STEM Education Excellence

The issue is not teacher quality. Schools like Stuyvesant don’t actually have extraordinary teachers and most failing schools don’t have particularly bad ones. The reason bad schools are bad is because of the kids who attend them and because of the educational philosophies they are organized around. Students do best in a cohort of other students whose abilities and level of preparedness match their own. Classes move faster and cover more material when all the students are at the same level of preparedness. What’s more, in a mixed ability classroom, the lowest performing students will always get the most time and attention from the teacher, because teachers may be considered accountable for the failure of low performers, but there is no teacher incentive to push students who are at or ahead of grade level forward. In a school that deals with students with serious problems, where few students are at grade level and a third or more are chronically absent, the students who show up, behave themselves and perform within a range deemed adequate on standardized tests are given A’s and told they are doing well. In fact, they are far behind their peers at schools that don’t have these problems and fall further behind as they languish in classrooms where teachers are trying to triage all these problems. Progressive school districts are run by people with education degrees who have been trained to believe that all children are equally capable and can perform equally, so the goal of these schools is to take students with a range of abilities and bring them to parity. They believe chronically absent students do not come to school because the school is failing them, so they believe that to be a good school, they must figure out how to reach and engage those students. They believe behavior problems can be rectified with the right interventions. I cannot emphasize enough that while the schools are focused on all this dumb shit, the students who actually show up and want to learn are languishing. In school systems where everyone is white, they always do tracking by ability, and in school systems where nobody is white, they always do differentiated classrooms because they believe tracking is a fig leaf justification for segregation, even though the schools are segregated because the whites all pulled their kids out when the schools eliminated tracking. Nikole Hannah-Jones believes that all black people have to rise together. But the kids in the neighborhood school are going to spend their whole lives in the project they grew up in unless they go to prison. The only way a kid in that school gets to someplace better is to leave the rest of them behind, and the only way to give a kid in that school opportunity is to create a way for them to do that.