Extraído do site : http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/opinion/gifted-students-deserve-more-opportunities.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
BARACK
OBAMA and Mitt Romney both attended elite private high schools. Both are
undeniably smart and well educated and owe much of their success to the strong
foundation laid by excellent schools.
Every
motivated, high-potential young American deserves a similar opportunity. But
the majority of very smart kids lack the wherewithal to enroll in rigorous
private schools. They depend on public education to prepare them for life. Yet
that system is failing to create enough opportunities for hundreds of thousands
of these high-potential girls and boys.
Mostly,
the system ignores them, with policies and budget priorities that concentrate
on raising the floor under low-achieving students. A good and necessary thing
to do, yes, but we’ve failed to raise the ceiling for those already well above
the floor.
Public
education’s neglect of high-ability students doesn’t just deny individuals
opportunities they deserve. It also imperils the country’s future supply of
scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs.
Today’s
systemic failure takes three forms.
First,
we’re weak at identifying “gifted and talented” children early, particularly if
they’re poor or members of minority groups or don’t have savvy, pushy parents.
Second,
at the primary and middle-school levels, we don’t have enough gifted-education
classrooms (with suitable teachers and curriculums) to serve even the existing
demand. Congress has “zero-funded” the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented
Students Education Program, Washington’s sole effort to encourage such
education. Faced with budget crunches and federal pressure to turn around awful
schools, many districts are cutting their advanced classes as well as art and
music.
Third,
many high schools have just a smattering of honors or Advanced Placement
classes, sometimes populated by kids who are bright but not truly prepared to
succeed in them.
Here
and there, however, entire public schools focus exclusively on high-ability,
highly motivated students. Some are nationally famous (Boston Latin, Bronx
Science), others known mainly in their own communities (Cincinnati’s Walnut
Hills, Austin’s Liberal Arts and Science Academy). When my colleague Jessica A.
Hockett and I went searching for schools like these to study, we discovered
that no one had ever fully mapped this terrain.
In a
country with more than 20,000 public high schools, we found just 165 of these
schools, known as exam schools. They educate about 1 percent of students.
Nineteen states have none. Only three big cities have more than five such
schools (Los Angeles has zero). Almost all have far more qualified applicants
than they can accommodate. Hence they practice very selective admission,
turning away thousands of students who could benefit from what they have to
offer. Northern Virginia’s acclaimed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science
and Technology, for example, gets some 3,300 applicants a year — two-thirds of
them academically qualified — for 480 places.
We
built a list, surveyed the principals and visited 11 schools. We learned a lot.
While the schools differ in many ways, their course offerings resemble A.P.
classes in content and rigor; they have stellar college placement; and the best
of them expose their pupils to independent study, challenging internships and
individual research projects.
Critics
call them elitist, but we found the opposite. These are great schools
accessible to families who can’t afford private schooling or expensive suburbs.
While exam schools in some cities don’t come close to reflecting the
demographics around them, across the country the low-income enrollment in these
schools parallels the high school population as a whole. African-American
youngsters are “overrepresented” in them and Asian-Americans staggeringly so
(21 percent versus 5 percent in high schools overall). Latinos are
underrepresented, but so are whites.
BARACK
OBAMA and Mitt Romney both attended elite private high schools. Both are
undeniably smart and well educated and owe much of their success to the strong
foundation laid by excellent schools.
Every
motivated, high-potential young American deserves a similar opportunity. But
the majority of very smart kids lack the wherewithal to enroll in rigorous
private schools. They depend on public education to prepare them for life. Yet
that system is failing to create enough opportunities for hundreds of thousands
of these high-potential girls and boys.
Mostly,
the system ignores them, with policies and budget priorities that concentrate
on raising the floor under low-achieving students. A good and necessary thing
to do, yes, but we’ve failed to raise the ceiling for those already well above
the floor.
Public
education’s neglect of high-ability students doesn’t just deny individuals
opportunities they deserve. It also imperils the country’s future supply of
scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs.
Today’s
systemic failure takes three forms.
First,
we’re weak at identifying “gifted and talented” children early, particularly if
they’re poor or members of minority groups or don’t have savvy, pushy parents.
Second,
at the primary and middle-school levels, we don’t have enough gifted-education
classrooms (with suitable teachers and curriculums) to serve even the existing
demand. Congress has “zero-funded” the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented
Students Education Program, Washington’s sole effort to encourage such
education. Faced with budget crunches and federal pressure to turn around awful
schools, many districts are cutting their advanced classes as well as art and
music.
Third,
many high schools have just a smattering of honors or Advanced Placement
classes, sometimes populated by kids who are bright but not truly prepared to
succeed in them.
Here
and there, however, entire public schools focus exclusively on high-ability,
highly motivated students. Some are nationally famous (Boston Latin, Bronx
Science), others known mainly in their own communities (Cincinnati’s Walnut
Hills, Austin’s Liberal Arts and Science Academy). When my colleague Jessica A.
Hockett and I went searching for schools like these to study, we discovered
that no one had ever fully mapped this terrain.
In a
country with more than 20,000 public high schools, we found just 165 of these
schools, known as exam schools. They educate about 1 percent of students.
Nineteen states have none. Only three big cities have more than five such
schools (Los Angeles has zero). Almost all have far more qualified applicants
than they can accommodate. Hence they practice very selective admission,
turning away thousands of students who could benefit from what they have to
offer. Northern Virginia’s acclaimed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science
and Technology, for example, gets some 3,300 applicants a year — two-thirds of
them academically qualified — for 480 places.
We
built a list, surveyed the principals and visited 11 schools. We learned a lot.
While the schools differ in many ways, their course offerings resemble A.P.
classes in content and rigor; they have stellar college placement; and the best
of them expose their pupils to independent study, challenging internships and
individual research projects.
Critics
call them elitist, but we found the opposite. These are great schools
accessible to families who can’t afford private schooling or expensive suburbs.
While exam schools in some cities don’t come close to reflecting the
demographics around them, across the country the low-income enrollment in these
schools parallels the high school population as a whole. African-American
youngsters are “overrepresented” in them and Asian-Americans staggeringly so
(21 percent versus 5 percent in high schools overall). Latinos are
underrepresented, but so are whites.
Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B.
Fordham Institute and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
at Stanford University, is the author, with Jessica A. Hockett, of “Exam
Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools.”
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