4, I noticed something going on with the curriculum. Rather than the steadily more challenging books I was expecting, reading began to be taught using a series of cards with the simplest of prose on them. Suddenly, the reading skills being taught to grade 4 students dropped to the "run Spot run" level. And stayed there.
By the time the new curriculum had become entrenched, I was in grade 6. My teacher in that grade was obligated to spend most of his time teaching the troublemakers in the class and really had very little time left over for anyone else, especially high achievers. Since this time, it has been declared that mentally retarded (sorry, NOT developmentally delayed, NOT differently intelligent, NOT developmentally challenged, mentally retarded) must be placed in regular classrooms also, along with autistic children and almost any other child not capable of learning at a normal pace. I can only imagine what effect this has had on actual learning in school.
I was very fortunate in that my parents, firmly in the middle class, were able to find a school with excellent academics that catered exclusively to gifted students and scrape together the tuition for it. Suddenly I was learning Latin, and Shakespeare, and actual geography and history. And this school was not afraid to kick me out for lack of academic performance.
It seems obvious to me that with a policy such as NCLB, schools will focus on getting the maximum number of students to a certain level of mediocrity. Under such a program, this is the maximum result (funding wise) for the minimum effort. And as this generation of children moves up in age, results of this policy will be easy to see. We can see them now in fact. Look at the comments on social networking sites et.al.: "like i dint no u r gonna b workig their omg that is sooooooo cool".
Just think: this is the next generation, the one that is going to have to meet the competitive challenge from India, China and others in the global battle for power and influence.
Looks like we've had our day in the sun.
I suggest that it is about return on investment. Resources invested in those who are motivated and and have at least a modicum of aptitude produce adults who go on to get good jobs and repay the cost in taxes that support others. I willingly support those efforts. Spending resources on those who don't give a rip or are clueless is money down a rat hole. As our economy continues to tank, we are going to have to make some tough, unpopular choices. I say spend the limited resources where they do the most good.
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 my middle school we had a gifted program. The program separated the students into three categories: Gifted, Above Average, and Normal. Because of scheduling the History class was composed of Gifted and Normal (no Above Average). The Normals in that class did better at history than the Above Average in the other History classes. I should note that it was the students who figured this out, the Non-Gifted ones at that.
The conclusion was that interest, more than anything, governed success and the enthusiasm and interest of the Gifted had infected the Normals. Allocating resources will only go so far but spreading interest will do more. Sadly NCLB leaves little room for a teacher to do so.
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.
NCLB was around LONG before BUSH...
" it's just another incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, one of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society monuments. That law's centerpiece program, known as Title I, has pumped billions of federal dollars into education for poor children over the past 43 years. And the Improving America's Schools Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, was No Child Left Behind-lite, with similar expectations for states and districts but fewer rules and timelines. "
Here's some more fun info on NCLB... If folks are gonna point fingers, at least read up on it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/28/AR2008032802976.html
And Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
The general result was that 50% of the schools resources was poured into 15-20% of the students. If you think that's fair that's your problem I for one will respectfully disagree.
Why is it ok for resources to be expended disproportionately when they are spent on the dysfunctional, but it's not ok when they are spent on the bright and talented?
Specifically, the cost to "normalize" say, a Down's child is far more than the avg cost of a normal student. Since you're disagreeing with "pouring" resources into a small fraction of the students, surely you're against such policies.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
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.
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.
But this isn't a problem created by No Child Left Behind - this shit has being going on since God only knows when in American Education. Stupid kids get all the attention and smart kids get to sit quietly and wait... the worst part of it is the mediocre kids get no attention and they're the ones who truly should get the most. They don't have to be mediocre they could improve.
I don't know when American Education started striving for mediocrity but it's clear that's what's going on. Any of us who were bored out of their skulls in school can attest to that.
This
I know several teachers here in Canada, and we have our own version of the 'No Child Left Behind' idea in my province. And the concensus among the teachers is that it translates to a nobody fails policy. So basically, no matter how lazy you are, or how few assignments you hand in... it's nearly impossible for you to fail. If you only hand in one assignment all year, your grade is weighted onto that assignment. If you refuse to do any work, or you skip the exam... the teachers practically gift-wrap extra credit work for you to do instead.
One girl was flagged as 'special needs' in that her only obvious special problem was that she refused to study for anything. As a result, the school decided they would help her with her problem by letting her bring her notes to every exam, even going so far as to allow her to type her exam on an Internet connect computer while the teachers turned a blind eye if she happend to open a web browser.
The result of this is that laziness or attitude has not concequences. Children with true disabilities or difficulties are just ushered through like cattle rather than given real help. And the students who could actually do great things- get discouraged by the sight of their peers getting free rides. They aren't pushed to do their best.
