Where isn’t @plthomasedd these days? Talking top down crisis @dailykos
I had this entry bookmarked, didn’t see at first it comes from our own Dr. Paul Thomas. Now the neoliberals are lamenting the neglect of our high achieving students. They are now in crisis. Do our moments of crisis ever end?
Although, I will say this, from my anecdotal experiences. There’s a definite middle that schools are after. Basically, it’s a numbers game for a lot of teachers. How can we devote limited resources most efficiently? Unfortunately, a lot of educators determine pretty early who is going to succeed and who will fail on the mandated state tests. The extremes are pretty easy to determine. Those “high kids” will do fine and those “low kids” aren’t going to see out of basic or below basis or whatever. But it’s that malleable middle, the fence-sitters, the handful of students that will put the school on one side of passing or the other, they are the ones that receive the vast majority of extra time and attention. I’ve seen this happen.
So let’s look at those “high kids” for now. In a lot of cases, many of them are not at all gifted in the strict sense of the term. It’s statistically impossible for roughly 30 kids out of a 100 to be gifted. But, because some are well-behaved or rarely cause trouble, they are seen as good students. When you have teachers who ability group
Although, I will say this, from my anecdotal experiences. There’s a definite middle that schools are after. Basically, it’s a numbers game for a lot of teachers. How can we devote limited resources most efficiently? Unfortunately, a lot of educators determine pretty early who is going to succeed and who will fail on the mandated state tests. The extremes are pretty easy to determine. Those “high kids” will do fine and those “low kids” aren’t going to see out of basic or below basis or whatever. But it’s that malleable middle, the fence-sitters, the handful of students that will put the school on one side of passing or the other, they are the ones that receive the vast majority of extra time and attention. I’ve seen this happen.
So let’s look at those “high kids” for now. In a lot of cases, many of them are not at all gifted in the strict sense of the term. It’s statistically impossible for roughly 30 kids out of a 100 to be gifted. But, because some are well-behaved or rarely cause trouble, they are seen as good students. When you have teachers who ability group
