Throughout my entire career, I have been asked to cater to the most underserved in our schools; by underserved, I mean the students who haven't been taught to read properly; the students who have unstable households; the students who would pass the state tests by a wing and a prayer. And each year, I took those students and performed the miracle of teaching them. I have ALWAYS had that knack. Maybe from being a student who had friends just like them, who lived on my block and played basketball in my backyard. You deal with them with a sympathetic touch, not feeling sorry for them, but making them aspire for more than what they are at this current time.
But what happens is that these students end up running the school. All teachers go at their pace and stay on their level. Those kids get the interventions, those kids get the tutoring. To accomodate, teachers dumb down what they are doing and teach to the test.
This is the manner of education. In the era of "No child left behind", many of those have in fact been forgotten. The invisible students- our advanced population.
In today's classroom, every effort is being made to get kids to pass these state mandated tests, and help low-performing schools achieve. By any means necessary. And by necessary, I mean teaching from old tests, textbooks, coach books and berating those students to death with practice tests. However, students who generally are proficient or advanced tend to have low engagement in school because expectations are so low that things are easy for them. And as long as they know how to read, they will pass the test, with bad teching or not. Schools depend on these proficient and advanced kids to score well and pull their scores up, yet do barely nothing to make school rigorous for them.
The biggest faux pas is that kids who score proficient automatically are placed in advanced classes, whether that kid is advanced or not. Which holds truly advanced students back as well. My biggest fear is that students at low performing schools are considered "advanced" but in the real world outside of the city limits, these kids in some cases would be considered barely proficient. Are we preparing these semi-advanced students to be able to compete with the students from rich households, at magnet schools, at private schools, who will be entering college classrooms with them?
In order to provide an equitable education for advanced students, we need to accelerate them to the level of their academic abilities, not to the level of their chronological peers. As a teacher, it will be my job to ensure that my course work is rigorous for all students. It is also imperative to make sure my expectations are higher and hold those students to those higher standards and support them in achieving those standards. I have to ensure these invisible, misused students are taught and will take something away from me. It is my job to push myself to be better for those kids. And when I feel myself becoming complacent, I have to continue to press. When administrators attempt to make me "blitz" students with standards, it is my job to demand differently, since research tells us that "blitz" never works.
It is my job to be the voice for these invisible kids.
