<p>The GFG, I don't get the connection between post 540 and post 531. Homogeneous classes are a form of tracking. Separate small groups within a mixed abilities age-based class is another form of tracking. What's to prevent the uber-competitive parents from demanding that their little Johnny be put in the gifted class or whatever the upper class is called? I gather that this is indeed what happens where gifted classes are available.</p>
<p>Our district spent a fortune trying to teach teachers how to teach in differentiated classrooms (say that fast three times:) It was so insane...I couldn't agree more. </p>
<p>I am not against fluid laning...provided that kids at young and tender ages have a chance to try whatever they want to try. I find that eventually water seeks its level anyway. </p>
<p>When my son was going through they did not let him accelerate in math because the principal just was against sending kids to the high school. The principal was eventually fired and now kids routinely go to the high school for math. I think my kid would like math a lot more (he is very good at it) if he didn't have to go so slowly. In ninth grade, I let him take an independent study class...it was his absolute favorite math class of all time. A math PhD student from the nearby university taught him and he was happy as a clam at high tide. Now he has a terrible text and his school won't let him take Calculus out of sequence...they won't let him test out of their fuzzy theoretical precalc class. My husband says it's a total waste of time, but the school won't budge. Needless to say, my son's love for math is not being nurtured. Just an aside vent. Sigh.</p>
<p>"My husband says it's a total waste of time, but the school won't budge. Needless to say, my son's love for math is not being nurtured. Just an aside vent. Sigh."</p>
<p>I hear you. We were lucky we got an extra almost unheard of math skip for my son. We just asked them to please, please give him a final exam and see how he did. So in the fall of 6th grade he took the 7th grade final. He did fine and further proved that we had made the right decision when he got the 2nd highest score in the school on the AMC8. For what it's worth (future reference for those with younger kids?) my son thought Pre-calc was a waste of time - he said the material could easily have been covered in a semester and wished he'd done it in summer school like some kids. One thing I'll say about our school system - in elementary school the school wouldn't budge, but we had a few teachers who did anyway. The middle school hated budging, but is beginning to realize that there are a few kids each year who really need more than the standard acceleration. The high school is wonderful . They really will do whatever you ask - the trouble is knowing which courses are skippable and which aren't.</p>
<p>marite: Sorry, you're right, the connection wasn't very clear. I'm not sure I've got it worked out yet in my own mind, lol. But here's how I've seen this play out in my experience: Tracking within a heterogeneous class does not improve the education for anyone, mostly due to the logistical difficulties of teaching on three levels at once. But when ambitious parents learn that there exist different groups for math or reading, they of course must ensure that their little darling ends up in the top group. Hence the start of Kumon and tutoring and summers doing workbooks. In this way, the aware parents with economic means can compensate for any deficits and will eventually over-compensate. Their little darling moves first to the top of his grade, and in time as he progresses through tutoring ends up a year, or two or three years, above grade level. The school must now respond with appropriate courses for these children. (This is how the high school ended up with colllege math classes above Calculus BC.) At that point, the parents and their children have entered the black hole of elevated aspirations and the stranglehold of spiralling competition with like-minded peers. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the children in the lower levels receive less teacher attention because her time and energies are divided among several groups. They also gain awareness that their abilities are below that of others, and may experience discouragment and lowered self-esteem. They tell mom and dad "I'm not very good at math." The performance gap widens.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if the school tracks into homogeneous classes, the education is better-tailored to the individual student. At first there may be fallout, but eventually the groups are settled and people forget. The fact that tracking is happening isn't so noticeable on a daily basis then, because all the kids in the class are doing the exact same thing and have the exact same homework. Tonight it was in-our-faces because I could see that some kids had different versions of the same worksheet hanging on the wall. You don't think the parents whose kids had the "dumbed-down" version didn't notice? Some of them will be hiring a tutor immediately.</p>
<p>On page 28 of this thread in comment #425, TheGFG posted this humorous and all-too-true comment on subjects covered in today's schools:
[quote]
1. diversity and tolerance
2. disability awareness
3. bully-proofing and conflict resolution ("I messages)
4. stranger danger, internet safety, physical privacy and related topics
5. drug and alcohol education/peer pressure/refusal skills
6. self-esteem development
7. minority-specific social issues
8. the every-changing food pyramid and healthy eating
9. recycling
10. conservation/ecology--S learned about whales every year, but now I think they're into lizards and Darwinian creatures of the Galapagos Isands.
