Discussing Waiting for Superman

[velvetpage]

From pvenables: "I have a question for you about a documentary I watched recently. It's called "Waiting for 'Superman'" and (I'm assuming you have seen it but what the hey) it features the plight of the American public school system, the concept of "drop-out factories," and the perception that it is impossible to change anything that's wrong with the system due to smothering influence of the teachers unions.

One thing that particularly shocked me was the fact that American teachers can get tenure. I've never heard of that going on here-- I assume that's only in the US.

Would love to hear your perspective on the film if you've seen it and if you haven't, to hear about your impressions once you have.

The question I had for you was about Canadian (or just Ontario) schools: Do we employ what they call "tracking" for students wherein some teachers funnel students towards success while others might be destined for a lower quality of instruction or attention based on fairly arbitrary assessments? Actually, in thinking about this, I think I can probably say "yes" we do as I saw it in action when I was in school. Perhaps a better question is, how early does this begin? I know you have an objection to... what was the testing called? It was something you've asked that Elizabeth not be included in..."



First, Waiting for Superman is a very biased piece of editorializing passing itself off as a documentary. It was produced by the Gates Foundation, and its purpose is to prove that adding more choice to education (that is, making it more of a free-market model) will improve it. These same people are funding charter schools all over the U.S. and cherry-picking their evidence so that it looks, in the movie, like charter schools out-perform public schools. That's a dramatic over-simplification, to the point of being an outright lie.

The fact is that choice in schooling has not been proven to improve the education of anyone - not even the kids for whom the choice was made, and definitely not for the kids left behind in the public system. The irony here is that the example the movie uses, Finland, is actually an example of the opposite point to the one they made with it. Finland's school system involves practically zero choice. They have high expectations for their students, small class sizes, and plenty of individualized instruction geared to high-level thinking. They also pay their teachers well, recruit their best students to be teachers, and give them a whole lot of freedom in the classroom - no merit pay, nobody coming in to make sure they're teaching exactly the way they should be. And their results are stunning - over a 90% high school graduation rate. They're an excellent example of how a single public system, fully-funded, with high expectations for teachers and students and small class sizes, gives excellent results.

The studies being done in places with a little less bias than the charter-school-pushers in the U.S. are showing that students whose parents choose a charter school for them - or any other school choice, including French Immersion, for example - are likely to do well anywhere they go, not because their school is better but because their parents are engaged enough to investigate options and follow through. Stuck with a single public school (for example, in a remote location with only one school) those parents tend to get involved in the school and make it better. The deciding factor isn't choice - it's parental involvement, combined with socio-economic level and parental, especially maternal, education level.

Which is to say, the American school system is being systematically dismantled on the back of a well-spun lie.

On to the Ontario-specific stuff.

First, while we don't call it tenure, effectively, Ontario teachers have it; once you've been teaching two years in Ontario, the process to get rid of you is long and arduous and almost never happens. This has its upsides and downsides. Upside: teachers don't have to kiss principal or superintendent ass in order to keep their jobs, and they have protection from firing if a parent complains. Downside: it's incredibly hard to get rid of a bad teacher, and entirely possible to coast through the last few years of your job until retirement. I'd like to see more principals take the bull by the horns and get rid of the people who shouldn't be there, because the mechanisms to do so do exist and I'd like young, enthusiastic people to get a shot at full-time jobs. Getting rid of tenure is a bad idea, though. It's there for a lot of good reasons.

The Ministry of Education officially discourages in-school tracking at the elementary level; that is, schools rarely track all the C students into one grade two class and all the A and B students into another. The accepted wisdom is that mixed-ability classes work better, because they allow for a variety of groupings within the class. So, just because the students are all in the same class, it doesn't mean they're all working on the same work. The kids who are struggling with reading will get small-group instruction geared to their reading level, while those who are more adept will focus on different reading strategies on harder texts to improve their comprehension. As students progress, they can move through groups fluidly, because the groups should be changing all the time. The single most important feature of these classrooms is class size: it's very, very difficult to meet student needs in a diverse classroom once those class sizes start creeping up. At the moment, Ontario has a cap of 20 students per class in primary classes, but there is no cap in the junior grades and some junior teachers find themselves teaching thirty or even thirty-five grade fours - kids who, the year before, were in a class half that size. (If ETFO, the elementary teacher's union, is on the ball, this will be an election issue. If not, it will be an issue in contract negotiations next year, and if those negotiations are with a Conservative government, we'll be looking at a strike. But I digress.)

