You also seem to misunderstand how students are assessed for special education or gifted classroom in our county. For special education, the county provides extensive assessment by psychologists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, etc. as needed. In the gifted program in our county, students are reassessed at each 9 week progress report and 18 week semester. Children who are not in the gifted program have multiple opportunities each year to test into the program through various methods — cognitive testing, standardized testing, overall classroom performance, or demonstration of unique qualities that make a teacher suspect the child might benefit from the gifted program. Unfortunately, because that program is only one day a week, the children can’t accomplish anything long term there. This sort of ability grouping works very well — the flaw is the inadequacy of the time period spent there (one day a week won’t do it) and that the rest of the time is spent in a mainstream classroom.

I’m willing to bet that you’re reading articles on this subject that provide confirmation bias. You believe “differentiated instruction” works, so you seek out articles that say that and feel vindicated that they exist. Perhaps you should try hitting websites and forums aimed at parents of gifted students, however, if you’d like to be pointed in the direction of articles that show how differentiated education does NOT work well for many gifted students.

We want to level the playing field because we know, as teachers and parents and grownups, that there is so much that we do not know. Especially where people are concerned.

We can design tests to measure “ability” or “intelligence.” But frankly, we often have a hard time even defining what intelligence is, or what raw ability is. It’s hard to test something you can’t define.

Heck, it’s hard to accurately test things you CAN define. (Ever had a rapid strep test? Don’t they always send it to a lab to be sure?)

If we take a student’s temperature on one or two measures and declare them to be of “high ability” or “low ability” there is a fairly high probability that we will get something wrong — either because our tests are flawed or because we aren’t even measuring the right thing.

If we put the “high-ability” students on a high-ability track, tell them they are smart and expect great things out of them, we will probably get good results. Partly because of their ability, yes, and partly because of how we’re challenging them.

If we put the “low ability” kids in a “low ability” track with low expectations, they know it, even if we aren’t telling them. If we don’t challenge them with “high ability” material, they’ll never have a chance to prove that they are “high ability.”

Now what if, by some unimaginable trick of fate, there was a mistake in our assessment of ONE out of the MILLIONS of kids we test in American schools every year? What if just ONE ‘gifted’ kid got accidentally placed in a “low ability” track? What would that kid do?

Would he ask for more homework and beg for a place in a higher educational track? (A track which, the school system assures him, does not exist?) Or would he finish his homework early and spend the rest of the time cutting up? Invent his own code language so he could pass notes to his friends and not get caught? Dream up ways to disrupt class the next time he’s bored?

I think your mis-classified “gifted” kid would be in the principal’s office more often than not. He would probably be both “low ability” and “a troublemaker.”

What if this is already happening? What if our assessments are missing profound levels of ability in students who are labeled “low performing?” A lot of kids in “low-ability” groupings today act exactly the same way a “gifted” kid would act in the same situation. They are bored and they are labelled and they don’t see a pathway out, so they act up, or they doze off.

Now imagine a different approach. Imagine a challenging curriculum for ALL students. And imagine that students are asked to work in small groups to master sections of that curriculum, then share the material with their peers. Imagine that students are encouraged to be good team players, helping each other master portions of the curriculum that are difficult for them.

Actually, you don’t have to imagine. SMART people have done research on this. And every indication is that in the situation I’ve described above, “low-ability” students learn more; “high-ability” students learn more thoroughly and get a chance to develop emotional maturity and people skills; and discipline problems drop precipitously (because everyone is “on task.”) And, you know, in that environment, being SMART becomes something that is valued. “That smart kid, I want him on MY team.I want to be like him.”

So that’s why we want to level the playing field. Because it’s very hard to pick a league champion or a Most Valuable Player at the beginning of the season. Because, no matter how good you are, you can’t score if no one gives you the ball.

As a parent, you may be asking, “What’s in this for Captain Science?” Well, no matter how good he is at STEM, when Captain Science grows up he won’t be doing surgery on himself. He won’t be doing structural tests on every bridge he drives over. He won’t be doing a health inspection of every restaurant in his neighborhood. It behooves us all to spread the wealth of knowledge, because we depend far more than we know on the intelligence and ability of others.

After eight years of teaching, I’ve begun to realize that most of the trendy stuff is developed by “educational consultants” who couldn’t hack it in the classroom. The REAL teachers do go through periods where we daydream about quitting teaching to do consultancy (and triple our income), but personally I couldn’t live with myself.

Also, I got my early childhood ed/early childhood special ed degree in 2003, and we were never taught about differentiated instruction. I get the concept, but I would guess that most of these public school teachers can’t implement it because no one ever showed them how.