I see this subject come up frequently here but I guess I'm still vague on what is meant by "equal outcomes"?
Do people mean all students taking the same coursework regardless of ability or do they mean identical grades and SAT scores? Or do they mean all kids with the same specific skills at the same age? Some combination of all of that?
And I did read several, but not all, of the earlier links.
Taking the same coursework regardless of ability may appear as equal opportunity to some... but to others it is withholding the curriculum, instruction, placement, and pacing which is appropriate to meeting each pupil's needs for continued development.
Closing gaps, or giving the appearance of closing gaps, involves capping the growth of students at the top as well as helping students at the bottom improve their learning, application, achievement, and demonstrated knowledge.
Choice of
grading practices utilized may provide one means to create an official record of "equal outcomes." Strategies include
selective redo opportunities and
differentiated task demands.
Withholding
appropriate growth opportunities from "gifted" kids can result in undermining their academic, intellectual,
social, emotional growth, and motivation... creating underachievers. It can change the way their brains are wired and make it difficult for them to once again grow.
While it may be more difficult to create identical SAT scores, recent changes to the SAT tend to lower the ceiling above which a student's knowledge is not measured.
It is important for parents to acquaint themselves with these practices and their likely results. Too many parents remain unaware. They may have only a vague sense that something is not right when their child says s/he is learning nothing new, is required to spend class time tutoring classmates who are behind, and is buried in homework assignments which preclude his/her participation in extracurricular activities.
I'm familiar with those concepts but I haven't heard about them in practice, which is where my questions originated from.
Taking the same coursework for example. Most of what I've encountered, limited I'll admit, is that there's a larger push to individualize curriculums for students - ranging from IEP's to differentiation to charter schools and more magnet programs. I can't comment on how effective those things are in practice but that's a very different direction than from when I was in school.
What do you mean by "the appearance of closing gaps"?
Capping the upper end of the classrooms and teaching to the bottom third certainly isn't a new trend. I was under the impression that it was standard teaching practice for a long time. As is the idea of curriculums being designed to cycle through the same material repeatedly over time. More importantly, as I said previously, it appears that most of the trends seem to be moving away from that approach.
I don't know much about grading policies but the practices described are also fairly old. Now, I haven't been in elementary school for over 25 years but even then teachers helped under performing students get better grades by giving them more opportunities to improve. As a student who never needed any such opportunities, I didn't take it as unfair and I don't see it as such now. If the teacher's job is to help the kids learn - then kids who need more help should get it.
Isn't that what we want for gifted kids? More help when they need it?
Wanting more help for gifted kids doesn't strike me as necessitating that teachers don't also give more help to marginal and struggling students. I don't see that as equal outcomes or equal opportunities, I see it as teachers doing their jobs and teaching. Of course, I still want to make sure that my gifted child gets as much teaching and instruction as he needs. I just don't think it necessitates pillorying marginal/average kids and their needs to get there.
Describing "Withholding appropriate growth opportunities" as an attempt to "force equal outcomes" seems a pejorative way to describe that particular issue. The push to get more attention on the needs of gifted kids is valuable and important but it's history, to my limited knowledge, was never about forcing equal outcomes. It was about the inability of the school systems to recognize that gifted kids needed more and a fundamental misunderstanding about the negative impact of inadequate stimulation. Framing it as an intentional attempt to skew outcomes in favor of less intelligent students is unfair and probably inaccurate to some degree.
As you noted, we should all familiarize ourselves with these subjects. On my side, I have familiarized myself with this issue. I've even taken the time to bone up on education law in my state including litigation regarding advocacy for gifted kids. I've come to get some idea of who wins and who loses those cases when they go before a judge.
I was asking my question because what is often the responsibility of the school district - to educate all of their charges - appeared to be restated as an intentional attempt to force equal outcomes. Most of the practices being criticized are decades old to my understanding and intrinsic to the shortcomings of mass education, not the specific type of social engineering that is being suggested.
Anyhoo, I think the critique of the system's failings have been overly broadened to suggest motivations that aren't as prevalent as suggested.
But I'm not in the education field so it's just one parents opinion.
