{"id":1528,"date":"2009-01-25T14:32:19","date_gmt":"2009-01-25T18:32:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1528"},"modified":"2009-01-25T14:32:19","modified_gmt":"2009-01-25T18:32:19","slug":"ron-matus-drinks-the-kool-aid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1528","title":{"rendered":"Ron Matus drinks the kool-aid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Aaaiiiieeee! One of the local, well-trusted education beat reporters for the <i>St. Petersburg Times<\/i> has bought into the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tampabay.com\/news\/education\/k12\/article970309.ece\">bright students still bored<\/a> criticism of NCLB. I&#8217;ve explained before why that&#8217;s an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shermandorn.com\/mt\/archives\/000811.html\">ugly argument against No Child Left Behind<\/a>, as well as why <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shermandorn.com\/mt\/archives\/000813.html\">it&#8217;s bad for what&#8217;s good about enrichment\/advancement programs<\/a> but I&#8217;ll repeat the gist:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Selective focus fallacy: If students in your advanced classes are bored, check to see if <b>all<\/b> students are bored. Chances are that the answer is &#8220;yes.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Historical amnesia: While I have concerns about Advanced Placement courses as an equivalent of &#8220;hard and rigorous,&#8221; there is no doubt that Florida provides far more opportunities for students of all kinds to take AP courses than the state did 10 or 15 years ago.<\/li>\n<li>The &#8220;they&#8217;re special&#8221; rut of gifted-ed arguments: For almost a century, we&#8217;ve distributed educational resources and opportunities based on assumptions that there is a fixed student capacity (or fragments of capacity). If gifted-education advocates cannot run away from that assumption, they are not nearly as smart as they need to be, either politically or intellectually. <\/li>\n<li>Insults to the rest of humanity: Surely we can talk about the need for more and better investment in education without denigrating those absent from the room. If you&#8217;re a parent and <b>don&#8217;t<\/b> think your children are gifted and deserve individual attention, you need your heart checked. And if you don&#8217;t think parents of the kids you&#8217;re <b>not<\/b> talking about will be upset when you claim that your kids (and not theirs) are special, you need your head examined.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What is especially surprising is that a good reporter such as Matus did not look for anyone with a different take on the issue. <\/p>\n<p>A few minutes ago, one of my daughter&#8217;s best friends rang the doorbell to say hello while she&#8217;s in the middle of her daily training run. In elementary school, she would never have been considered for the type of gifted-education program that Ron Matus discussed in this morning&#8217;s article. Today, she&#8217;s 17 years old, a good friend to many peers, a joy to be around,&#8230; and in as many AP classes as her friends who were in elementary and middle-school gifted programs. She would not have been where she is today without an incredible drive to achieve and without also some assistance in elementary schools from an astute second-grade teacher and an effective teacher of pullout services. To all advocates of gifted education who have a static definition of what giftedness is, and are willing to push it in a policy context, you would do well to remember that there are more talented students &#8220;than are dreamt of in your philosophy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><b>Update<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.tampabay.com\/schools\/2009\/01\/maybe-florida-h.html\">Ron Matus responds<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Aaaiiiieeee! One of the local, well-trusted education beat reporters for the St. Petersburg Times has bought into the bright students still bored criticism of NCLB. I&#8217;ve explained before why that&#8217;s an ugly argument against No Child Left Behind, as well as why it&#8217;s bad for what&#8217;s good about enrichment\/advancement programs but I&#8217;ll repeat the gist: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-oE","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}