Every motivated, high-potential young American deserves a similar opportunity. But the majority of very smart kids lack the wherewithal to enroll in rigorous private schools. They depend on public education to prepare them for life. Yet that system is failing to create enough opportunities for hundreds of thousands of these high-potential girls and boys.
Mostly, the system ignores them, with policies and budget priorities that concentrate on raising the floor under low-achieving students. A good and necessary thing to do, yes, but we’ve failed to raise the ceiling for those already well above the floor.
Public education’s neglect of high-ability students doesn’t just deny individuals opportunities they deserve. It also imperils the country’s future supply of scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs.
It seems that the public schools are dumbing down students to the lowest common denominator. No one left behind seems to mean that we all have to be at the same low level before moving on to more mediocrity. The current trend in education in the US should be cause for concern from a national security concern. Where will our future scientists come from, Pakistan or China?
It is really quite simple: lowest common denominator. The dogma that public school teachers must profess before getting teaching licenses (and I did get one about 10 years ago) is that all kids can learn and must be taught to learn. In theory, that is a laudable goal. In actuality, there are simply some children that cannot be taught, at least stuff like Algebra and such. Thus, we pool our resources on a fool’s errand: we pander to that lowest common denominator in the classrooms and do not focus on the best and the brightest.
This plays out in things like standardized testing and channeling special needs kids into the classroom to make them feel included. We teach to the test and bend over backwards to make sure the lowest and dullest pass enough standardized tests to make our school and our teachers look good, and in the process we simply ignore the best and the brightest. Our entire curriculum and educational pedagogy is simply geared to pandering to the lowest common denominator.
This is why American public schools always do so poorly on standardized tests because we test everyone in the system. In other countries that are often much higher on standardized test scores, they weed out unintelligent students and funnel them into vocational schools which don’t do national standardized testing, therefore artificially inflating their national test scores. This is analogous to the reason why many private schools do better on test scores: they have weeded out the unintelligent or unruly kids who simply can’t cut it in a private school curriculum either intentionally (private schools can expell students for academic probation or behavioral offenses) or by virtue of tuition that poor or disadvantanged kids (often the ones who do poorly on test scores because they don’t have the stable family or resources to allow them to succeed or even attend a private school) can even get into to begin with.
Ha, No 1 posted his comment at the same time I was writing mine. Great minds think alike!
Look at this as the deployment of equal opportunity to be no better than anyone else, the ultimate in equality. That a political goal, enfranchisement, should be the ultimate social goal results in this. The concept of “stratification” on the basis of abilities is anathema. Equal stupidity is the goal.
Why do you think home schooling is booming right now? It epitomizes individualized instruction and targeting the right learning at the right time at the right pace. Particularly with boys in the primary grades, those who get finished with tasks before their classmates are most apt to get fidgety and disrupt the class, which points them in the direction of an ADHD diagnosis and the appropriate meds. Is it any reason why the well behaved girls are now the ones in the majority at the university level? Their high achieving, overly high energy male counterparts have been tagged as ADHD classroom discipline problems from an early age and not given the same opportunities.
This is not new: my high school eliminated advanced academic classes because parents complained that it was “undemocratic”, so those of us who were more academically inclined sat bored in classes with other kids who weren’t. That was in 1968.
Part of the problem is a public expectation that is neither realistic nor desirable. My best friend dropped out of college before he flunked out, and makes 2-3 times annually than me with my master’s degree.