If I might say, schools in the past teached VERY badly (beatings were the least) and most of the time they only put people middle classed and above into them, if you were not at least middle class, you were in the mines. So comparing to today, people in the past, comparing socioeconomically, were a lot worst than today.
It’s like comparing poor kids today agains the sons of kings in the middle ages, there were gaps in education, not everyone went to school in the past.
In my experience, if you’re the smartest kid in your class, you’re not smart. You’re just in the wrong class.
Also, if you’re the dumbest kid.
But I’ll spot one further. Standardized testing exists to place students on a curve. You don’t want everyone failing. You don’t want everyone acing the exam. You want to be able to point and say “These are the good schools/students and the bad ones”.
Coincidentally, the wealth, the politics, and the ethnic composition of the districts tend to speak far louder to exam performance. Schools that are targeted for privatization can suddenly find their students doing very poorly, year to year. Schools that have a partisan administrator with friends at Pearson can find themselves doing amazingly well, practically overnight.
If there really were a single dimension axis of smartness, won’t there be a “smartest” and a “least smart” in every classroom? And if they’re in the wrong class and they leave, won’t there be two new pupils at the extremes? This argument of “you’re in the wrong class” always sounded elitist to me.
The important is that the teacher tailors the teaching to the students. Spend more time on the ones who struggle, give extra stuff to do to the quickest (e.g. help teaching to other pupils).
I’ve also always been against separating children by “intelligence”. Having a “smart” class and a “dumb” class is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That being said, there are children who have special needs and who require a teacher who has the proper formation to help them.
As someone currently in college for a degree in secondary education, yes this is exactly it. Putting the underachieving students in the “dumb class” reinforces low self esteem and crushes motivation, causing them to continue to underperform or even perform worse than before.
Individualizing lessons in the classroom is what helps students. However I have found teachers are typically pretty bad at doing this, and in my opinion, its because they are afraid of giving up control.
