My School Experimented with 'Education Equity.' It Failed

The single most important skill that can be taught in school is autodidactics, learning to learn independently. That can be taught just as well with everyone in the same classroom as otherwise, because it is not done by lecturing the class as a whole, or otherwise teaching the same content to the whole group at the same time. That's the mistake this experiment made and why it failed. It is done by requiring and allowing each student to pursue their own study at their own pace. That is, by replacing the regimented assembly line Prussian model of education with a model of individuals breaking their own paths through trial and error.

This is not a new model but the default of the old one-room schoolhouse, where the toddler learning to read sat next to the teenager learning to read Latin. In this model the teacher's job isn't to directly implant knowledge into the students' neural nets, it is to guide them to the correct trail head when they are ready for it, and nudge them back on track as needed. Doing this for each of thirty kids is harder than making one lesson plan for the same group and insisting that they work in synchrony. So it can take more teachers per student to do well and looks inefficient to the Prussian, until you examine the results. Particularly the results of the most capable students who would otherwise be paralyzed and repulsed by boredom. But also of the least capable who would otherwise learn little unless the whole class is taught to the least common denominator.

This scheme seems to assume that the school environment can be the great equaliser, but thinking of the different backgrounds: you're going to have kids who are sleep deprived, malnourished, have difficulties with English, have vastly different social skills, and completely different attention spans.

How could a single class or teacher smooth over those without a boarding school like environment?

I wonder how much this issue is oversimplified by being held at the national level. I’m certainly pro tracking in general, and I’m certain there are plenty of people who philosophically think that putting people in the same class is “equity”.

But I imagine at a poor school, and I think the Wire made this implication, that some kids will be tracked into something that barely represents education at all.

Sure the wire has the special class for the corner kids, and that was great! But it seemed heavily implied it was an expensive class and without that money it wouldn’t have existed.

It has long been known that if you want the highest possible achievement, split up students along ability lines (even if that means starting to ignore age).

That will produce the highest highs. This has been known for centuries. Everyone in education will have been taught this.

The point of the administrators effort was not to improve students' outcomes ... and that means that, despite failure, it's probably not over. This saves money.

One of my relatives was put in an honors track in 2nd grade years ago and the intro talk to parents was:

"We are separating your child because they are exceptional. To put this in perspective, the children as exceptional on the other end of the learning spectrum cannot tie their own shoelaces."

Regimenting all children the same is obviously a horrible idea to anyone that cares about the child ...

Educating gifted kids is a special needs issue. Daisy topping is savage.