State schools admit they do not push gifted pupils because they don't want to promote 'elitism'

[Danno 1,228]

State schools admit they do not push gifted pupils because they don't want to promote 'elitism'

By LAURA CLARK

As many as three-quarters of state schools are failing to push their brightest pupils because teachers are reluctant to promote 'elitism', an Ofsted study says today.

Many teachers are not convinced of the importance of providing more challenging tasks for their gifted and talented pupils.

Bright youngsters told inspectors they were forced to ask for harder work. Others were resentful at being dragooned into 'mentoring' weaker pupils.

Previous studies have pointed to a widespread ideological reluctance in schools and local authorities to champion academic excellence (file photo)

In nearly three-quarters of 26 schools studied, pupils designated as being academically gifted or talented in sport or the arts were 'not a priority', Ofsted found.

Teachers feared that a focus on the brightest pupils would 'undermine the school's efforts to improve the attainment and progress of all other groups of pupils'.

More...

School lends pupils iPhones to use as 'educational tools'... and they even get £15 to buy apps

Head teachers told inspectors that ministers had failed to give a strong enough signal that catering for gifted pupils should be central to schools' work.

Schools are meant to identify the top 5 to 10 per cent of pupils as 'gifted and talented' and ensure they are given appropriate tasks to help them achieve their potential.

By September 2010, such pupils should expect to receive written confirmation from their school of the extra activities and master-classes they will benefit from.

The schools in the study, 17 secondary and nine primary, were chosen because they had been told to improve provision for gifted pupils.

Previous studies have pointed to a widespread ideological reluctance in schools and local authorities to champion academic excellence.

A separate study has called for the introduction of academic selection at the age of 13 or 14 to identify pupils who excel at science.

The study, by Professor Alan Smithers and Dr Pamela Robinson of Buckingham University, said it was 'a nonsense' that specialist science schools were barred from selecting pupils according to their ability in science.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12...l#ixzz0ZjXMPAQS

[Niels Bohr 72]

Dumbing down school standards.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

The Daily Outrage is good at this kind of thing. But think about it for a minute.

You are a teacher, you have a hundred demands on your time - you are overworked, underpaid and the schools funding and your job security are dependent on the volume of students "passing" standardised tests. Is the focus of your time on pushing those who need no help with the required curriculum or on the kids who need the help to achieve a passing grade on the material?

[Danno 1,228]

The Daily Outrage is good at this kind of thing. But think about it for a minute.

You are a teacher, you have a hundred demands on your time - you are overworked, underpaid and the schools funding and your job security are dependent on the volume of students "passing" standardised tests. Is the focus of your time on pushing those who need no help with the required curriculum or on the kids who need the help to achieve a passing grade on the material?

While I do get what your saying at the teacher level, what system would not have programs built in, to identify and place these these students accordingly?

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I expect that there are. What is missing from this article is an explanation of how the UK education system is actually run (I guess because its a UK paper its assumed that people know this, but then again probably not - since The Daily Mail is a notorious tabloid outrage paper) - there are local education authorities in different districts that have some latitude to run the schools in their own way - so long as the curriculum and the government tests are adhered to (Parliament is only interested in statistics).

As with a lot of things, the quality of what you get is dependent to some degree on where you live. Pragmatically - it is what it is.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Its also interesting that the article mentions sports and the arts. We do have scholarships for arts and sports students but there isn't as big an emphasis on those things as there is in this country.

AFAIK there is a bigger emphasis on English, Mathematics and the Sciences. Both sports and the arts are optional at the GCSE level.

[Niels Bohr 72]

The disappointing thing back in the 90s when I was I school, everyone focuses on arts and sports. Those kids who scored high on the National Mathematics Olympiad, National High School Mathematics Exam, PSATs for inductance to the John Hopkins Merits Program hardly ever gets recognized openly. They bring them to a restaurant for a gathering, and that's it. Everyone else had open welcome with the prep rallies, etc...

Heck, the top 10 wasn't even recognized. More people talk about the high school dropouts than those who goto college.

Edited December 15, 2009 by Niels Bohr

[Usui Takumi 1,562]

Daily Mail, nuff said.

[Jenn! 918]

I think tracking used to be done from an early age, i.e. subdividing schoolchildren into groups according to their academic achievements. I remember reading and math groups when I was a kid. As far as I'm aware, that's not done as much anymore - too damaging to the self-esteem of those in the "remedial" groups, I imagine.

