But it is a false dichotomy. You can both offer resources to the ones behind and support high achievers.
The latter can pretty much teach themselves with little hands on guidance, you just have to avoid actively sabotaging them.
Many western school systems fail that simple requirement in several ways: they force unchallenging work even when unneeded, don’t offer harder stimulating alternatives, fail to provide a safe environment due to the other student’s disruption…
That's a good point.
Maybe you can have all quiet and focused students together in the same classroom?
They might be reading different books, different speed, and have different questions to the teachers. But when they focus and don't interrupt each other, that can be fine?
Noisy students who sabotage for everyone shouldn't be there though.
Grouping students on some combination of learning speed and ability to focus / not disturbing the others. Rather than only learning speed. Might depend on the size of the school (how many students)
For what it's worth, that's how the Montessori school I went to worked. I have my critiques of the full Montessori approach (too long for a comment), but the thing that always made sense was mixed age and mixed speed classrooms.
The main ideas that I think should be adopted are:
1. A "lesson" doesn't need to take 45 minutes. Often, the next thing a kid will learn isn't some huge jump. It's applying what they already know to an expanded problem.
2. Some kids just don't need as much time with a concept. As long as you're consistently evaluating understanding, it doesn't really matter if everyone gets the same amount of teacher interaction.
3. Grade level should not be a speed limit; it also shouldn't be a minimum speed (at least as currently defined). I don't think it's necesarily a problem for a student to be doing "grade 5" math and "grade 2" reading as a 3rd grader. Growth isn't linear; having a multi-year view of what constitutes "on track" can allow students to stay with their peers while also learning at an appropriate pace for their skill level.
Some of this won't be feasible to implement at the public school level. I'm a realist in the sense that student to teacher ratios limit what's possible. But I think when every education solution has the same "everyone in a class goes the same speed" constraint, you end up with the same sets of problems.
Counterintuitive argument:'No one left behind' policies increase social segregation.
Universal education offers a social ladder. "Your father was a farmer, but you can be a banker, if put in the work".
When you set a lower bar (like enforcing a safe environment), smart kids will shoot forward. Yes, statistically, a large part of succesful kids will be the ones with better support networks, but you're stil judging results, for which environment is just a factor.
When you don't set this lower bar, rich kids who can move away will do it, because no one places their children in danger voluntarily. Now the subset of successful kids from a good background will thrive as always, but succesful kids from bad environments are stuck with a huge handicap and sink. You've made the lader purely, rather than partly, based on wealth.
And you get two awful side effects on top:
- you're not teaching the bottom kids that violating the safety of others implies rejection. That's a rule enforced everywhere, from any workplace through romantic relationships to even prison, and kids are now unprepared for that.
- you've taught the rest of the kids to think of the bottom ones as potential abusers and disruptors. Good luck with the resulting classism and xenophobia when they grow up.
There will always be a gap between kids who are rich and smart (if school won't teach them, a tutor will) and kids who are stupid (no one can teach them). We can only choose which side of this gap will the smart poor kids stand on. The attempts to make everyone at school equal put them on the side with the stupid kids.
Not sure if counterintuitive or not, but once you have such social mobility-based policies in place ("Your father was a farmer, but you can be a banker, if put in the work") for a few generations, generally people rise and sink to a level that will remain more stable for the later generations. Then even if you keep that same policy, the observation will be less social movement compared to generations before and that will frustrate people and they read it to mean that the policies are blocking social mobility.
You get most mobility after major upheavals like wars and dictatorships that strip people of property, or similar. The longer a liberal democratic meritocratic system is stable without upheavals and dispossession of the population through forced nationalization etc, the less effect the opportunities will have, because those same opportunities were already generally taken advantage of by the parent generation and before.
You say we should provide those ahead a safe environment.. but that's what accelerates social segregation and leaves those other poor kids behind