Thanks for those definitions, Indigo.
My son's former middle school is moving away from tracking to supposed in-class differentiation. This school has top math scores in our state-- but they're falling victim to the common core notion that "deep" will satisfy advanced students.
I feel really strongly-- based on my own kids' deep frustration with being unable to advanced at a reasonable pace-- that this single track is the wrong approach and puts the best math students at a disadvantage they might not be able to overcome.
Last March, the Atlantic magazine had a really good article about the problem. Some excerpts:
' “If you wait until high school to attempt to produce accelerated math learners...the latecomers will find themselves missing too much foundational thinking and will struggle, with only four short years before college, to catch up,' [according to Po-Shen Loh, the head of the US math team]. These days, it is a rare student who can move from being “good at math” in a regular public high school to finding a place in the advanced-math community."
"The cumulative effect of these actions, [not addressing advanced math needs in public school] perversely, has been to push accelerated learning outside public schools—to privatize it, focusing it even more tightly on children whose parents have the money and wherewithal to take advantage. In no subject is that clearer today than in math. "
"The ratio of rich math whizzes to poor ones is 3 to 1 in South Korea and 3.7 to 1 in Canada... In the U.S., it is 8 to 1. And while the proportion of American students scoring at advanced levels in math is rising, those gains are almost entirely limited to the children of the highly educated, and largely exclude the children of the poor. By the end of high school, the percentage of low-income advanced-math learners rounds to zero."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-math-revolution/426855/