So, officially, no tracking at the class level in elementary. I know it still happens occasionally, especially in very large schools with many classes per grade, and in cases where teachers and principals are trying to make up split-grade classes. I suspect all the grade 4s in this year's 3/4 split will be fairly independent workers who can be set at a task and keep at it on their own, because the grade 3s can then get more of the teacher's attention (and this year, they need it.) But those are decisions that do not affect any future year, just class placement in one specific grade.

This changes in high school. Ontario streams starting in grade nine, into three streams. The top stream is called "academic," and basically is for the kids who are university-bound. The next is called "applied" and is supposed to be for college-bound kids, or kids who will go into a trade. In practice, it's the warehouse stream for kids who are struggling and tuning out. The remaining stream is a spec. ed. stream for those who came from special classes in elementary, I believe.

This issue is the elephant in the room of Ontario education: there's a gap the size of the Grand Canyon down the middle of grade eight and grade nine, and kids are falling in on a regular basis. It's extremely difficult to get out of one stream once you're in it, partly because you won't know the things you need to know to do the work in the next stream up, and partly because the guidance counsellors and teachers tend to take placement in a stream as a statement of ability and counsel parents and kids to maintain that established order. The high school teachers are not getting the literacy training that the elementary teachers are getting, nor the emphasis on constructivist methods, so the kids who are doing all right with support in grade eight come to grade nine to discover that absolutely everything they thought they knew about school has changed, and nobody can tell them how. The lessons are set up differently, the work expected of them is different, the level of teacher interaction or help is different, the process of improving work is different, and most of their teachers act like they should know all this because it's always been this way. We're in desperate need of high school reform to match the elementary reform we've already had under the McGuinty government. (He hasn't been perfect, but as political regimes go, he's been the best we've had since Bill Davis was education minister.)

The other big issue is standardized testing. In Ontario it's called EQAO - Education Quality and Accountability Office - and it happens in grades three, six, nine, and a literacy test in grade ten. You're right, I'm not letting Elizabeth write it. It won't tell me anything I don't know about her already or can't find out from less intrusive means, and the testing is used to hurt schools and teachers by pitting them against each other. I'll vote for any party that promises to reduce or eliminate EQAO, especially the grade three testing. This is the only spot in which the accusation of tracking fits in Ontario elementary schools: grade three EQAO results are predictive of high school graduation rates more than 90% of the time. That is, a student who does poorly (a level one or two) on EQAO in grade three has less than a 30% chance of graduating high school, while a student who does well (level three or four) has close to an 80% chance of graduating. And yet, most of the deficits in education at the grade 3 level could be remediated. There's no good reason why a kid who is reading at a grade two level in grade three can't succeed over time; she's off to a slow start but that's not statistically indicative that she can't do it, only that she needs more time. By pigeonholing them with EQAO, we're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. They don't succeed because they know they didn't and therefore believe they can't.

To sum up, I'll say that the situation in Ontario is dramatically better than the American situation overall, though of course there are pockets in both countries where the norm doesn't hold. Ontario is near the top on the measures of school systems in North America, and holds its own against European counterparts, coming in the top ten. We've got a good public system that has improved dramatically in the last ten years. The trick now is to keep from voting in the people who want to take it down the American path.

Comments

[curtana.livejournal.com]

It's interesting what you say about streaming in high school. In NB when I was in high school there (1994-96) there was streaming, as you describe, but with an extra level. Level 1 was basically advanced/gifted/whatever you want to call it. Level 2 was the 'average' level - many kids in these courses could and did still go to university, but it was just geared a bit lower. Level 3 was the 'not going to university' level, and then there was a spec ed stream as well (I forget if they called it Level 4, or something else). People freely switched between Level 1 and 2 for certain subjects, or from year to year - you didn't need any kind of approval as far as I recall, just your own decision that you would like something a bit easier or harder. I did Level 1 math in Gr. 10, Level 2 in Gr. 11, and Level 1 again in Gr. 12. Level 1 Chemistry in Gr. 11, Level 2 in Gr. 12 (those courses covered a lot of the same subject material, which was the only case when I felt I didn't benefit from this system...) I wasn't penalized in university admissions or by teachers for this sort of switching streams, and lots of people did it too, afaik.

