A stunning 60% of parents in Palo Alto, California supplement their children’s math education through private tutors, extra workbooks and other means, “mostly because they feel Palo Alto classes aren’t challenging enough,” according to results of a district survey cited in the San Jose Mercury News.
The district conducted an online survey of about 1,200 elementary school parents, and will compare its results with another survey taken next spring, after students have spent a year learning the district’s new Everyday Mathematics curriculum. During the debates over the controversial Everyday Math program, adopted as the district’s new curriculum in April, many parents said Everyday Math is confusing and doesn’t teach basic math skills. Parents frequently said they would have to supplement their children’s math education.
Nearly 63 percent of parents surveyed said their children don’t need extra help in math. However nearly six in ten said they provide extra math work anyway to challenge their kids. Palo Alto is the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, where engineers and scientists are legion. “They have a low-expectation math program in a community where there are high expectations for math,” one former school board member tells the paper.
I can’t help but view this through the lens of the spirited, ongoing tracking discussion prompted by Will Fitzhugh’s piece on “athletic tracking.” Granted, what’s happening in Palo Alto is about a poorly received curriculum, but it’s driven by the perception kids aren’t being challenged enough. It’s useful to be reminded that parents of more advantaged children will go to great lengths to make sure their kids excel. One has to wonder how poorer potential high achievers without access to tutors or even advanced classes (if we insist on mixed ability classrooms) will possibly compete with the likes of these Palo Alto whiz kids.
Or maybe we’re OK with that?
The 15,000 pupil Stamford, Connecticut school system, ”among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking,” is abandoning the practice, which the New York Times describes as ”an uncomfortable caste system.” But if the Times is so concerned about tracking, asks Will Fitzhugh, why are they silent on “the complete dominance of athletic tracking in schools all over the country?” As unbelieveable as it seems, deadpans the editor of The Concord Review, there is no real movement to eliminate it.
Athletes in our school sports programs are routinely tracked into groups of students with similar ability, presumably to make their success in various sports matches, games, and contests more likely. But so far no attention is paid to the damage to the self-esteem of those student athletes whose lack of ability and coordination doom them to the lower athletic tracks, and even, in many cases, may deprive them of membership on school teams altogether.
Fitzhugh observes that the elimination of tracking is a product of educators who are ”more committed to diversity and equality of outcomes in classrooms than they are in academic achievement.” I would also add that mixed ability grouping on sports teams is not unheard of. The New York Mets have been doing it for years.
One of the most revealing aspects of Fordham’s report on high-achieving kids in the era of NCLB is the accompanying teacher survey:
The national survey findings show that most teachers, at this point in our nation’s history, feel pressure to focus on their lowest-achieving students. Whether that’s because of NCLB we do not know (though teachers are certainly willing to blame the federal law). What’s perhaps most interesting about the teachers’ responses, however, is how committed they are to the principle that all students (regardless of performance level) deserve their fair share of attention and challenges.
This precisely describes my experience teaching 5th grade in the South Bronx. A teacher in a school where the majority of kids read below grade level is unlikely ever to be asked what he or she is doing for kids who are at or above grade level. The immediate concern is triage.
Continue reading ‘The Smartest Bears in the Zoo’
Recent Comments