1) In a one-track approach, the best math students may not gain a year's worth of knowledge in a year of school. This may help close the achievement gap or excellence gap, which benefits teachers and schools which are rated on this basis.
2) These benefits to teachers/schools for closing the gap comes at a cost to these students (the former "best math students"): They may learn to underachieve, their brains may undergo changes, they may find it difficult to take on a challenge and begin learning again.
Agreed. And while your choice of words above was poor, I agree with your sentiments about Burris and Ravitch. BenjaminL, the problem, I think, isn't that people AREN'T taking Ravitch and Burris seriously so much as that they ARE.
I've done a lot of education grant review and have attended education conferences. I've met people who, when talking about good students,
really believe that "they're already proficient!" and therefore
don't need anything else.
My best guess is that these individuals have a well-founded concern about poor-performing students who are at great risk of failure, and really want to help them. From their perspective, someone who's already proficient doesn't need anything extra, especially because the needs of the other students seem to be more urgent in their eyes.
The good students have so much. Why give them more? They seem to see the situation as either/or: either we help the poor performing students or we take away what little they have by letting them languish in demeaning tracked classes. They really believe this. They're also not seeing that top students can fail, too. They may not fail in the same way as the poor students, but failing is still failing.
These educators strike me as defining the task as
imparting knowledge X in year Y. If a student has this knowledge by December, that's great. Full stop. There's no need to provide more knowledge, because the next chunk comes in year Z and it's not Y's job to impart Z's knowledge.
(TBH, I've always wondered if there's some begrudgery going on, too.)
Either way, I fail to see why teaching more to the poor performers is incompatible with teaching more to the best students.
