Widening the “Middle”

Educators love labels; we like to use acronyms and initials to classify things.  We also love to label children. We might say a child “needs help”, “not motivated”, “average, above average”, “smart”, all of which pigeon-hole children into categories. This practice isn’t exclusive to teachers; parents love to label their children as well.  In many instances parents demand we label children in order to help them understand where their child stand in relation to the other children in the class.  It is a practice that does more damage than good.  I fear with the increase in testing that it will only get worse. 

Statisticians will tell you that all data has a normal distribution; or that most examples in a set of data are close to the ‘average’, while relatively few examples tend to be to one extreme or the other.  If you apply that same concept to children on a grade level, most children are in “the middle”.  Yet in our practices we do not follow this statistical fact; we shirk the middle and have an overabundance of labels for the outliers. 

For example, we average over 20 students per grade in our AGP program (with one grade at 31) while the national statistic should place the number closer to 10.  We used to have two classes in the MS (50-60 students) identified as accelerated and earn HS credit in science and math.   Currently over 17% of our district is classified with an IEP and another 9% are ESL 

We shrink the “middle” when we should widen it.  Rigor and high expectations MUST be the norm for all our students.  We need to stop labeling (and mislabeling) them.  The outliers should receive the programs and educational experiences they need and deserve. Everyone else should have the same challenging exposure to content.   This current year we enrolled every 8^th grader into regents Algebra; we took a course that traditionally was available to only 60 students and now over 200 learn the content. This week’s 8^th grade midterm our children had a 75% passing rate.

 The curricula changes we are planning for next year in the area of science continue this plan.  Every child will receive a more rigorous exposure to science; and in addition and more importantly a hands on experience that demonstrates real life applications of science. It is our intention that holding a higher expectation for all of our students will result in a greater number of students reaching their potential.