Now, switching to/from Level 3 would likely have been a different matter, but even then, I seem to recall some kids who were really gifted in a particular subject doing Level 1, say, English, and Level 3 Math, or whatever. But that *would* penalize you in terms of getting into university, because Level 3 classes weren't considered admissible, and if it was a mandatory subject (like Math) you would have a hard time getting in, if not impossible without further coursework.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

The whole idea of streaming is flawed from the get-go. It presumes that all the students streamed into a certain class will be able to do a certain level of work, which is demonstrably not true. Result: teachers fall prey to the thinking that says: "I taught it, it's not my problem if they didn't learn it." Second, it allows students to develop an identity based on group placement which can then work against improvement. Why would a kid want to improve out of the stream where all their friends are, especially when the kids in the higher stream are looking at them like they've crawled out of the dump? Third, of course, is mentioned above: presence in a certain stream is considered by many to be indicative of overall aptitude rather than a potential stepping-stone to the higher stream, and kids are judged based on it.

It occurs to me that probably most of the kids in NB's level 2 would have been capable of doing the level 1 work if they had enough support, since moving back and forth was so easy. In that case, why not give them the extra support and expect their very best? Having two streams seems to be a way of legitimizing lower aspirations.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

I don't think you can go without streaming at the high school level, and I'm skeptical of whether it's a good idea even at the middle school level. Kids' ability levels vary so widely that you simply cannot present the same curriculum to all students and meet all those students' needs. Streaming allows each class to include students of a less varied range of ability levels, and IMO, while some individualization will still be necessary (especially if students have to be in the same stream for every subject), the lower degree of variation in ability will most likely make it possible to present some lessons and administer some tests to the whole class. That can't be done in middle school and high school classes that include kids of all ability levels without failing to meet the needs of students in the highest and lowest ranges of ability.

Look at what happened when grade nine was destreamed under the NDP in Ontario. The material was made less difficult in order to cater to the lowest common denominator among non-special ed students. Smart kids in those classes were bored out of their minds. In my experience, that's the usual result of a non-streamed setting--the teacher presents material at a difficulty level that most of the class can grasp, which means it's too easy for the smartest half of the class and too hard for the few least able students.

I don't buy that all or almost all students are able to learn, say, calculus. If all students are streamed into a setting where calculus is taught, there are two possibilities. One is that you'll have what happened at the beginning of the transition to the new curriculum in Ontario, when there wasn't a low-end special ed stream and grade 9 applied math was harder than the previous grade 9 destreamed had been--kids drop out because they can't do the work. The other is that because many of the kids can't handle the material, the class will gradually be dumbed down until nobody gets to do calculus at all, and the smart kids who could have done it aren't prepared for university.

I do think that the recent advances in differentiated instruction are a very good thing, but it's just not plausible to me that it can be the best thing to keep kids who need completely different curricula in the same classroom.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

You don't see that it can be done because your only experience is with a system that did it poorly. It has been done and it has been done well, just not here. (And yes, destreamed grade nine was done poorly. There weren't enough supports put in place so teachers were still gearing their lessons to the middle of the class. If destreaming is to work, it has to incorporate a lot of small-group instruction and guided independent study.)

Assessment shouldn't be whole-class most of the time anyway, so making it easier to administer a test to the whole class is not of primary importance. The idea is part of a style of education that doesn't work for many students, even the ones it appears to work best for.

You've got a level of privilege here that is skewing your ability to see the possibilities and the studies for what they actually say. The studies do not support streaming; they say that high expectations paired with high support can indeed lead to a high level of success for practically all students. Why would we settle for anything less?

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

So how does it work, logistically, to give different kids totally different curricula in the same classroom? It seems that mathematically, increasing the number of different curricula in one classroom must proportionately decrease the amount of actual instructional time that each child or group of children gets, and your comment about small-group instruction and guided independent study seems to confirm that.

What about kids who need to be explicitly instructed by a teacher in order to learn, or who can't work in groups? No kid on the autism spectrum will do well with an approach that is heavy on small-group learning without the teacher always there. I lean towards believing in instructing autistic kids separately anyway, because they're so universally bullied in regular classes, but I don't buy that even every neurotypical (or undiagnosed) kid is going to do well with an approach that involves little actual instruction from the teacher. Furthermore, how is a setting that focuses on group work and independent study "high-support"? The decreased amount of teacher instruction of each student seems to imply less support, not more, than in a standard classroom setting.

It also doesn't make sense to say that all students are capable of the same level of success. Some kids are smarter than others. That's just how it is. Even if most of the less intelligent kids, with more support, could do what the smart kids do now, that suggests that the smart kids could do even more with adequate support. If you equalize achievement levels by helping the less smart kids more than the smart ones, you penalize the smarter kids by not giving them enough support to let them achieve as highly as their ability would allow.

