Rationing Education

This Washington Post op-ed describes a problem that is all too common and one of the biggest undiscussed problems in education. The dirty little secret of education is that most of the attention right now is focused on those students who are in the middle.

The stakes for schools are enormous. So it isn't surprising that many educators game the system by reaching first for the low-hanging fruit, the students closest to passing. Dubbed the "bubble kids," because their scores put them on the bubble of the passing mark, these students give schools the biggest bang for the buck. In response to this incentive, many schools have rationed out practically all of their resources to these students. Meanwhile, the lowest-performing students, the "hopeless cases," languish. So do their high-performing classmates, who are relegated to the waiting room while the bubble kids are cured.

If you put the intelligence level of all kids in a school on a graph, you will of course end up with a bell curve. Schools in America not only put most of their focus on the kids in the middle of the curve and that is also where the schools do the best job.

But the true measure of a school's effectivness and quality is what it does with the students on either end of of the bell curve. Schools are generally getting better at dealing with kids on the lower end of the bell curve, and rightly so. But the kids on the upper end of the spectrum are often left to struggle for themselves.

A personal anecdote is appropriate here. My brother is the smartest man I know (although I won't admit it to his face). While my sister and I were blessed with good genetics and a pretty good education, my brother got a little lost in the system. Every year in school, he would said through the first half of the school year, making straight A's but then he would get bored, get frustrated at the lack of progress and get into trouble, often just squeaking by on grades at the end of the year. Even our quality high school failed to deal well with someone with his intelligence level. I can't imagine what academic achievements he could have master had he been pushed regularly.

Schools need to focus a little better on all students. But as long as the incentives are based solely passing the most students, we will continue to see focus solely on those on the bubble.