Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Discrimination in schools.

We have all heard of NCLB - No Child Left Behind - a commendable effort to improve the education of children who are not as "bright" as others. The discrimination that I am concerned about is to the "bright" students. I have a grandson who is extremely intelligent. He has a very high IQ, but he has to be held back to learn at the rate of the child with the lowest IQ.
I was educated in England in the UK. We had levels in our school. For example the 4th grade would have a 4A, 4B, 4C and 4D. The way it worked was this - the smartest most intelligent were in the A stream, and so on. At the end of each year there were exams. The 10% of students who tested highest moved up to the next grade and the 10% of students who tested lowest went down. For example if you were in 4C and were in the top 10% you went into 5B. If you were in the lowest 10% you moved down to 5D. And so on. This way you were always with students with approximately the same intelligence. So you didn't have to wait until the guy with an IQ of 80 understood. He would be in the D stream and be taught with other students of the same intelligence. makes sense to me.
My grandson has to sit around doing nothing while the teacher spends all his/her time on the students with the lowest IQ's. He could, and should, be pushed to achieve. Perhaps he would be able to do something to find out why some people are of lower IQ's than others. Perhaps he would be able to develop ways to teach these students. We will never know, because he has to be held back, "To be fair to the others with a low IQ." How dumb can we be?

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David.