Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion DoE seeks equality in AP, gifted classes

I agree that the writer has some very serious ideological constraints that make him untrustworthy (e.g. "contempt for the constitution"). But that doesn't make him wrong about certain problems in the US education system (the stuff Bostonian quoted). We all know how our system punishes its most capable students ("no acceleration for you!"). Our schools also pretend that their weakest students aren't as weak as they actually are, and ignore the reasons for the disparities. Not that this guy is necessarily going to be interested in that last point; I don't expect him to be talking about IQ depression created by poverty and lack of access to healthcare anytime soon.

That said, we also have a lot of folks who don't like to talk about the fact that too many American teachers don't have a solid understanding of what they're teaching. You can't teach what you don't know.

We seem to have replaced meaningful approaches to addressing these problems with equity! policies, which mandate artificial "balance" into AP or honors classes or algebra for all in 8th grade. When unqualified students are encouraged or pushed to take honors classes, either the standard of instruction falls or, as a group, the unqualified kids perform poorly. For examples of the standard of instruction falling, consult any Big Education math textbook published in the last ten years.

And we end up with high failure rates on college math and English placement exams, high rates of remediation, and college dropouts, and everyone wonders what happened.

Saying that everyone should go to college sounds nice, but part of what's driving this movement is the outsourcing of skilled and semi-skilled jobs in the name of profits, the reduction of free high school voc-ed programs, and the lack of a living minimum wage. But why worry about any of this stuff when you can just fill out a form saying that your school has 15% group x students, and 15% of group x students are enrolled in honors trig? So what if half of them would learn more in a lower-level course? It's all about appearances.

So you end up with one group of students being underchallenged and undertaught, or another group being confused and presumably feeling like failures when the deck was stacked against them from square one. Talk about squandering minds across the board, regardless of how you arrange the board (even if you arrange it randomly).

The other side of this coin is top-tier college admissions arms races. Yes, these problems are linked. They all derive from the unfairness in our system that gets worse, not better, when we force artificial non-solutions into it. When everyone has to compete for increasingly scarce resources or jobs or whatever, behavior will become increasingly self-centered, and the people most in need of meaningful help will be least likely to get it. Thus, Muffy goes on a voluntourism trip to [insert exotic tropical poor place], thus ensuring that she will have great copy for her college essays. Meanwhile, kids in the inner city get thrown out of school and maybe arrested at age 14 for minor offenses that would earn Muffy a lecture from the principal.

I'm not saying there's a magic solution to unequal educational outcomes. I'm saying the opposite: the situation is extremely complicated, and fixing it will take a lot more than creating Equity! policies or claiming that Arne Duncan and our president are contemptuous of the US Constitution.