[/quote]
Here's a real-life example from a South Texas public elementary school:
[quote]
FREEPORT — Velasco Elementary School’s principal said he has been taken aback by a controversy that has arisen from his campus’ Mexican Independence Day celebration, and he apologizes for offending parents. During a short school assembly Friday, several parent volunteers read a pledge of allegiance to the Mexican flag. Since a parent complained on the Chris Baker show on NewsRadio 740 KTRH that afternoon, the issue has become a focal point of some Houston talk radio shows.</p>
[/quote]
</a></p>
<p>GFG...boy, you really hit it on the head in 544.</p>
<p>IMO, unless a child is super-gifted in math, it can work well to compact the curriculum for the faster students (let them learn the material quickly at the beginning of each class and then move on to interesting problems---like you might see in Continental Math League, e.g.---while the rest of the class does more repetition. The problem with accelerating the slightly faster kids is they may not make it all the way through an extra year of material and so it's messy to deal with, especially in the transition to HS math classes.</p>
<p>Sometimes, I wished they would just have a unified system where kids could move along at their own pace irrespective of grade level, like they did in the old one-room schoolhouses. Homeschoolers can do that, but I gues it's harder with hundreds of kids and several subjects to manage in our public schools.</p>
<p>
[quote]
....but is beginning to realize that there are a few kids each year who really need more than the standard acceleration.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The key word is FEW. Kooky parents push for their kid to move faster as well, and the rat race begins. My town has a so-so public h.s. It would be 1000% stronger if nepotism & connections didn't play such a role, both in the hiring of teachers and the placement of students. Doesn't matter if the mayor's daughter is the village idiot, she'll be slotted into an honors track & drag the whole class down. That recent grad of a no-name education school who earned the lowest GPA in the school's history? No problem being hired here & placed on the tenure track if he is the town attorney's nephew.</p>
<p>Realtors are still bragging about the school system because it ranks above neighboring districts with more serious problems. Lots of denial here. The '05 val went to Princeton, so a big fuss was made & the Board of Ed can milk this one for a while. I know the boy & he and his small gang of bright students taught themselves the advanced math needed for AP & SAT IIs. The math teachers are that bad! So about 10 kids (out of 350) were admitted to Tufts, Brown, NYU, Swat, etc. The kids deserve all the credit. Guidance counselors aren't aware of SAT II requirements, and kids who do make it to ivy and elite schools have researched it themselves.</p>
<p>GFG:</p>
<p>As I said before, we seem to inhabit such different universes. As a first grader, my S was part of a separate group for advanced second graders because the teacher was willing to form such a group; again in 7th grade, he was part of a group of advanced 7th and 8th graders. At no time did parents try to get their children to join these two groups; they remained stable throughout the year. Outside of math, the kids did not constitute separate "tracks."
I never heard of parents rushing to the Kumon math center. I know that there is one in our city, but I did not get the impression that it was known among our school. If I had not been told about it by an Asian diplomat, I would never had known what it was all about.
