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Helping Some Students May Harm High Achievers
palegray.net writes "According to a new study performed by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, increased emphasis on helping students with a history of lower academic achievement results in lower performance for high achievers. This trend appears to be related to the No Child Left Behind Act. Essentially, programs designed to devote a large number of resources to assisting students who are deemed to be 'significantly behind' leave little room for encouraging continued academic growth for higher-performing students."
It's all about finance really. If you pay more teachers to teach smaller classes, most of these issues go away. The other thing is that children with learning disabilities get taught by themselves or in small groups because they are a special case. I would say the same should be available to gifted children.
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.-
Not the same AC so I can only reply on the first question:
I was both, that is having an easy time in school and often being in fights (both starting and defending). I totally agree that violence is not something that should be in schools, but I don't think for a second that separating the "stupid" kids from the "bright" kids helps.
Also, really smart people often have a really hard time in school and kids with good/great marks != geniuses.
I think a bigger problem (and with a less obvious solution) is how to spot the bright people, and keep them motivated and interested during schools. I mean, high school teachers aren't members of that group of people and tend to see creative solutions as failure rather than brilliance.
Yeah, I think lots of people have been saying this for years. It's completely obvious, but unfortunately some people won't listen to even the most obvious things until you can say, "a study proved it." And of course, you never hear about any studies that prove obvious but politically-incorrect ideas.
Anyway, yes, of course, kids don't simply raise themselves. Smart kids, dumb kids, it doesn't matter, they need people to pay attention to them, teach them, tell them what to do, be given examples of what to be, etc. Attention is a limited resource, and the more attention to pay to some kids, the less you pay to others. So if you pay all your attention to the problem kids and the dumb kids, the well-behaved kids and the smart kids suffer.
And no, really, the smart kids don't take care of themselves. All kids need attention.
This was true when I was in school 20+ years ago. The reason this is deemed news is because it makes people with an axe to grind (i.e. people who are against NCLB) all warm and angry inside.
It's completely obvious, but unfortunately some people won't listen to even the most obvious things until you can say, "a study proved it."
I don't think this is quite true -- if it were, there wouldn't be so many morons rubbing organic garlic on their feet to try to get rid of their headaches. "Obvious" is subjective, and can often be misleading. If there were more people that evaluated studies before making a decision, the world would be a much better place (and, no, we wouldn't have the "No Child Left Behind" act.rubbing organic garlic on their feet to try to get rid of their headaches
No maaaaan, you apply it directly to the forehead...
how long until
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!
This is common, but from a kid's perspective, most would rather be sitting quietly or reading a book than doing more *work* than everyone else has to do.
:-)
My son is in 6th grade and has been at the top of his class since he joined school. He finished the No Child Left Behind mastery tests usually in 20 minutes or less even when the test was supposed to take between 60 and 90 minutes. Even given that, he scored in the 97th - 99th percentile for scores for the last three years (4th, 5th, 6th grade). He gets his smarts from his mother, but gets his motivation, or lack of it, from me.
I say all this because my experience with him and some of his classmates is exactly as described. In fact, we worry that the smart kids are rushing to get done just so they can get to the free time or reading time that much earlier. It almost becomes a race. If it wasn't for the fact that my son's scores are high, we'd have done somethign about it. The thing is, he was asked to be in an academically gifted program and he hated it, not because it wasn't interesting, but because it was more work!
I can see your point, but until we return to a policy of creating "smart kid" classes and "not-so-smart kid" classes, instead of the enforced homogeneous classes we have nowadays, it is unlikely that teachers will be able to cope with students that move at such different speeds. They try all kinds of strategies, like pairing the smart kids together into challenging reading groups, or assigning targeted homework, but 80% of the day is done together with everyone.
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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.
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
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.
So what do you do with high achieving students who have behavioral issues?
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
Now, if a scientific study has been made and has conclusive results (which happens less often than we'd like to think), you should initially have reason to believe it. But stopping there is just intellectually lazy (or ignorant). You should look into the context of the "study". Find out who "they" are (and more to the point, who's funding them). Find out how strong the correlation was (you've studied statistics haven't you?). Find out if there is a consensus in the scientific community about this "study". Find out if there are any conflicting studies. Etc.
I'm not saying you need to detailed analysis on every study you come across. All it takes is a few minutes of searching to gain a better understanding of the context that surrounds a "study" (assuming the referenced "study" even occurred in the first place). Doing this, you can avoid many of the conspiracies or frauds out there that prey on the intellectually lazy.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
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.
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