Access doesn’t mean that all students are consigned to move as a convoy at the speed of the slowest student. Quite the opposite, especially with decent differentiation and strong professional support.

Sister Howitzer .. I absolutely did make up that number — debated whether to include the disclaimer in my earlier not that I don’t have accurate stats for the Middle Ages, despite reading Tuchman’s Distant Mirror long ago: 1 in 20 may even be generous. But you did peg the argument correctly: it’s very hard to learn what you’re not taught. Many skills, like reading, are broadly accessible to students — not just the upper half.

I think you’re missing my point.

What’s important is the gap between the high-IQ and low-IQ students, not the difference between the stuff being taught today and the stuff that was taught a hundred years ago.

In a world with limited resources, triage is a necessity. (Streaming is more accurate than triage because it allows for more paths, btw).

You can give a low-IQ student the best coaching possible, but he’ll still do worse than a high-IQ student, mutatis mutandis. That’s nature – ain’t good, ain’t bad, it just is.

There is one exception to my thesis that high-IQ students will do better than low-IQ students; in ed-school circles, the reverse is immutably true.

The trouble, for me, is the sorting of children into academic and non-academic streams. I think the middle class children, and upper class children, will not be sorted downwards, because they’re the ones most likely to bolt the public system. It may be harder for the children of working class parents to persevere through to university, but I don’t think that they should be denied the chance to learn.

Without requiring some students to spend potentially large amounts of time outside of class, the only way to accomodate a wide variety of pacing levels would be to reduce the amount of material covered–which may be okay but then the superfluous material becomes enrichment for the fastered-pacing students and aren’t we right back where we were before?

I think you made that up. Of course, at some point in history, only a select group were able to read, but only because they were taught and the rest weren’t. They weren’t necessarily the “top” of anything, except luck. The ability to read really isn’t related to intelligence. Even kids with Down Syndrome can learn to read, although their comprehension will never equal that of someone with normal intelligence.

but they couldn’t take that class if they never progressed that far in science by being placed in the “less than 50%” track.

Certainly some students will learn the material faster, but that’s not reason to triage access or to dumb down the material. Long ago perhaps only the top 5% of people could read: no reason to keep old standards unexamined nor to think that they can’t be improved. The argument isn’t one of linearity, but a challenge to have good curriculum, good teachers and good support. It’s not rocket science.