Average versus attainable

I have talked about this before, and I am going to address it again. A lot of people criticize the schools for aiming their expectations at the average student. It is believed that more advanced children and slower children are the ones whose needs are not being met.



While it is true that certain components of our schools are based off of the average student, the pace is always targeting the slow. Schools are looking at such things as the ideal start time, ideal amount of homework assigned and more. These topics take looks at overall trends, which are then applied to all students.

When it comes to pace, they embrace a different target. Attainability is more important to them than average. Slow students benefit the most, and advanced students suffer the most. All students who exceed the slowest are being let down.

No school in the country is targeting a graduation rate of less than 50%. If a school based standards off of the average student, they would see more people failing than succeeding. Part of the reason for this is because the average is likely less than the median. You can't learn less than nothing, so there is a hard limit on how little someone is capable of learning. There is no similar hard limits on potential. The more capable students would almost certain skew the average.

A bigger issue here is that aiming for average means that success would require everybody to be at or exceed average for every expectation in order to succeed. If you are right at average overall, it would be nearly impossible that you will meet average requirements for every single class. Even within a class, you will have strengths and weaknesses that ensure an average student will not successfully pick up every lesson within a class aimed at the average student.

The general portrayal of the schools is that they fail every time a student falls short of their expectations. If one person failed out of one hundred, there will be a lot of focus on why the one student failed. Failure does not mean that a student is incapable of learning what was expected. There are always inefficiencies in the approach being taken by a teacher. If a teacher uses a flawed approach, that can be sufficient to explain a student falling through the cracks of the system.

It seems highly unlikely that any students are failing because their teachers set their standards too high. There are always other factors. The truth is that the schools are setting their expectations based on the bottom one percent of all students. If they didn't, graduation rates would plummet. The schools aren't willing to risk the backlash that they would receive if they aimed as high as average.