Right now, the educational “vogue” is inclusivity. For those of you that don’t know, this means including special needs students in the general education classroom in order to challenge them, keep them on track, and promote more peer-relationships between special needs students and “general” students. Students are given an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) which is reviewed by a plethora of involved persons that tells their general education teacher what accommodations need to be made for the student. Do they need a special testing situation? Is it an issue of physical space in the classroom? Should they be allowed to work in groups? How do they learn best? These are all the types of questions that the IEP answers.
There are two guiding principles for the IEP collaborators -- the student must have a Free Appropriate Education and it must be in the Least Restrictive Environment. So, if the student can excel in the general education classroom, there’s no need to restrict them to the special education classroom, and if they need accommodations for testing because of their disability, then that’s the appropriate thing to do!
We, as a nation, have forgotten those students without IEPs. The slogan we have adopted is no child left behind, but in the educational race and our efforts to ensure the success of the slowest, we keep all children behind.
The did a study on inner city kids -- the ones we don’t value as much -- and why they dropped out. Some kids dropped out because they needed to work to support their families. Some kids dropped out because they were already behind and it wasn’t worth it anymore (something that can be prevented by getting books into their hands at a young age). But the majority of the kids who dropped out said they knew they could succeed in school if they invested themselves, but they were bored.
Bored? That’s certainly not the story you hear on TV!
But it’s true. And it’s not just the inner city students, either. In fact, most suburban dropouts stem from the same issue -- boredom.
Students who are smart, gifted even, are put in classrooms where everyday, they go over the same material again because their neighbor didn't understand it. In middle schools, it’s common for students to fail an assignment because they read ahead in the book (hey, it happened to me!). In fact, teachers often take a class period to go over the answers of the test with their students -- a good idea -- without taking into account the many students in their classroom who excelled on the test. Why should the student pay attention if they already got a 100 on the test? Of course they know the answers! And yet it’s for doing other work in times like these that students frequently get detentions.
How in the world can we expect students to enjoy and invest in a system that wastes their time and belittles their abilities?
Of course, there are many responses to this. No, we don’t want to speed up the level of the course so that students fall behind, but if flocks of kids are dropping out because they’re bored, then we as a nation are failing to provide them with appropriate education. And that’s what it all comes down to -- ALL students should be given a Free, Appropriate Education. It’s never appropriate to waste someone’s time, that’s simply common courtesy, but it’s even worse to punish them for being productive. ALL students should be educated in the Least Restrictive Environment -- and if their learning is being restricted by that of those around them, well then there needs to be another option.
And there are many other options, but nobody is implementing them! The obvious one is to have an “honors class,” but, as many people rightfully point out, that encourages the same problem we had to start with, only instead of “Special Ed, general, and honors” you have “general, honors, and super-honors” or something. However, there are tons of other options! You could have a pull-out program for students where students spend one day of the week (or one class in a high-school setting) with an honors section -- maybe they have extra projects or assignments. You could have those students in your classes be given extra assignments -- maybe they can research a topic and present on it, or write a paper on it, or they can research how to make their own. You could do just about anything you wanted as long as you challenge students.
And that’s what it comes down to, really. Students want to be challenged. There’s a program called AVID that is all about challenging at-risk students. And you know what? When those students are challenged, they step up to the challenge. No, you don’t want to push students until they burst, but when you set them up to succeed, honestly tell them that they can, and then make them do the work, they almost invariably step up to the challenge.
We have to stop losing the students of our future to boredom in the very places they’re supposed to be learning and growing.
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