The next question: do schools really care about the students?
Our own experience, and my observation of friends' kids (not necessarily gifted kids, some struggle a lot in school), makes me think that the answer is no. My feeling is that students are data points that the bureaucracy needs to show that they are doing a good job and therefore should receive continued funding. I hope I'm too sarcastic and the reality is better than this.
IME,
teachers (mostly) DO care-- often very deeply. Of course, they too become victims at the hands of the system. Why?
Bureaucracy, by wry definition, cares about nothing but itself. It bludgeons those who don't 'fit' the "process" until they leave or conform. There are a lot of good teachers who are crushed under those millstones over time, in other words... becoming bitter, disillusioned, or deadened to the passion that led them into the profession to begin with. Most of the helping professions are susceptible to this kind of burnout when the individuals are stripped of autonomy in favor of bureaucratic, rigid procedural correctness, IME.
The sum of the two factors is what we observe with schools.
I really had tears well up in my eyes when I read the post a bit back which described this process from the perspective OF a teacher. It's
very sad to see. There's something innately HUMAN about great teachers and teaching. Stripping the humanity via bureaucratic controls is
part of what is deeply, deeply wrong with education now. Not all of it, of course-- the other problem is that the profession seems to encourage mediocre (or worse) subject mastery, which is a separate-- but no less vexing-- issue.