One year, I expressed frustration about what seemed to me the inadequate math curriculum to another parent: "review, review, review..." It turned out that he was all in favor of review as his daughter was weak in math. He made me think that the problem was that I had a kid who was very advanced in math (true) not that the curriculum was weak (which I continue to think it is compared to the curriculum of other countries). The daughter in question is now at a top LAC.</p>
<p>Teaching mixed classes is enormously difficult. But the two best k-8 schools had combined grades and thus inherently mixed classes. While the teachers acknowledged the difficulty, they liked the fact that they had the same kids (and their parents) for a two-year period, that the older kids helped them get the new kids familiar with the expectations and practices of the class, etc...We hired teachers with the ability to use this approach in mind. A few years ago, when I attended the reception for NMSFs, I found out that over half of the NMSFS came from our school, and practically all the others from the other combined grades school (2 out of 15). Just a couple came from a program that specifically drew advanced middle schoolers from their regular k-8 schools., though it did not offer a more advanced curriculum.</p>
<p>symphony, your words are music to my soul!</p>
<p>Sticker--don't you just hate those district brag sheets? The one I received last night particularly irritated me because my S was responsible for bringing to the school several of the honors listed, and I can tell you the school had absolutely nothing to do with his accomplishment. And while the district can claim credit for our mediocre SAT average, I don't think there's one NMF/MNSF/NMCS who got the high SAT scores he got because of school quality.</p>
<p>Marite, it's not just Kumon. We have another busy learning center in town, and numerous others in neighboring towns with similar educational profiles. In addition, public school children attend summer classes held at the area private prep schools. Others of course do CTY and EPGY and university programs for high schoolers. So the resulting high achievement of these students (that the district loves to highlight to boost real estate values) masks the underlying reality for the majority of children who parents can not afford these enrichment programs. I'm not saying their education is awful--we are a rich suburban school, after all. But I am saying that the supplemental teaching allows our district to deny problems with our curriculum, teaching methods, and teacher qualifications.</p>
<p>"The problem with accelerating the slightly faster kids is they may not make it all the way through an extra year of material and so it's messy to deal with, especially in the transition to HS math classes."</p>
<p>The other problem is that if they skip they still end up in a math class that moves too slowly. It's a problem, ideally I'd like to see some of both, but I think for some gifted math students you have to do some acceleration. Believe me, you can run out of enrichment topics!</p>
<p>GFG:</p>
<p>I hear you. I can't say much about the math curriculum or math-teaching in our school since my S pretty much taught himself or was taught outside classes. But our school got parents involved in the hiring of teachers. Parents formed committees with teachers to wade through cvs and took part in hiring decisions. For some reason, we had trouble filling out positions for 5/6 grades (lots of turnover) but we were all pretty happy with the results of our hires for other grades.
A complicating issue was that S did not want to be grade-skipped, and neither did the other advanced kids save two siblings, who were admitted into H & Y respectively at 16.</p>
<p>Although I generally think that tracking is a good idea because it enables teachers to focus on teaching rather than on "differentiating," I have to admit that tracking can be harmful to kids who move from one district to another. Educational philosophies differ drastically in different communities, and kids who move can suffer as a result.</p>
<p>My kids started school in a New Jersey district that used whole-class instruction for all subjects until eighth grade, at which point the only distinction made was that some kids would take algebra while others wouldn't. In any classroom, all students were doing the same work except for special ed kids, whose assignments might be modified.</p>
<p>When kid #1 was in 6th grade and kid #2 was in 3rd grade, we moved to a Maryland district where there was differentiation within the classroom at the elementary level and tracking at the middle school level. Neither kid was allowed into the high tracks/groups at first because they hadn't been in high tracks in NJ (because there were no high tracks). </p>
<p>The elementary schooler had no problem. She was placed at first in the middle groupings within the classroom in all subjects but quickly established that she could do more. Because the different levels were in the same classroom, the teacher could easily and informally move her from one level to another.</p>
<p>The middle schooler had a tougher problem. Because the different tracks were taught in different classrooms, there was no easy, low-risk way to give him a chance to try the higher tracks. He had to fight his way in through testing and petitions, one subject at a time. It took him three years to get to the point where he was allowed to take honors-level courses in all academic subjects -- and I'm not sure that he would ever have reached that point if he had not proven himself by accident. In seventh grade, he was scheduled into honors science by mistake and forced into honors foreign language because of a scheduling conflict. His success in both courses helped us convince the school that he could succeed in honors courses in other subjects.</p>