Meh, our plan is for private school when the time comes.

[Peikko 1,575]

Daily Mail, nuff said.

Indeed! This has 'Gypsies jump to the front of NHS queues' written all over it.

Mind you, I'm surprised Danno didn't find a nice Melanie Philips article to drool over.

How about this one Danno?

Link

Just for once, the Archbishop is right ... treating Christians as cranks is an act of cultural suicide

By Melanie Phillips

Last updated at 8:51 AM on 14th December 2009

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, comes in for a lot of stick - not least from columnists like me.

But in the past few days, he has said something important. He has criticised Government ministers for thinking that Christian beliefs are no longer relevant in modern Britain, and for looking at religion as a 'problem'.

Many Government faith initiatives, he observed, assumed that religion was an eccentricity practised by oddballs, foreigners and minorities.

Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has attacked the Government for treating religious believers as 'oddities'

This is not just a seasonal exercise in special pleading by a Church leader. Dr Williams has put his finger on what should be a cause of extreme disquiet - the war of attrition being waged against Christian beliefs.

In recent times, there has been a string of cases in which it is no exaggeration to say that British Christians have been persecuted for expressing their faith.

In July, Duke Amachree, a Christian who for 18 years had been a Homelessness Prevention Officer for Wandsworth Council, encouraged a client with an incurable medical condition to believe in God.

As a result, Mr Amachree was marched off the premises, suspended and then dismissed from his job. It was a similar case to the Christian nurse who was suspended after offering to pray for a patient's recovery.

Christians are being removed from adoption panels if they refuse to endorse placing children for adoption with samesex couples.

Similarly, a Christian counsellor was sacked by the national counselling service Relate because he refused to give sex therapy sessions to gays.

What this amounts to is that for Christians, the freedom to live according to their religious beliefs - one of the most fundamental precepts of a liberal society - is fast becoming impossible. Indeed, merely professing traditional Christian beliefs can cause such offence that it is treated as a crime.

Take, for example, the case of Harry Hammond, an elderly and eccentric evangelical who was prosecuted for a public order offence after parading with a placard denouncing immorality and homosexuality - even though he was assaulted by the hostile crowd he was held to have offended.

Or look at the case of the Vogelenzangs, a hotelier couple from Merseyside, who last week were cleared of a 'religiously aggravated' public order offence after being prosecuted for insulting a Muslim guest.

While their behaviour may have been offensive and unwarranted, it is nevertheless a source of wonderment that for the police, 'hate crime' doesn't seem to occur whenever Christianity is pilloried, mocked and insulted - as happens routinely - but only when a minority faith is in the frame.

Indeed, the Archbishop's complaint echoed an earlier Church-backed report that accused the Government of merely paying lip service to Christianity while focusing support on Muslims.

The curious fact is that Labour's hostility to faith is highly selective. It does everything it can to protect and support minority creeds while appearing to do everything it can to attack Christianity. The root of this double standard is the unpleasant prejudice that minority faiths hail from cultures where people are less well-educated and so cannot be blamed for their beliefs. This, of course, is a deeply racist attitude, and is commonly found on the Left.

As Dr Williams observed, one of the effects of the modern hostility to religion is to give the impression that faith is not really very British. But on the contrary, it is part of the national psyche - even among people who don't go to church.

To stop the denigration of religion, the Archbishop has called on government ministers to be more willing to talk about their own faith. But since this is seen as the province of cranks, politicians are reluctant to do so because of the risk of public ridicule.

This well-nigh insuperable difficulty was acknowledged yesterday by Tony Blair in an interview about his religious beliefs. As his former spin doctor Alastair Campbell once famously observed: 'We don't do God.'

This is because among the intelligentsia, the animosity to religion runs even deeper than the upside-down value system of the multicultural agenda. It springs from the fixed view that reason and religion are in diametrically opposite camps.

Anyone who prays to God must therefore be anti-reason, anti- science and antifreedom - in other words, an objectionable, obscurantist nutcase.

But this is the very opposite of the truth. Rationality is actually underpinned by Judeo-Christian beliefs.

Without the Biblical narrative, which gave the world the revolutionary idea of an orderly universe that could therefore be investigated by the use of reason, science would never have developed in the first place.

And it was the Judeo-Christian belief that all individuals are made equal in the image of God that gave rise to human rights and democracy.

Of course, terrible things have also been done in the name of religion. And equally, people without religious faith can believe in freedom and equality, and lead moral lives.