It's an utterly failed concept, bringing everyone down, and turning schools into a joke. But, god forbid you speak out against it... because then... *gasp* you must WANT children to be left behind!
*sigh*
This comes in light of a recent special edition of National Geographic that I read all about China- where school and studying hard is almost a religion over there. We're all going to be out-educated by miles in the next generation.
There were special ed classes where the kids with learning disabilities and other severe physical handi-caps went to class, and then the gen pop went to normal classes, the over achievers went to AP classes and that was that. To my knowledge the normal kids in regular classes that were the classic lazy under-achiever, read today as ADD, were just primarily left to their own designs in class and only received help if they asked for it.
This method worked well, we had plenty of scientists, engineers, and other highly skilled individuals coming out of schools, or those motivated by learning to set on the road to becoming something along those lines.
I've said for a long time, if a child that has special needs, and yes this is gonna sound like "get off my lawn" but, the curricula should not be dumbed down to make any one child feel better about themselves, it makes the other 30 children in the class suffer by getting a lesser education.
My daughter is by no means a genius, yes I am a dad and I said that, but it's true I think she is average. She gets A/B honor roll every term, and next year is taking 3 AP classes and beginning Japanese, she is in 6th grade. My fear is that because, "no child gets left behind", her education is suffering for it.
Everyone is entitled to an education, a good education, not a half-assed, atta-boy heres your gold star for the day. In the long term, it's our kids that suffer, and ultimately we as a nation will suffer.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
When you tell every student, no matter how they perform academically, that they are special ... you are really sending the message that no one is special.
.. to get into better universities .. so essentially most of lower education is spend learning how to ace the exams. This of course has NOTHING to do with actual learning, or learning that is required to produce innovative and imaginative minds anyways.
The Japanese school system is the perfect example of where we are headed. They study and cram for exams, granted
In the past 20 years, there has been a huge rise in suicides, and what we might be considered odd and violent behavior. Japanese children are burning themselves out, and from time to time someone snaps spectacularly, murders their parents, an entire classroom of students etc. etc. etc.
No child left behind bears striking similarities to this process. Students schools are granted (or withheld) funding based on their schools test scores. So teachers are expected to teach to the tests, instead of the curriculum. In the end it makes dumber kids, who can't handle higher education, with the added benefit of ignoring the high potential children's growth.
So, in order to give a kid who is not mentally apt enough, an almost infinitesimal shot at becoming a doctor, we ignore the group of children who could become very GOOD doctors with only minimal additional effort.
Square peg, round hole syndrome. In the end of the day we either have NO doctors, or a few very very unqualified ones. [You only need a C to pass!]
Can someone explain to me how this makes the employment base of our non-manufacturing country stronger ??
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
>You see these people on American Idle ...
That's just wonderful. Please tell me it was intentional.
If you read the executive summary the salient point is that "Children at the tenth percentile of achievement (the bottom 10
percent of students) have shown solid progress in fourth-grade reading and math and eighth-grade math since 2000, but those at the 90th percentile (the top 10 percent) have made minimal gains."
The article is attempting to spin this into FUD that helping the lower performing students is having a negative impact on the upper performers, when in fact the upper performers just aren't gaining as much.
There are certainly some things that can (and should) be done better, but the tone of the article (and most of the posts) seem to miss the actual facts here.
We really don't need a study to show this... just go into any school and ask any teacher who is now completely teaching to the test because there isn't any time for anything else. They say this appears to be related to No Child Left Behind? Sorry folks, this is a direct result of that disaster. In some schools, we have gotten to the point where if it isn't a graduation requirement or directly assessed on the test, it's not being taught. And here is the kicker... the kids, at least the high school kids, are now at the point of asking if it is on the test or not. If it's not on the test, they really don't want to have anything to do with it. Sure, they will do the work and get the grade because they need it to graduate, but they are really just geared to the test now. Not college, not the world of work, not anything after high school... it's the test. This started with math, reading and writing. This year adds science and next year adds social studies. We are on the way to creating Stepford teachers and Stepford children. And all of this is name of improvement! Before NCLB we had one of the greatest educational systems in the world because we trusted our teachers and had true parent involvement. Now with fruits of the Reagan/Bush I reforms pushing outcome based education that led to NCLB under Bush II, we rank something like 15th. Outcome based education is interesting... you would think the outcome would be what the kid retains on leaving school and how they can apply to life. Not under NCLB... the only outcome here is how well they do on the test. Go figure... and yes... I taught.
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.
It wasn't intentional. It was a nice Freudian slip though.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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