The kids are bored!

It’s official! America’s
school children want to work harder!

“You might think that the nation’s teenagers are
drowning in school work, but our report found the
opposite,” said Ulrich Boser, at the Center for American
Progress, who analyzed federal surveys of students.

“We found 37 percent of 4th graders say that their math
work is often or always too easy. More than a third of
high
school seniors report that they hardly ever write about
what they read in class,” said Boser.

Here’s my theory, based solely on casual observation,
and stuff I’ve heard teachers say.

The bell curve is a fact of life. In any human
endeavor, most people are in the middle — with a few who
always excel, and a few who never get it.

So if you want everyone to meet a certain standard, you
have a choice. You can move the standard to the left, or
shift the whole curve to the right.

If you have the money, you AMP up the education so you
can keep a high standard and bring everybody up to it.

But the curve will persist regardless!

Which means some will ALWAYS get it faster than others.

So the former low achievers are now high achievers, but
the former high achievers — are bored.

When I went to school, in the crazy sixties, kids were
divided into academic tracks. The idea was to bump you up
a track until you were no longer bored, or bump you down
until you were no longer overwhelmed.

But that began to look elitist, and so we replaced it
with the well-intentioned concept of No Child Left Behind,
only to come face to face with its insidious doppelganger:
No Child Sprints Ahead.

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