Exactly, Tallulah. The result is such myopic rigidity that the schools really DO NOT work for the HG+ kids in them. Which can be, as you note, a fairly sizeable percentage of the kids.

Our town's district ID's a full 30% as "gifted." I don't know that it's wrong, since the major employers in town are a fortune 25 hi-tech company, a regional medical complex, and a state flagship uni. So yeah, there ARE a lot of ideally bright and probably MG kids in town. No question.

But what gets aimed at that group doesn't suffice for the kids who are actually EG or PG, and it's all the more maddening to listen to the administrators, teachers, and school board patting themselves on the back for doing such a bang-up job of it all when you ask them questions ABOUT that minority group of students.

It's as though it doesn't compute, your question-- as though you couldn't POSSIBLY have actually asked it, because you don't understand how Super Awesome their program is.

It's a game. Student learning is incidental to winning the high-stakes testing rounds, and lack of learning is irrelevant unless it directly affects scores on high-stakes tests.

IMO, most of the US K-12 education system should be pillaged of anything of value in it, with the rest being burned to the ground and buried under a two-foot layer of salt.

Um, in one district--might even be yours--they bus kids to lower performing schools to take AP tests to improve the ratings for the lower performing school. In another district, they put GT programs into the lowest performing schools to hide the fact that there are lower performing kids who are not getting what they need. A game indeed.

Master of none and blackcat have proven, once again, that no matter how deeply you dig into the pits and caverns of American education, no matter how often you think you've finally hit the bottom, there is always, always a spot where your pickaxe will go through the floor, revealing another layer of badness below, waiting to be explored.

The whole system of state testing and linking it to teacher evaluations and school funding has basically created huge incentives to do exactly this sort of thing

I can't say I'm in any way surprised, though. The whole system of state testing and linking it to teacher evaluations and school funding has basically created huge incentives to do exactly this sort of thing.

MoN, what you describe is absolutely nauseating.