[pvenables.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't suggest that the idea of holding all children to the same achievement standard is the same as teaching them using the same methods. There's no question that different children learn better or worse in certain environments. I've seen my own kids respond entirely differently to different kinds of instruction and discipline.

What I took away from the Charter schools approach (and granted, I'm no expert) is that with reduced student to teacher ratios and more in-class time coupled with targeted learning practices to the student lead to success where otherwise little was seen.

For the autistic child, there's no question they need to be engaged differently than other kids. I could be wrong, but children so diagnosed get addressed in the special education program which, on the face of it, seems like the right thing to do.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

If you teach kids in such a way that all of them achieve the same standard, some of those kids are going to be achieving below their ability level, and that's not fair to those kids. Some kids are going to need a lot of support to meet the standard. Some kids aren't going to need very much. But the kids who don't need much support to meet the standard probably COULD be doing much better than the standard, if they weren't being given a lower degree of support in order to equalize the unequal!

Kids on the autism spectrum sometimes get put in regular classes, even if they're special ed students with IEPs. In those classes, they are usually seriously bullied (i.e. abused) by the other students. When a teacher tells a class, "get yourself in groups and do X," any autistic kids are likely to just stand there and have no idea what they're supposed to be doing. If they do manage to engage with a group, they're extremely unlikely to have any concept of how to have their contributions to the group roughly equal everyone else's, or to be able to effectively manage any other aspect of group work. The kindest thing you can do for an autistic child in a regular class during group work is to just let the child work alone, with lots of teacher support.

[pvenables.livejournal.com]

Here's where I have to stand down. I couldn't possibly comment on how best to integrate autistic children. I think it's going to be a challenge, however, regardless of whether you have one standard of education or multiple streams. Ultimately, you have to account for impairments to education.

Perhaps the issue at hand is where you draw the line on educational impairment. Personally, I don't see any method as being capable of identifying impairment/educational limits between superior and average students. There are ways of identifying learning disabilities or impairments like autism but and clearly identifying those from non-impaired students, but I wouldn't be comfortable saying that certain children simply aren't as smart as other kids so let's not challenge them.

I can only speak anecdotally, of course, I was a solid "C" student all through school and didn't turn "on" until grade 10 at which point I became a high performer and finished high-school a straight "A" student. For me it was motivation and peer influence. That doesn't mean all kids can be turned on like that but if I had been streamed (and they tried to) into general curriculum I'd have never gone to University.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Let me tell a story to illustrate why I don't think you can ever completely do away with streaming:

In seventh grade French, for which the seventh-graders in my split-grade gifted class were integrated with a regular class, I often helped a student (let's call her Teri) with her work.

Teri was very, very intellectually slow. It was obvious even in casual interaction with her. It was even more obvious from her efforts to do schoolwork. She wanted to just copy my answers to our French work. Due to my scruples about cheating, I insisted on walking her through every question, or at least one or two of the questions in each exercise, in the hope that she would be able to actually learn the material. My hope was almost always in vain. I would walk her through the material in the slowest, most step-by-step way I could think of, and she still wouldn't get it.

I specifically remember one exercise where we had to fill in the blank: one question was "Tu ________ la cuisine." ("You ______ the kitchen.") We were supposed to choose between the verbs "manger" (eat) and "ranger" (tidy), and then conjugate the correct verb. I said, more or less, "'Manger' means 'to eat'. 'Ranger' means 'to tidy'. Do you eat a kitchen, or do you tidy a kitchen?" She STILL didn't get it.

That was a representative sample of what attempting to help Teri with French was like. No matter how much support I gave her, she just could not grasp the concepts. I realize my seventh-grade self couldn't teach nearly as well as, say, velvetpage probably can, but I'm not sure anything would have gotten the concepts into Teri's head. She just wasn't very smart, no matter how much support she was given, and she failed French that year in spite of my efforts.

I'm pretty sure Teri was a special ed student with an IEP, but she was integrated with a regular class for the majority of her school hours, even though French was not the only class that went completely over her head. I just...it would have taken a bona fide miracle for Teri to ever be able to learn calculus. The idea is about as plausible as pigs flying. I hope that analogy doesn't come across as likening her to a pig, because she was really a nice kid. She was just very, very slow.

