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I have worked through some of these types of issues on a personal level. I too believe that all students should have tons of opportunity and I also believe that if a parent makes a choice - whether that be a charter, private or other school - you are naturally going to have a more involved parent and more involved parents lead to more involved students and more involved students are more successful. I wish there was a way to duplicate that success for kids whose parents either don't have the ability too or choose not to make the educational choices for their children.

Having said that, I completely disagree with the fairness argument. It is not fair that everyone gets the same - we have that now with NCLB and that is inherently unfair because kids that are not going to get to the bubble are dismissed as well as those that are above the bubble.

What is fair is that everyone gets what they need and if my kid or any kid needs an accelerated curriculum, enrichment or more challenging curriculum, or learning in an enviroment with only his academic peers, so that he can learn work ethic, responsibility, study skills, goal setting, problem solving and sacrifice, then that is what is fair for him.

MoN - You have provided a nice summary of a prevailing view within my district. There is a term for this -- "social justice." Our kids' elementary school principal recently wrote her PhD thesis on this, and advocates a school model in which there are no "pull outs" or special programs of any kind that separate kids (beyond the classroom walls) by ability. She said to dh and I that teachers should be able to accommodate students at all levels, and pull-outs (for high or low achieving students) are a "crutch against bad teaching."

Our twins are in 5th grade and her model is working reasonably well in their classroom, which includes a wide range of abilities, from our kids who are hg+ to a child learning to sort objects by color. Thanks to Title I funds, there are two full time teachers in a class of 27 kids, plus various other adults including student teachers and aides.

I think it takes both exceptional skill and dedication (the latter amounts to something like a religious fervor in our school) to make this work, and it is hard for me imagine such success on a district-wide or national scale.

In fact, at the high school level, the inclusive classroom approach as currently implemented is at odds with state gifted statutes, and the district has been recently found to be out of compliance following a complaint to the state by a group of parents. This is a raging controversy here.....

I worked in GATE committee of our school district for a number of years. The term "Equal opportunity" sounds familiar. It was used quite often as a justification to scrap GATE program. Our school district used to have a standing alone GATE class in 4th and 5th grade (students above 95 percentile were identified and offered a slot in that class). "Equal opportunity" was used as a code word for something else, in our case, the personal conflict between the principal and the GATE coordinator.

I and other GATE parents fought long and hard to preserve the GATE program. The effort was not completely futile but only served to delay the demise of the program for a couple of years. At the end of it, I was so sick of the petty school politics I sent my daughters to other district. Many other parents followed. Now the GATE program in our district is only a shadow of what it once was. So sad.

Ahh yes, everyone should have an equal opportunity to get a lousy education. If your child isn't getting one, we need to make sure he can.

True. Why not? Good idea.
If nobody likes the gifted label that would make advanced learners just able learners. Does that make the lest able be called what?
(probably not something that would be very just or good for their self esteem and would probably make their parents worry needlessly).

Someone had posted a link on another thread:

http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0697web/whiz.html

I especially like that the last paragraph in which Julian Stanley summarized why we, as a nation, needs to invest heavily on our gifted and talented kids. Using investment term, "over-weight" rather than "equal-weight".

Julian Stanley said:

"The fact is that the gifted pay off so handsomely for the country," he says. "The work of the world is done by routine people. I don't want to imply they're not crucial, but garbage collectors don't develop new garbage trucks. Those inventions come from talented people, especially those who have had education to develop their talents. Society develops enormously by capitalizing on their talents."

Here is another perspective on the social justice/equal opportunity issue. It is not the premise of social justice that *all* students have the same potential - it is that the *distribution* of potential is the same among different subgroups of the population. Take, for example, socioeconomic status as a variable. If you take two kids with very high academic potential, one from a well-off family and one from a homeless family, in most school systems the kid from the well-off family is far more likely to get gifted services for several reasons. Suppose then, the well-off kid is selected for services because of a parent request while the low-income kid does not. If this happens early on in schooling, consider the following two implications. In the TAG program, the identified and well-off kid learns critical skills by tackling true academic challenges and learns to self-identify as "smart," while the kid from the low-income family does neither. There is a feedback here for both kids that will amplify over time and will be hard to reverse later on. In our district, economic disparities fall for the most part along racial lines, so it is perceived as a racial issue as well. The differences may also be amplified by racial stereotypes held by the teachers the students encounter.

It is not clear that there is much possibility to change people's minds about this, as proposed above, or even that it is desirable. I have grown to have a lot of admiration for those I know in the school system who take the social justice perspective. They would agree with you that in a classroom of kids, each one has different learning needs that should be addressed, but they are working very hard to develop models to address those needs in an equitable way, a way that does not exacerbate the disadvantages an otherwise smart kid has no control over. They are by no means of a "no child gets ahead" mentality, but are in the trenches tackling multiple facets of a complex issue.

This is not how the real world works. People won't hire you or keep you as an employee if you don't pass whatever criteria are in place at work.

Would you put a beginning motorcyclist who can't afford a fancy bike in a class with people who've been racing bikes for three years and call it an equal opportunity? Of course not. He'd end up breaking some bones (not necessarily only his). This is exactly what we do when we put unprepared students into classes that they aren't ready for. And the "bones" that get broken are the standards (which change for the worse in order to get those unprepared kids to pass). Edumacators drive me nuts when they make these kinds of claims.

Another fallacy in Mr. Soifer's reasoning is that he assumes there are only two choices: run a computer programming class or don't. What about running two sections? One of them can do programming and the other can be an introduction to what computers are all about and what they do, with some Scratch programming taught at the end.

I understand that some people don't have the same opportunities that others do. It sucks. But we need to focus on letting people work at their levels (they'll probably learn more that way anyhow), so that they can reach a higher level when they're ready, rather than admitting children to programs regardless of readiness, and then patting ourselves on the backs because we "solved" the problem. Lack of opportunities results in part from lack of skills, and that problem won't go away when we put kids into programs they aren't prepared for.

I understand that these people may be trying to make things better, but they just make things worse. It's better to be honest and give unprepared kids work that is at their level and let them work at their own paces.

Consider the following logic:

(1) Intelligence is positively correlated with income and other measures that comprise SES.
(2) Intelligence is highly heritable. One finds estimates of about 75% in the U.S.
(3) Given (1) and (2), the children of high-SES parents are ON AVERAGE more intelligent than those of low-SES parents.

The idea that all subgroups have the same average potential is theoretically implausible, and it does not appear to be empirically true, either. There is an interesting graph
at http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/03/edunihilism-and-early-childhood/ in a post "Edunihilism and Early Childhood" by Matt Yglesias . Achievement test gaps between children of less-educated and more-educated mothers are largely in place by age 3. That does not prove the gaps are largely genetic, but it is suggestive.