Originally Posted by
John K Jordan
It would be a shame to start some types of education to fit the average and fail to identify and challenge those who might benefit earlier.
An example - a friend here started at the U of TN Animal Science when she was 13 and graduated number 1 in her class, in Vet school now. Fortunately, she had strong family support.
I've known some without such support and challenge - they seemed to always be bored and frustrated, some labeled trouble makers in public schools. Maybe there is better screening in public schools these days and special help for those on the far end of the spectrum.
Actually, the last couple of decades I saw just the opposite.
With the advent of the No Child Left Behind legislation federal money was tied to student achievement. Achievement was measured in several ways including the number of students passing minimum grade level competency tests, the disparity between the scores of the whole group and various sub-groups of your student population, and having a minimum percentage of students taking the test so as to not inflate the scores by having low kids just not test. A district did not get points for how high students scored, only how many passed minimum competency (in Iowa that was at the 40th petcentile on the Iowa Test of Basiic Skills /Educational Development as measured on the 2001 tests).
Not only was federal money dependent on the scores, but state busing money and other ancillary expenses were affected. Newspapers published these scores and resultant labels (watch lists, schools or district in need of assistance). Realtors listed these when selling houses.
One can see immediately a school can improve their chances of staying off the bad lists by focusing their efforts on the students who were the bottom 40% or on the bottom of the at-risk populations (low social economic, English Limited Learners, special education). So that is what many districts did. District money and teacher inservices focused on these students. Schools' curriculum was modified to emphasize the types of problems the "bubble kids" were likely to have on the ITBS.
The first place money could be found to pay for this shift was from the budget of the talented and gifted as those students would hit the minimum level regardless. So, many did. In some districts there was immediate backlash. In Seattle parents of T&G students threatened to pull their kids from state tests if the T&G budget was not restored. This would reduce the number of kids passing, thereby increasing the percentage of kids not passing, and possibly reduce the participation number below the critical threshold.
Other districts handled it more discreetly; more stringent requirements to qualify for the T&G program or making the program a push-in rather than a pull-out (so the T&G teachers could also work with the other students in the class, freeing up the classroom teacher for a time to do remedial work with the lower 40%).
This new focus was successful. As a nation we did improve instruction for the lower 40%, and the spotlight on achievement gap of various sub-groups helped to identify where we were failing. But, there were casualties. Subjects not on the state assessments were left to hang in the wind. In our district penmanship, spelling, and social studies were de-emphasized. And, I suspect, the T&G and the near T&G kids got less indvidual attention.
Comments made here are my own and, according to my children, do not reflect the opinions of any other person... anywhere, anytime.