[Ohiogift] Education Week blog: Student Tracking vs. Academic Pathways: Different...or the Same?

[Margaret DeLacy]

Friends:

 Below is a link to an excerpt from a blog that appeared on Education Week today:
Student Tracking vs. Academic Pathways: Different...or the Same?
By Marc Tucker on October 15, 2015 6:25 AM

blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/10/tracking_vs_pathways_differentor_the_same.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news3

The most enduring feature of the American education system is its character as a sorting machine. But you would never know it from the way we think about our education system....

"There is only one antidote to the sorting mentality—new or old—and its insidious consequences. That is to stop adjusting the challenge level of the curriculum down to the presumed ability of the students. It is to set high standards for all students, not just some, and then to do whatever is necessary to get the students to those standards. That sounds impossibly naïve, but it is just what the top-performing countries do. Judging from their results, it works. "

Margaret comments:

After reading variants of this discussion for several decades, I think the fundamental problem is the buried assumptions in words such as "rigorous," and "challenging."  Obviously every student should be exposed to curriculum and instruction that is rigorous and challenging for him or her--something that often is missing today--but that doesn't mean that the same curriculum will be rigorous and challenging for all students of the same age.  If a handful of twelve-year-olds succeed in college classes (as we know they do) does that really mean that every twelve-year-old student should go to college and we should "do whatever it takes" to make them pass?  If not, than should we simply create a blanket rule that no twelve-year-old may go to college?  What about fifteen-year olds?  Where does this end?  To me, assuming that all students have exactly the same needs and interests and must reach the same level does sound not only "impossibly naive" but inhumane.



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