I just thought of a new way to track kids. You could have one class that wants to learn and one class that wants to do the bare minimum. The teacher that likes to differentiate can have the students that want to learn, whatever their abilities, and they support the students and don't hold them back. The students are self selected.
Interesting idea--but I think it might suffer some of the same issues as other tracking systems once the parents figured out what was going on--I think most parents would not want their kid in the 'bare minimum' group. So then I can imagine all the parents who care raising heck about getting their kid into the 'wants to learn' class regardless of how their kid feels.
Re lack of political correctness, here's another interesting idea that I heard awhile ago but haven't seen work yet. A speaker re 2e kids suggested that one rationale that might help advocates of gifted education is that minority/underprivileged/socioeconomically challenged 2e kids tend to be under-identified, and screening for and helping such kids might be useful to schools and teachers under the No-Child-Left-Behind incentive structure. I don't know how the recent changes to No-Child-Left-Behind might affect this, but it was an interesting idea that these 2e kids might be particularly under-served, and that including them as a reason for gifted identification and education might be helpful in advocating for gifted kids generally, as well as being a very good thing to do.
