Is this idea a better alternativge to the 'No Child Left Behind" BS?

Question

Allow ALL students (K-12) to advance at their own rate.
This system has shown to be 100% effective! Smart and bright students are abled to remained challenged in any or all of their studies while those that need remedial aid are offered more attention that they need and deserve. This truely keeps all children in the game at their proper level.
Following the Bell Curve, there will be as many underachievers as over achievers, with the bulk advancing at the same relative rate.
This keeps all students challenged, without the feeling of boredom or despair.
It IS true that the high and low ends of the spectrum realize that they are special (either in needs or abilities), but they will know this anyway, as life sorts these things out in the long run.
One thing for sure, underachievers will become motivated to perform better to avoid the social stigma that is associated with low intelligence.
All people are not equal in abilities, to treat them as equal harms everyone.
Your thoughts?

Answer 1

whoo i love that :)

my biggest problem with no child left behind though is the funding for it.

right now, the government decides to cut funding for high achieving schools and gives it to lower achieving schools. so theyre punishing the good schools for doing well on tests.

what really bugs me about that though is that in my district, there are schools on both ends. there is mission san jose, which is one of the highest rated schools in the US, and kennedy high school, which is well known for its low performance and gang violence.

the thing is, msj gets its funding cut while the money goes to kennedy. there though, it isnt a question of special needs or such, the people there just dont want to learn, and they tsill get more funding anyway.

darn bush and his shortsightedness. and im sure some NSA freak is watching me virtually right now. how creepy.

anywyas, i like your plan though. i never got why all the higher achieving students were forced to stay behind, boring them to death, while the lower achieving students were pushed forward, creating immense pressure for them. i like how you took the social viewpoint into account too.

Answer 2

I do not believe so. I feel that allowing students to advance at their own pace would enable too many non-motivated students to fall farther behind. It also does not take into consideration teachers who are not as motivated as others to oversee the successes of students. Questions are likely to arise:
What part should students play in learning?
What are their responsibilities?
What can we do to raise the amount and quality of student effort to the levels that excellence requires?

Good questions, yet we are hardly ready to reinforce these notions until we have restuctured our educational system so that we are able to employ a classroom for such notions.

Teachers need continual training for this NO Child Left Behind, that we can hardly keep up with, better yet actually achieve this ideal!!
Unless the untapped power of student effort and engagement is activated and harnessed to learning, we are unlikely to realize the benefits to achievement that the new reforms aim to make possible.

Answer 3

I am not an educator, but it makes sense to me.

I've seen kids get "social promotions" who reached far into high school as functional illiterates.

With brutal honesty, my old high school English teacher, Mrs. Frances Tisdale, always greeted her Freshman students with this blunt statment: "I am teaching the college-bound students. If you are not college-bound, keep up the best you can. I will not wait for you, nor will I hold back." She was tough as nails, and could be mean as a snake, but I dearly loved her.

I believe that Mrs. Tisdale would have approved your idea. She'd like letting students progress at their own best rate, at least she'd approve as long as she got the honors class and someone else was stuck with the slow learners.

Doc

Answer 4

Not everyone is equal. That's the real world you might as well get use to it. Everyone should go to the school of their choice. The failing schools will fail and go out of business.