[quote=UCGal]
I agree that students have different abilities to learn.
But with no metrics in place – teachers are not judged on whether the students learn anything. If there is a positive delta in what the student knows at the end of the year, vs what they knew at the beginning of the year – REGARDLESS of where they started – then the student made progress.
I have a friend with a child with significant learning disabilities. My friend has had to push hard to make sure that appropriate material is given to her son… Some of the teachers would just park him in a corner. My own experience is that a less than stellar teacher can stagnate the learning of a gifted student. Rather than giving more depth/breadth, or alternate material, to a student that has already mastered the grade level material – he was parked in the corner. My son ended up hating school because it was boring and unchallenging. (I changed schools after this. He totally changed his outlook after I got him out of that environment.)
If a program is developed where students are pushed to learn from where they are – to improve – then all students are learning. Right now the system is set to teach to the medium… and fails the kids at either end of the spectrum.
Obviously there could be factors put in for kids with 504s and/or IEPs so that the teacher is given a pass if the improvement is less for the kids with learning disabilities. But improvement and learning should absolutely be the end goal for every student. Not parking in a corner.[/quote]
Yes, all students should be making progress throughout the year, and it should be measurable progress, but the gifted child will learn perhaps 3-10 times (or more) what the learning disabled or low IQ student will learn in a given year, and this differential gets magnified as the years progress.
Many teachers would LOVE to track students by ability so that they wouldn’t have to “teach to the middle,” but as I’ve noted in the post above, that’s not legal, and some would argue that it’s also not moral or ethical. But even if we did track, the teachers would still have to teach to the middle of that classroom’s bell curve. The difference between someone with an IQ at the 99th percentile and someone with an IQ at the 99.9th percentile is HUGE. While a teacher could certainly make sure that the students have material that would enable them to progress at their own pace (at the 99th percentile and above, a lot of the learning would likely be self-directed), the actual teacher instruction would either be too advanced for those on the lower end, or boring for those at the top.
Ideally, every student could learn at his/her own individual pace, but that kind of learning might not be evident on a state test as some students might hyper-focus on one thing to the detriment of all of the other subjects, etc.
FWIW, the reason we started homeschooling was because our “gifted” child was 2-3 grade levels above her class in certain areas, and at grade level in other areas, but the principal wouldn’t allow her to be in a pull-out program because they didn’t believe in it for students below third grade. The teacher was awesome and fully supportive, but the principal/school district had rules that prevented her from doing what was best for our child. The teacher was not able to spend the time specifically with our one child while she had 20+ students who, technically, needed more help; and I never held this against her because I could see what she was dealing with when I volunteered in the classroom. She helped me talk my DH into homeschooling at the parent-teacher conference.