But that's because they draw upon a culture that rests on religious foundations. Strip away those foundations and what's left would be a brutalised and chaotic society.

You don't have to be a religious believer to be mightily concerned by such a likely consequence. But anxiety over fundamentalism has resulted in rising hostility to all religion.

Notably, however, this is not the case in the U.S., which remains overwhelmingly an upfront Christian society. Its politicians are neither ashamed nor embarrassed to call upon God to bless America at every opportunity.

Unlike U.S. mainstream Churches which, as descendants from the English Puritans, remain deeply wedded to the Biblical tradition, the Church of England has always looked down on true Scriptural believers as half-wits.

With such a half-hearted foundation of religious belief, it has been more vulnerable than other Churches to the secular onslaught against religion.

Dr Williams exemplifies this weakness by trying to go with the flow of social change and is for ever apologising for Christianity.

Certainly, it did some terrible things in the past to people of other faiths. But it is also responsible for the astonishing achievements of western civilisation.

Rather than complaining about politicians, Dr Williams should use his office to teach the nation about the seminal importance of Christianity to this society. But to do that, he has to have faith in his own Church - a faith that too often appears to be lacking.

The key point about the U.S. is that it still believes in itself as a nation and in its values, which are rooted in religion. Loyalty to their churches follows from loyalty to the nation in a kind of benign cycle.

In Britain, however, religion and nation have formed a vicious cycle in which hostility to the country's identity and values reflects and feeds into hostility to the religion upon which they are based.

The Archbishop's anguish at the onslaught upon Christian faith is very real. But unless he starts promoting the Church as the transcendental custodian of a civilisation rather than the Guardian newspaper at prayer, the society to which it gave rise will continue to sleepwalk off the edge of a religious and cultural cliff.

Enjoy

[PlatyPius 5]

The Daily Outrage is good at this kind of thing. But think about it for a minute.

You are a teacher, you have a hundred demands on your time - you are overworked, underpaid and the schools funding and your job security are dependent on the volume of students "passing" standardised tests. Is the focus of your time on pushing those who need no help with the required curriculum or on the kids who need the help to achieve a passing grade on the material?

In other words, strive for a general level of mediocrity?

Sounds about right.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

In my wifes class (not your typical student population), sending districts check with their students once or twice a year to make sure they "like" going to this school and if they don't, they get pulled out and sent elsewhere. So the focus, and this comes straight from the administration, isn't on teaching but on making sure the kids like being there. The whole thing is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money.

[rebeccajo 14]

The disappointing thing back in the 90s when I was I school, everyone focuses on arts and sports. Those kids who scored high on the National Mathematics Olympiad, National High School Mathematics Exam, PSATs for inductance to the John Hopkins Merits Program hardly ever gets recognized openly. They bring them to a restaurant for a gathering, and that's it. Everyone else had open welcome with the prep rallies, etc...

Heck, the top 10 wasn't even recognized. More people talk about the high school dropouts than those who goto college.

That's not new behavior in the US school system. Ever watch the movie "October Sky"?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Daily Mail...gotta love Danno's taste in fine journalism...

Here's the Federal program that my stepson was recently tested for in a (gasp) public school:

The Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program, authorized by Education Code (EC) sections 52200-52212 (Outside Source), provides funding for local educational agencies (LEAs) to develop unique education opportunities for high-achieving and underachieving pupils in California public elementary and secondary schools who have been identified as gifted and talented. Special efforts are made to ensure that pupils from economically disadvantaged and varying cultural backgrounds are provided with full participation in these unique opportunities.

LEAs may establish programs for gifted and talented pupils consisting of special day classes, part-time groupings, and cluster groupings. GATE curricular components are required to be planned and organized as integrated differentiated learning experiences within the regular school day and may be augmented or supplemented with other differentiated activities related to the core curriculum, including independent study, acceleration, postsecondary education, and enrichment.

link

[Chica Yeyé 41]

Its also interesting that the article mentions sports and the arts. We do have scholarships for arts and sports students but there isn't as big an emphasis on those things as there is in this country.

AFAIK there is a bigger emphasis on English, Mathematics and the Sciences. Both sports and the arts are optional at the GCSE level.

WORD. I have a lot of respect for the UK and the French's K-12 systems. Academic tracking is not seen as a sin like it is here - and school is about knowledge, not freaking hoop-shooting or cheer-screaming.