There is a political battle ranging right now between gifted funding and funding for students at the bottom in urban school districts. Chicago has been exempt thus far thanks to a status quo mayor and a governor who refused to do anything because there's no money to do it. This is all going to change quickly thanks to a new governor and soon to be a new mayor.
To gear up for the mess, I've been reading up on the last 5 years of failure in the school districts of Newark, California, Washington DC, and New York.
At the bottom of the pyramid are dysfunctional poor families. It seems hopeless. The schools that serve poor cannot educate their children while diverting a huge portion of resources from education to a variety of other causes, like community, jobs, politics, bureaucracy, and corruption. The schools that made a concerted effort to focus on education, starting with Kindergarten, found that 70% of the kindergartners left the district by 3rd grade. Violence, drug addiction, broken families, and instability are a way of life for the poor and negatively impact the child's ability to learn.
The middle of the education bell curve includes a remedial education level about 2 years behind preparation for college. Parents in wealthier districts send the kids to school reading a year a two ahead. Parents in not-so-wealthy districts send their kids to school ready to read. Parents at the bottom send their kids to school unable to recognize the difference between a letter and a word.
At the top, the 3 warring factions are a) parents who expect a decent education for their children that only exists in a gifted and talented program, b) gifted educators who are cynical about parents, and c) poorly done research that contends the best education for gifted is to put them in a classroom of kids who don't place a high value on education at home.
The fatal flaw in a mixed classroom is the requirement for material that is suitable for a mixed classroom, and a teacher who is trained and motivated to deliver this material to students of mixed abilities.
The shining exception to the mess is Jo Boaler, a professor at Stanford, who is determined to produce and accumulate effective material and train teachers to use it. I hope she succeeds. In the mean time, I love the material and it's great for At Home gifted education. Her website is YouCubed.com and I encourage you to turn your printer on and visit the website to take advantage of the free material. Please take note of her course on Algebra for kids of all ages, especially if your child is over the age of 9 and you want to head over to my other website, competitiveparentmagazine.com, where I'm putting together a strategy to get the TestPrep kid into Stanford. Granted, I have an article from a few months ago explaining why I would not waste $250,000 on an undergraduate degree, but I'd be more than happy to pay $250,000 if I could stop by the math department at Stanford during student orientation week and meet Jo Boaler. It would be worth $250,000. I've got at least one child who might study in her department.
Here is an example of the material on her website. This 'worksheet' is for ages 5 to 11.
There are 3 things to note. First, a child of age 11 (of normal math skills) will get more out of this worksheet, like 5x3+4x4 than a child of age 5, who will probably use it to learn how to count or basic adding. Next, if your child aspires to be gifted in math, you can start with the 5 year old usage and just keep going to the 4th grade level. Boaler has successfully used her material during research to turn D and F middle school students into A and B students. That directly implies that you can use it to teach advanced math to little kids. It works.
The third thing to note is more of a warning. A few years ago, when our 6th grade gifted math teacher in our gifted program sent home a worksheet like this (although slightly harder involving exponents), parents were both baffled about what to do and outraged that they had to do it, and the teacher was run out of town. I frantically emailed parents about what to do but it was too little too late. How dare our teacher expect our gifted students to act gifted. It turns out that parents where heavily involved in homework - heavily, if you know what I mean. The replacement math teacher is probably good, but I don't know for sure, since the middle school team instructed students in very strong terms not to tell anything to parents ever again about homework. Good for them.
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