Friday, August 31, 2007

“Failing our geniuses, poor Black and Hispanic students, boys, girls, students with disabilities….”

In a recent article in Time magazine (“Failing our geniuses,” August 16, 2007), John Cloud writes about an education system so focused on the goal of minimal proficiency for all students that “we may be squandering a national resource: our best young minds.” The problem, according to Cloud, is an “education system [that] has little idea how to cultivate its most promising students.” Although I was put off by the elitist themes in the Time article, Cloud does have a point. There are lots of students, not just gifted students, whose needs are not met by the trend toward one-size-fits-all curricula focused on bringing all children to the level of minimum proficiency. Lately, many educators and educational policy makers have argued that schools do not do a very good job of meeting the needs of boys. This follows more than two decades of research showing that many girls are poorly served by public schools. The persistent achievement gap, in which poor Black and Hispanic children, on average, under perform relative to their White counterparts, provides strong evidence that schools aren’t meeting the needs of many poor and minority students. The continued expansion of special education is further evidence that significant numbers of children are poorly served by public schools.

I have a somewhat different perspective on public schooling in this country. I think there is lots of evidence that many students – boys, girls, Blacks, Hispanics, special ed. and gifted students – are well served by their teachers and schools. Still, increasingly standardized curricula inspired by No Child Left Behind make it difficult for many teachers to accommodate the diverse needs and backgrounds of their students. The problem isn’t teachers, students, school administrators, or teacher educators but inflexible structures that imagine homogeneous groups of mostly “average” students who are expected to learn the same things, at the same time, at the same rate. To truly meet the needs of all students, pushing all students as far as they can go as learners, we need to create classroom structures that are congenial to the range of students in our classrooms. Readers and Writers Workshops, for example, provide teachers with large blocks of time to collect rich assessment data and to work with students individually and in small groups. However classrooms are organized, teachers must have the flexibility to provide instructional support that responds to the needs of individual students and the opportunity to conduct the kind of assessment that insures that instruction is targeted to what students need to learn. I believe that flexible classroom structures targeted to the learning of individual students can accommodate even “our best young minds.”

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well said.
-Felisa

Anonymous said...

I couldn't agree more. As a Coordinator of Gifted Education in a midwestern, suburban, public school district, teachers are constantly expected to do more with less. They are told they must differentiate instruction yet are provided with very few resources (in terms of materials as well as personnel) to support their efforts. Since most materials and resources are designed to fit the average child (who exactly is that?!) teachers are on their own to differentiate their curriculum. Unfortunately our best and brightest often draw the short straw.

Anonymous said...

In the first grade my son was reading at the 5th grade level. He learns very easily. He's now in 2nd grade. Yesterday his teacher sent home a page of problems with sums up to 5 for each of the kids to do, then color. Apparently she thinks that since some kids don't know them yet, all of the kids should practice them. This was probably kindergarten level work. There are only 20 kids in a class nowadays--can't teachers individualize more to meet the needs of some of the brighter kids? What can I do for him to make up for these mind-numbing assignments? I'm afraid that when the work challenges him one day (Physics, Calculus) he won't be prepared to be challenged, because everything is being geared to meeting standards. .

Anonymous said...

I gave up teaching in the public environment to create a private school where I can control the environment and curriculum. I have found that challenged children achieve well beyond state defined age milestones. When discipline is expected in the classroom and supported by the parents the process of engaged learning can be enjoyed by all. My only problem? Tuition isn't free.