Dealing with a diluted curriculum

To ensure that kids with poor work habits are able to pass their general courses, general courses have become challengeless trifles.

Originally published in the Moultrie News.

What can be done about a child who is an all-A student taking courses above her grade level yet despises school as “stupid, slow, and boring?” She considers herself to be not especially smart, just motivated to learn. We have several friends with the same problem: they have bright kids who are bored with school because of its glacial pace and lack of a challenging learning environment.

The glacial pace and lack of a challenging learning environment are the results of schools’ errant attempts to reach failing students. Examine the widespread efforts to accommodate (versus educate) lower-achieving kids and you’ll see they generally dilute the elixir for everyone. One good example, which you allude to, is higher-level courses in lower grade levels.

To ensure that kids with poor work habits are able to pass their general courses, general courses have become challengeless trifles. That has resulted in a lot of thumb-twiddling for ordinary, reasonably motivated students, of which there are many — too many to simply send up to a higher grade. In response, districts have started pulling higher-level courses down to stagnant, bored students, resulting in absurd situations like algebra being taught in the sixth grade.

Anyone outside of the educational bureaucracy realizes this “solution” causes more problems than it solves. It doesn’t even touch the issue of watered-down general courses. Also, it simply isn’t possible to administer a borderline college-level course to large numbers of tweens without watering it down beyond recognition.

That’s a problem for students like your daughter, who is now taking a high-level class modified, reduced, and weakened so ordinary kids can swallow it. Imagine you’re a physically fit adult who enjoys exercise, so you sign up for an advanced aerobics course. Once there, you find that most of your classmates are flabby and lazy. To accommodate them, the instructor spends most of the class handing out celery snacks and assigning fifteen minutes of speed walking. That might give you an idea of what our most advanced students feel like in their “advanced” courses.

So how can you help your daughter as she slogs through the remaining years of her education? Here are two suggestions.

One is to recognize that your school may not get better anytime soon. That doesn’t mean teachers aren’t doing their best; they assuredly are, but they’re only permitted to maneuver within a flawed system, and nearly every pressure forced upon them from above is about raising test scores of low-achievers.

That’s where it’s on your shoulders to fill the breach. Ask to meet with your district’s head of gifted students. That person likely has a heart for kids like your daughter; he or she may offer you supplemental curricula you can administer yourself or recommend a recourse. I know it’s discouraging that your school isn’t properly educating your daughter, but remember that the school exists to help you do your job, not to do it all by itself. If its help is substandard, the responsibility is ultimately yours to see that your daughter gets what she needs.

Second, consider reframing your daughter’s view of education. In the 21st century, we tend to think that education's sole value is in our children’s personal growth and achievement. But it also has a broader purpose. As Marian Wright Edelman wrote: “Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.”

Looking at it that way, your daughter can view her learning talent as a gift and the school’s glacial pace as an opportunity to share her gift with struggling classmates. Her school counselor can assist, perhaps by having her help pull-out students. Ideally, it shouldn’t be this way, but if your journey lags because of weary caravanners, you can stall in frustration or get behind them and push.

It is unquestionably a regrettable situation. But until schools realize their good intentions are hurting education, parents must help their kids swim against the current in an environment where sinking to the bottom is the easier way out.

Read the original column here.