In any case, holding Teri to the same expectations as a strong student or even an average student was, really, rather cruel. She shouldn't have been expected to study a second language at all, and she most certainly shouldn't have been lumped in with gifted kids who found the assigned work mind-numbingly easy. She needed to be streamed out, or at least to be given a curriculum with a different set of expected outcomes, probably ones involving basic literacy and numeracy in English. (She failed math that year too.) She should also probably have been in a setting with a lower student:staff ratio--that's something I totally agree with Erin about--so that somebody trained could walk her through everything in the teeny tiny steps that would have been necessary for her to learn it. That would have meant either a separate special ed class, or an aide with her in the regular class who could help her complete her customized curriculum rather than expecting her to do the same work as the other kids.

Kids are different. They can't all learn the same stuff, and we need to respect that by giving each kid a high level of support in completing a curriculum that is suited to their ability, whether their ability level is high, low, or in between.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

If you teach kids in such a way that all of them achieve the same standard, some of those kids are going to be achieving below their ability level, and that's not fair to those kids

Let me get this straight, and see if you're saying what I think you're saying.

I'm saying we need to up our expectations and our support so that every student can meet a higher standard than most of them do now - let's say we'll expect every kid to meet the standards in academic-level grade nine and ten courses, just as an example.

You're saying that that means some of them will be achieving below their ability level, and that's not fair.

But my premise begins with the idea that the achievement of the academic stream would be the new minimum standard. So what you're saying is that expecting the same standard of everyone that we now expect of the highest stream is unfair because it doesn't sufficiently challenge the highest stream. So this improvement, that would see the kids currently lost in the middle cease to be lost in the middle and given the same opportunity as the kids getting the best we can offer, is still not good enough because the kids currently getting our best still deserve more. Do you not see how classist that is? In effect, you're completely denying the possibility that educational equality is something we can or should strive for.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

I think whether I'm saying what you think I'm saying depends on what you mean by educational equality.

I think every kid should have the opportunity to learn the most challenging material they can handle. I absolutely accept that kids should have the opportunity to move between streams if they turn out to be able to handle more challenging material than their teachers originally thought. Every kid who has the basic intellectual ability to handle university prep material should be able to study that material, and if you're correct that most kids do have that ability (and I'm willing to believe that), most kids should have that opportunity. So I believe in educational equality if what you mean by that is that everybody should get the opportunity to develop their academic potential to its fullest.

What I'm not convinced of is the idea that if you give every kid the same opportunities and level of support, most of them will achieve around the same level. I'm certain there are real differences in ability among kids (which I know you accept in the case of LD/non-neurotypicality), and I would be surprised if there aren't real differences in ability among basically neurotypical/non-LD kids. If that's the case, making them all achieve at the same level (e.g. that of the academic/university prep stream in Ontario high schools right now) would require more support and challenge for some students than for others. That would mean that students who couldn't do any better than the current university prep standard would be supported and challenged enough to achieve to the best of their abilities, where students who could do better would only be supported enough to get them to the current university prep standard. I think every student should be supported enough to get them to achieve to the best of their ability. So if by educational equality you mean every neurotypical/non-LD student achieving at the same level, I'm kind of skeptical of that because I don't think it would happen even if there was equality of opportunity--I think it would require better opportunities for the less able students.

I hope that doesn't make me horribly classist.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure I've explained this before. I'll leave you to look back through the tabs, with one caveat: there is a difference between ranges of achievement for neurotypical, non-LD children, and ranges of achievement amongst those deemed to have special needs. I don't subscribe to the idea that children with autism don't need anything more than what can be provided for them in a mainstream differentiated classroom, and I never have. I've always acknowledged that there needed to be options available for those students, either in the form of an EA or in a special class placement. While many LDs can be accounted for in a regular class, they need extra support and some of them need a special class.

Can we take that part off the table and talk about what I'm really discussing, which is siphoning off the best and brightest - or those whose parents are most involved and worked with them the hardest to make them look like the best and brightest - while leaving the others to languish in sub-par programs? Because for every almost-gifted kid who wasn't challenged, I can point to two more who were believed to be of much lower intelligence and aptitude than they actually were. For example, a good friend of mine failed grade nine science and spent an awful lot of time in trouble at school. He's defending his PhD in biophysics this fall. Like pvenables, his parents were told that he was just not that good of a student, and I'm sure many of their teachers would be totally shocked to find out how well they've both done educationally and career-wise. But how many more get missed, streamed into the wrong stream in grade nine, lacking the foresight or parental support to dig themselves out later?

