I have a hard time believing you grew up with learning disability because you always come across as a very smart and articulate person.
I wanted to address the issue of equity in education that a few people have raised, and this statement illustrates very well some of the points I'd like to make.
Some people have lamented some of the changes that have been taking place in education systems over the past 2 to 3 decades, namely the dismissal of tracking systems (or sets or streaming, as some of the posters here are calling them), in favor of a system that "lowers the bar" in an effort to cater to the masses. The appalling statement that "resources should be devoted cultivating the intellectually gifted kids rather than spent on programs to 'close the gaps.'" was even made. People have given personal evidence of how the tracking systems they grew up with worked well enough for them (notice, though, these are individuals who were in the fast tracks, or higher sets), and the truth is that they're right -- the fast track programs
do work very well for the kids fortunate enough to be placed in them. The problem is that they work well at the expense of everyone else. Kids in the slower/lower tracks are given fewer opportunities, less differentiation, and usually a poorer quality of education overall; and importantly, when the bar is set low, children rarely fail to stoop to its level. Whether or not you adhere to the Pygmalion effect, it is undeniable that separate cannot be equal.
Now the question becomes, "
Should it be equal?" There are a few things to consider when answering this question: First, and most obvious, is the fact that not all people are equal when it comes to intellect or academic capability. Second, is the fact that people have different skill sets (or in the teacherspeak: different intelligences), so that a kid who is a genius in mathematics may be almost completely illiterate, a child who can grasp difficult abstract concepts may struggle with the basics of spelling or 2+2=4, a kid who can do pages upon pages of immaculate algebra may be able to divide 49 by 7, but not understand
why 49/7=7 (this is an exceptionally common problem these days as the education system drifts more towards facts and away from knowledge). Children with learning disorders and emotional disorders end up in lower-functioning groups, even when they are perfectly capable academically. Third, and perhaps most importantly when considering the implications of this debate, is the fact that standardized assessments
do not work -- they have been proven again and again to be inaccurate and biased, so that (for example) African American males are vastly overrepresented in special education and underrepresented in honors/gifted/fast track programs, as are children from families of lower soceo-economic status. Some people may be content to let the few achieve greatness by squashing the many, I say that the few who will achieve greatness will do so, that does not mean everyone else should be denied the opportunity to try. I know this screams "leftist teacher idealistic philosophy," but you might be surprised at how effective teaching from this philosophy can be, for
every child.
The major concern with the discarding of tracks and the implementation of things like Inclusion classes (classes which contain "special ed" and general ed students), is that the bar must be set lower to accomidate slower kids, and therefore the average and especially the gifted kids' educations will suffer. This is a valid concern, but can be addressed very simply, if not easily, by changing the way we teach. Firstly, the bar must be done away with entirely. Prior to the 60's the goal was to "teach to the middle." And if the students were divided into tracks or sets, the teacher taught to the middle of those sets. To allow every student to really get the most out of a lesson, from the slowest to the most gifted, the lesson must be open-ended. It is difficult to explain this concept but easy to illustrate it, so, here is an eample of a math lesson taught to a 3rd grade inclusion class early in the school year. The class had students ranging from the LD and mildly mentally retarded (one student had an IQ in the mid 80's), to the gifted (at least 3 students were reading at or above the 7th grade level), and everything in between, including two boys with Asperger's who were being mainstreamed into general education from a self contained Autism special ed program:
The lesson was algebra. The students were told about the "smallest candy store in New York," that sold only three kinds of candy, chocolate bars for $.25, kisses for $.15, and gum for $.10. On the outside of the store is a sign reading "Only one dollar bills accepted, no change will be made." The children had 40 minutes to figure out how many different combinations of candies they could buy. They were allowed to work in groups for part of the period and individually for another part of the period.
The aim of this lesson was not actually to find the ultimate answer of exactly how many combinations there really are. The math behind that is very complex for an 8 year old. However, the lesson was well-designed, so that the highest functioning kids in the class were well on their way to developing the equations that would allow that: a lesson that teaches the development of algebraic equations to third-graders? Sounds adequately challenging for gifted kids to me! The kids who were more average in math used multiplication and division to solve the problem, again, using different strategies like manipulatives to solve the problem, and therefore generating the functions on their own rather than being simply given formulae to memorize by rote -- a fairly advanced activity. The kids who struggled at math used addition and subtraction, and practiced money counting skills. Every child had the opportunity to rise to the highest level of achievement.
All the students were given equal instruction, all in the same class, and neither was the bar lowered to accommodate slower kids, nor was the lesson inaccessible, leaving kids behind. This is how differentiation works, and how we can do away with tracking and
improve the quality of
every child's education.
As an important aside, the kids in this class were occasionally grouped by skill level for some lessons. There is nothing wrong with this, as children do have different abilities. However, these groups are flexible and changeable in two important ways, the one being that kids who were in the highest math group, might very well have been in the lowest reading group, and the other being that, unlike in traditional tracking programs, the kids could move easily between the groups, moving up or down as their skills developed or when they needed extra practice.
When this approach is implemented children learn, and they learn well -- better, in fact, than when taught with a traditional approach. In fact, the program I teach is part of a research study investigating these very techniques (and specifically, the integration of art, music, dance, and drama into literacy education), and over the past 7 years our students have consistently and greatly outperformed their peers (with statistical significance) in reading and writing across various curricula and as assessed by several objective and subjective tests. It is a simple answer to the question of equity in education. But as I said before, it's not easy. Most people, including most teachers, were not taught this way themselves, and so don't have the personal experience to draw upon. Teachers are usually not well trained in this kind of teaching either. The biggest hindrance, though, is the legislation and politicization of the educational system as it stands today. As I mentioned before, in an bid to satisfy the tests, the trend in education is toward facts and away from knowledge. The kind of teaching I am describing teaches children to think, rather than to simply do. As it stands, teachers in NYC public schools are expected to spend 90% of the day on reading, writing, and mathematics, and 10% on science, social studies, and art. If we spent 50% of class time on reading, writing, and maths and 50% on science, social studies, and art, we would have a far better educated, and a far more intelligent populace. And, if we turned the trend back toward knowledge, teachers would have the time to teach differentiated lessons like the math lesson I described above.
In summary, there are problems with teaching and learning today, but the solution isn't to turn the clock backwards -- after all, the approaches we are lamenting today were implicated because the system was flawed before: it is only through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia that we see the system of our childhoods as the height of quality. And as to how this relates to intelligence? I mentioned before that most people have a false idea of intelligence as something innate and immutable. The fact is that, while there are differences in potential for every child, the brain is too complex an organ and intelligence too varied and complex (and nigh indefinable) a concept to accurately judge what the potential and limits of individual children really are. Therefore, creating an educational system based around these preconceived notions of ability is simply not good enough.
