I agree that teacher training programs are laughable and rigor has been lamentably lost, but I strongly disagree with your dismissal of shifts toward equity. CRT has nothing whatever to do with my own district's recent decisions to finally pay attention to our low income students.
I taught in my small town, nearly all white-- but half r…
I agree that teacher training programs are laughable and rigor has been lamentably lost, but I strongly disagree with your dismissal of shifts toward equity. CRT has nothing whatever to do with my own district's recent decisions to finally pay attention to our low income students.
I taught in my small town, nearly all white-- but half rich, half working class -- town a decade ago. The "gifted" students were actually just the "rich" ones. I taught the non-honors, College Prep (they were not preparing for college) level, and my students were not ungifted, they were just from the wrong side of the tracks, or in our case, the hill towns. I know this is true because I asked my stronger readers and writers directly why they had not signed up for Honors. They told me they did not want to be grouped with the rich kids. A district admin admitted, "There are no poor kids in Honors Math." The seismic shifts that would be required to pull off your bullet list of proposals are not up to bureaucrats to enact, they are up to us as a citizenry to demand, and as it stands now, the only people who demand stuff are the well-educated, upwardly mobile parents whose kids, ironically, would do just fine on their own with a laptop and wifi.
My daughter will be in the first freshman class at that high school in their new untracked, unleveled system, and it's about time.
Whatever she may lose in rigor, I hope will be made up in the education she and her classmates will get in what actual citizenship looks like. People of all walks of life together in one room, compelled to work together. Where else in the US do we see that happening today?
I don't care if we produce the next Einstein. China can "win." I care about turning our common ship in the direction of our founding promises. The civil strife we saw on Jan 6th is just an amuse bouche for what's to come if we don't do that.
The students being the most harmed by the non-tracking are not white kids...they are high-performing, but often poor, children from Asian backgrounds, as well as high-performing Black and Hispanic children.
You may want to look up the examples of Stuyvesant in NYC and Lowell High School in San Francisco. So no, your example of the rich kids being the gifted kids is a parochial experience not duplicated throughout the United States.
If you can't bring everybody up, then bring everybody down.
I agree that teacher training programs are laughable and rigor has been lamentably lost, but I strongly disagree with your dismissal of shifts toward equity. CRT has nothing whatever to do with my own district's recent decisions to finally pay attention to our low income students.
I taught in my small town, nearly all white-- but half rich, half working class -- town a decade ago. The "gifted" students were actually just the "rich" ones. I taught the non-honors, College Prep (they were not preparing for college) level, and my students were not ungifted, they were just from the wrong side of the tracks, or in our case, the hill towns. I know this is true because I asked my stronger readers and writers directly why they had not signed up for Honors. They told me they did not want to be grouped with the rich kids. A district admin admitted, "There are no poor kids in Honors Math." The seismic shifts that would be required to pull off your bullet list of proposals are not up to bureaucrats to enact, they are up to us as a citizenry to demand, and as it stands now, the only people who demand stuff are the well-educated, upwardly mobile parents whose kids, ironically, would do just fine on their own with a laptop and wifi.
My daughter will be in the first freshman class at that high school in their new untracked, unleveled system, and it's about time.
Whatever she may lose in rigor, I hope will be made up in the education she and her classmates will get in what actual citizenship looks like. People of all walks of life together in one room, compelled to work together. Where else in the US do we see that happening today?
I don't care if we produce the next Einstein. China can "win." I care about turning our common ship in the direction of our founding promises. The civil strife we saw on Jan 6th is just an amuse bouche for what's to come if we don't do that.
The students being the most harmed by the non-tracking are not white kids...they are high-performing, but often poor, children from Asian backgrounds, as well as high-performing Black and Hispanic children.
You may want to look up the examples of Stuyvesant in NYC and Lowell High School in San Francisco. So no, your example of the rich kids being the gifted kids is a parochial experience not duplicated throughout the United States.
If you can't bring everybody up, then bring everybody down.
The vast majority of school systems in this country look a lot more like Sheela's than like NYC/SF.