Ideology of Fairness Forces Education Into Chaos

The system is broken and getting worse as witness the chaos at the university level where political correctness in high schools was main-streamed, grouping the slow learner with those with actual abilities and desire to learn, brings those same unquailed students to the next level of education to cause the same problems that they caused at the lower levels.

Where's the equity in that? Where's the fairness for the student that wants to lean but is held back by the ignorance and ideology of a few that forces their personal agenda on the many, and is successful because the many are unsure of who they are and what their responsibility is to education and the community.

Another Devastating Unintended Side Effect of the System’s Appearance of Fairness Imperative
By John Merrifield

The widespread perception that, “any sort of tracking is classist and racist” is very costly. Former Assistant Secretary of Education Michael Petrilli notes that it leads to excessively diverse public school classrooms that often suffer disruptive behavior from the bored or overwhelmed classroom outliers, and that such disruptive behavior is especially harmful to the especially talented and determined low SES (socioeconomic status) students.

Of course some actual and possible ways of sorting children into different schools, or different classrooms in schools, is arguably “classist”, and indirectly racist because of the persistent correlation between some races and SES. But extrapolating from counter-productive tracking practices that we dare not consider sorting children by anything subjective (only age and place of residence) continues to be a very costly barrier to school system improvement.

Ability grouping by subject is functionally appropriate because the vast majority of children have strengths and weakness, and because doing ability grouping by subject correctly would greatly improve teaching environments to the huge benefit of students and teachers. And ability grouping by subject should be politically appropriate because it doesn’t deserve the stigma of tracking whereby children are sorted into groups as if they are equally talented and motivated in every academic subject.

But the critical differences between one-dimensional tracking and ability grouping by subject are widely ignored. On a totally different subject, that sort of dissonance reminds me of the devastation gradually overwhelming our urban highway systems because of the inability by some, and thus unwillingness by others, to make the critical distinction between a toll road and a road with rush-hour-only tolls; congestion fees we need to implement so that we spend minutes commuting, instead of hours.

Allowing self-sorting, probably by learning style or subject theme preference, will place public school classroom outliers to settings better for them, and thus avoids the disruption that often results from boredom and disconnect in a classroom not working for them. That would help talented and determined low SES (socioeconomic status) students the most.

Until we can achieve universal school choice, politically (outside Nevada), we can recognize extraordinary talent as the special need that it is (for the student and society), and afford them school choice through laws that target school choice expansion to “special needs” children; laws that are much easier to enact