“Gifted” programs are becoming “enriched studies” in Montgomery County, Maryland, reports Dana Goldstein in the New York Times. The goal of the huge school system, which is both high performing and diverse, is to qualify a broader mix of students for advanced work. In hopes of closing “the excellence gap,” Montgomery County has turned its elementary magnets for “highly gifted” students into Centers for Enriched Studies, which are supposed to enroll “students who are outliers

Well, it looks like tracking to me. And I’m fine with it. Jonathan Plucker, a Johns Hopkins education professor, sees “a subtle shift” in the last four years from boosting minimum competency to challenging achievers. He advocates placing “high-achieving and high-ability students in advanced classrooms for their strongest subjects, but not for every subject,” writes Goldstein. The groupings should be more flexible than the rigid “tracking” of students in decades past, the advo

Nobody takes algebra in eighth grade in San Francisco’s district schools any more, reports Ed Week‘s Stephen Sawchuk. In the name of equity, district leaders decided four years ago to place all students in “math courses of equal rigor through geometry.” That means no “honors” classes. No gifted track. No weighted GPAs until later in high school. No 8th grade Algebra 1. In detracked classes, “groups of students work through a series of ambitious math tasks,” he writes. Achieve

High achievers don’t want to be teachers, reports Madeline Will for Education Week Teacher. “Around the world, students who want to go into teaching tend to have poorer math and reading skills than students who plan to work as professionals outside of teaching,” according to a new analysis of 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. In the U.S. 52 percent of 15-year-olds expected to work in professions that require a university degree;  4 percent of stud

North Carolina’s public schools are failing to place low-income achievers in challenging classes, reports the Charlotte Observer, which partnered with the (Raleigh) News & Observer to analyze seven years of state data. “Every year across North Carolina, thousands of students with top math scores who happen to live in low-income households fall off the college track,” reports the Observer.  “These students are excluded from advanced classes at a much higher rate than their mor