All children should be taught in mixed-ability classes to boost standards and self-esteem among all students, according to a report.
Uhn hunh……where does this come from?
The study, by Teach First, which recruits top graduates as trainee teachers in tough inner-city schools,
Hmm….and of course \”top graduates\” who go off and work in inner city schools are not going to be ideologically driven lefty gobshites, are they?
Oh no.
No experience of teaching, but plenty of being a bright lad in a class driven at snail’s pace by a dumbo; and in another subject, being the dumbo feeling totally inferior and cast aside by the subject’s mysteries.
The brighter ones at best ignored me, but at worst taunted my thickness. Yes, that really increased my self-confidence, thanks a bunch.
The man quoted who said this leads to mediocrity is wrong – the sanil’s pace is way below that.
Alan Douglas
I heard some moron bigging this up on R4 this morning. Said moron had the temerity to suggest that because the evidence in favour of streaming was not absolutely definitive, we shouldn’t do it.
[BANGS HEAD] Is the evidence that mixed ability classes are better absolutely definitive?
Would it not have to be to counter the most obvious common sense/intuitive approach – that teaching a group of children of similar ability is going to easier and more productive that trying to teach to all sorts of different levels at once?
It gets half it’s money from the state, so it’s pretty much a fakecharity too.
The odd thing is that most of the rest comes from the sort of top-flight businesses you’d think would run a mile from the further dumbing down of the curriculum and the interfering of the socialists…
“The man quoted who said this leads to mediocrity is wrong…”
Well, yes. Mediocrity is what we have NOW. God knows what we’ll have if these people get their way.
My entire education was ruined by the boredom brought on by constantly being held back. Meanwhile, children with less intelligence, constantly had to compare themselves to those with whom they had no chance of competing.
Not fair all round.
Serf,
Holding you back was ideologically sound in the opinion of those doing it. This was acknowledged by the headteacher of my primary school in Scotland: when I was 6 years old and finished all the books for the year rather quickly she denied my teacher’s request for more books for me as “it would make the other students feel bad”.
When I was an undergraduate I volunteered as a teacher assistant at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School for Girls in Islington (now famous for Alexandra Burke). Streaming is absolutely essential. Even within a given stream the variation between student abilities is hard to handle.
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
Yep, makes perfect sense. Put the best and the brightest in with the, umm, rest to improve the standards and self-esteem of the, ummm, rest.
But why stop at school. I think it’d do wonders for the self-esteem of the local ‘C’ grade tennis competition to force Andy Murray to play in that league. It’d do his standard of play the world of good as well.
I was essentially expelled from the State education system (the LEA had no mechanism to advance me any more years than they had already, so they said to my parents: get rid of this kid and send him to prep school or we wash our hands of him.) Thank God. Mixed-ability classes are tantamount to child abuse.
This country is doomed.