It is not penalizing smart kids to give every kid the same opportunity that they've already got, and the support to do what they're already doing. That's called equity.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

I'm torn between thinking that every kid should have the opportunity to achieve highly if they're capable of it, and being unconvinced that most neurotypical/non-LD kids are similar enough in ability for putting them all in the same class, with similar enough curricula that they can easily move between the available options, to work.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

But I've done it. I can point you to half a dozen studies of high schools that do it consistently. Whole countries achieve it.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Do you have time to link me to studies and evidence? I just, given what I've seen, have a really hard time imagining how this could be possible above the elementary school level.

[amazonvera.livejournal.com]

I don't understand why it would be hard to believe that enough children between five and ten fall along a relative developmental median to allow for them to be educated together as long as there's a sufficient adult-to-child ratio to give support to the outliers.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Or even five to fifteen. I certainly never suggested that every single person should go to university - only that the reason they don't go shouldn't be because the schools failed to prepare them as far as they could have.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

I'm more skeptical about older kids being sufficiently similar developmentally to each other to be educated similarly than about kids between five and ten. I'm skeptical because when I was in school I saw absolutely enormous differences in ability levels among the students, such that there appeared to be no possibility of educating them all appropriately with the same basic curriculum. However, I think it's possible that I'm thinking primarily of kids who are far enough above or below the mean that they belong in special ed.

[ruggerdavey.livejournal.com]

Because for every almost-gifted kid who wasn't challenged, I can point to two more who were believed to be of much lower intelligence and aptitude than they actually were.

EXACTLY! Kids whose parents didn't read to them, who don't have books at home, who don't have that higher level of educational prior knowledge are so often assumed to be less able than they are just because they don't know things we think they "should know." Or if it takes them longer to get a concept, we assume that they're slower, but it's often really that the kids whose parents are more educationally supportive came in farther along in the learning process.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Yep. I see a huge part of my job in the library as providing background knowledge about a variety of topics. We sing songs that I grew up knowing, and I talk about the history of the song and what one little phrase meant (for example, "My ship sailed from China with a cargo of tea" led to me showing them tea bags and loose tea leaves so they knew the ship wasn't carrying a load of brown hot water.) I point out which words in French have English cognates that are slightly different but related in meaning, like "marcher," which means to walk. And so on, and so forth, to build up that level of background knowledge that is absolutely crucial to long-term success. I got it through wide reading, and I encourage it that way, too, of course; but there are so many other sources of knowledge that most people don't realize they use.

[ruggerdavey.livejournal.com]

That is so awesome. It never occurred to me about the tea. They're all about the sweet tea and iced tea down in the south, but I don't know that my kids know about tea bags and I'm SURE they don't know about tea leaves. I've got some in my classroom along with my electric kettle, so I think I'll try to explain more when I'm making myself some this year.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

It also doesn't make sense to say that all students are capable of the same level of success.

I think this part may be a part of the problem we're having with understanding. I do not think that all students are capable of achieving an A+ in university calculus, with any level of support. I do think that almost all students are capable of achieving a B in grade ten academic mathematics, and probably in grade eleven academic mathematics, given the correct supports throughout their academic careers. Some will be capable of A+'s in those areas, and some will require FAR more work than others to achieve the same things. But how we quantify "a high level of success" is crucial to this debate, and my impression is that you're setting the bar somewhat higher than I am.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

I was thinking in terms of all students being able to take grade 12 university prep calculus and actually learn the material well. Thank you for that clarification. The idea that almost all (definitely not all, but almost all) students can get a B in grade ten academic math with sufficient support seems reasonable to me.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I suspect that if we actually got to the point where, say, 85% of high school students were achieving a passing grade in grade ten academic math, it would mean that, in turn, 85% of those would be able to handle university-prep calculus. I have no problem with student choice as a streaming method after grade ten; that is, I would rather see different strands of mathematics offered than different levels, but if a student wanted to focus on financial math in grade eleven rather than intro to trigonometry, at that point I wouldn't care too much. That's partly because if they change their minds later, the difference is two courses, not four or more as it is if they're streamed into applied math in grade nine.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

That seems reasonable to me. I suspect some of those students would need a lot of support to handle university-prep calculus, but my OAC calculus course was batshit crazy intense--it basically crammed OAC calculus plus a pretty good chunk of University of Waterloo first year calculus into one semester--so I may not have a good idea of how difficult the current university-prep calculus course is.