NCLB leaves average and gifted kids behind?

When I was in school, I generally tended to fall in the upper end of the ‘Average Students’. As such, I never received much attention from teachers. I wasn’t a brilliant genius who could make a teacher or a school look good at an academic meet, and I didn’t need any remedial help with my schoolwork. I just showed up. And from my end, that’s about all I bothered to do too. I never had much enthusiasm for school, I skipped when I could, but I at least did the minimum amount of work required to hand in each assignment.

The only year that actually changed for me was in Grade 9. I didn’t get any academic attention that year, but I did find out my teacher enjoyed the same types of fiction as I did. For the entire year, we swapped books and suggested authors to each other. And that was all the attention I needed. Just that little bit of connection between me and one teacher, and my entire attitude toward school changed. I worked harder, cared more, and bumped myself to the top of the class.

The next year, that connection absent, I reverted to the old habits once again.

All this is prelude to my comments on a report released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute called “High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB”

The report claims that:

Congress was quite clear about NCLB’s objectives. Right on its cover, it’s termed “An Act to close the achievement gap.” Congress followed through with accountability mechanisms that have one clear and explicit purpose: drive up the achievement of low-performing pupils. As for students on either end of the spectrum, indeed all youngsters who could already be termed proficient,  NCLB’s core provisions treat them with benign neglect. Let them fend for themselves. Let someone else worry about them. Let them eat - well, whatever is left over at the bakery when the bread runs out.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that one of the results of the NCLB is that gifted students are gaining little ground. That’s simply a necessary part of the design of the act. After all, the achievement gap can’t close if all groups improve their performace at an equal pace — that’s simply moving the gap up the scale a little, not reducing it.

And while I agree that it’s a travesty to ignore the gifts and talents of advanced students, the statistics seem to show that advanced students have college educated, strongly participatory parents who can lobby for them, or get them outside tutoring if they wish.

I wonder if the greater tragedy is that, now more than ever, those average students with the potential for greatness are being ignored. The average students, by far the largest portion of a class, are the least likely to get any one on one attention from a teacher. After all, they’re doing fine.

Likewise, of the home educators I know, quite a number are homeschooling kids who are either gifted or special needs.  Would those parents have considered homeschooling if their kids were in the ‘average’ range? Would they pull them out of government schools where  “they’re doing just fine?”

Is “just fine” as good as it gets for someone labelled Average?

Maybe they’re the most chronically ‘left behind’ group of all.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Homeschooling, Random Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.