This article is dead on. We lost the direct and precious way of teaching to a method of wishy washy find your own way instruction. Two of my kids this doesn't work and they are always lost. Direct and clear; repetition; and assessments are bad words in public education. I believe this is one of the biggest reasons our racial gap is so large.

This article is so true in my experiences. I am a special educator and have seen many kids "labeled" because of the curriculum, rather than true disability. As a parent of two bright children, I was fortunate enough to take them away from the constructivism in Madison schools and ground them in traditional educational practices. Now, we have one at West-which still uses more traditional approaches, particularly in math and science, thank goodness. We have one at Cherokee, and the math he brings home to do as "homework" is not getting to the heart of what he needs to know to be a mathematician, or for that fact even a good problem-solver. The math "book" doesn't even have examples to review and use when doing the homework. It's awful for learners who need to "go back" and review concepts. We don't even HAVE the books that they've "completed". And, I was one of those who paid for a tutor for actual teaching. I know, some will think I don't get it, but I've also worked with general and special education teachers trying to TEACH this curriculum, and few have had enough professional development to do it well.

I thought this teacher made an especially good point under her section below:

"Under-Performing Gifted Students

The push for egalitarianism was also designed to ignore exceptional, or gifted, students. The all-inclusive classroom where special ed students were blended with regular and gifted students produced another fad called “differentiated learning.” This is a teacher’s nightmare to plan. It is, therefore, usually an unproductive environment for most students.

In the inclusive classroom, a teacher ends up focusing on the neediest children because that is the goal for egalitarians. The regular and gifted students are considered able to fend for themselves. They aren’t. They lose academic opportunities and growth. And they lose their patience, as most humans do when their needs are continually dismissed or openly ignored. A gifted student will shut down as much as any special ed student because he hasn’t learned basic and general strategies on how to approach a solution. Neither one wants to look dumb. “Better to be thought that way than prove it,” they say.

One of the saddest stories I heard was from Dr. Ruby Payne, who conducts professional development training for teachers who work with students and adults from poverty. She explained that third-grade African American boys who showed signs of giftedness were often labeled “emotionally disturbed” and placed in special education. (ADHD children’s symptoms also mirror those of gifted children.) Part of that problem resulted from not knowing how to measure giftedness outside of scores on math and reading tests. Another part was in seeing giftedness as exceptionalism and that was to be downplayed. These children then became under-performing or major disciplinary problems as their own needs, often ones that saw them wanting to work alone, weren’t met in the highly interactive, noisy, motion-filled classrooms designed, teachers thought, to meet lower-performing students’ needs (girls and minorities, except Asians)."