<p>Of course, if we had a national curriculum and uniform national education policies, this sort of thing wouldn't happen. But that's a subject for another thread.</p>
<p>While I am not a teacher now, a few years ago I earned my teaching license and spent several years in both middle and high schools. I wrote a research paper on tracking and spent a lot of time puzzling through the problem.</p>
<p>Vermont is a strong believer in mainstreaming students and heterogeneous classes, and differentiated instruction is the new keyword. In middle school especially, many bright students are bored in some classes. In other classes, with teachers who taught to the top students, the ones on the bottom floundered.</p>
<p>From the bright students’ perspective, heterogeneous classes are horrible. But from the average and below-average student perspective, tracking is horrible. I taught in a middle school in 8th grade, the first year the kids were split into classes based on their math ability. The kids who didn’t make the algebra class reacted. They now knew they were “dumb.” It wasn’t pretty, what that knowledge did to their attitude and their feelings about school. As a teacher, it really is nicer to teach a heterogeneous class. Teaching a class with only low-level students is very difficult and not fun. And I do think that differentiated instruction can work, but only sometimes and only if the teacher gets a LOT of training and support and extra materials.</p>
<p>I had to laugh at the image of the parents rushing out to get their kids tutored so they could be in the top group. That would never, never happen here.</p>
<p>And a comment on solving repetitive math problems – my daughter’s strength isn’t in math, but she’s OK at it. Her learning style is that she really needs to solve problems over and over again to master the material. In fact, that was a point of contention last year in her pre-calc class – her teacher refused to give her extra problems to solve, and she spent hours on the Internet trying to find problems so she could study for tests. (In retrospect, we should have gotten her a tutor, but that just never occurred to us until it was too late.)</p>
<p>Marian: Your story is what educators here in Vermont would jump on as the example of why tracking is bad (tracking is a dirty word here. Only elitists talk about tracking). </p>
<p>There is a BIG gap in education between theory and practice. Educators get all these great ideas and then mess up implementing them in the classroom. Tracking in theory has benefits. But making it impossible for a kid to change tracks is bad.</p>
<p>Marian:</p>
<p>I am the product of a uniform national (French) curriculum and I see both good and bad sides. Tracking supposedly is not on ability but interest. So students who are interested in the humanities go into one track, regardless of abilities; students interested in math go into another track, again regardless of ability. They all have to study the same subjects but at different pace, depth and doses. All 12th graders are exposed to calculus, but the math/science types get more of it, for example.
The problem is that that tracking is at an early age and does not take into account sudden blossoming of different interests; and it does not deal with the different abilities of students in the same track. Classes, even in private schools, typically have 40 students, and the teachers tend to teach to one particularl level of ability. For lots of students, it's sink or swim as the teachers are hell bent on covering the curriculum. The sinking happens at end of the year exams. As a result, it's common for students to repeat grades even before they take the baccalaur</p>
<p>Marian, I moved d to our public middle school because a crazy new principal in her Catholic school eliminated any honors track, claiming "elitism." While she had no honors tracking record, she had great standardized test scores, including those CTY exams & the SATs (sat for it in 7th grade, maybe? I forget.) When I met with the principal to complete her registration, he told me that even though she had straight As, she might be blown away by the rigor of the middle school. Luckily I had been warned by people who had experience at the school & I insisted on all honors. Thank God, becaue it was mind numbingly slow. And she's not a genius, like Marite's son. </p>
<p>This principal, by the way, is a former gym teacher who earned his principal credentials (whatever that is in NJ) at the local no-name teachers college. He's a big strong guy who can put troublemakers in a wrestling hold, but not the brightest educator I've encountered. That about sums up my town's educational offerings.</p>
<p>I had one of those gifted math students. Basically. his middle school teacher gave him books and let him study on his own. In 9th grade, he got in trouble for reading ahead in book, instead of following the lecture. Fortunately, teacher was astute and, while in took a month, they devised an exam and moved him up two grades. He attended a college classes from then on. During school hours, he tutored others. The districct had to change some rules, but now a precedent is set. Looking back, I think they could have incorporated on-line programs into the curriculum. We didn't discover the Stanford program & state program (free) for physics and English 4 until he was a junior and needed to complete these courses. (I learned from CC)</p>