Educational Policy in the US: Punish Children's Diffenrences

From the Reading & Other Learning Differences Blog:

American Educational Policy: Punish Children’s Differences? | Reading & Other Learning Disabilities. Recently, Marion Brady offered thought-provoking insights on educational policy that deserve serious consideration, something that many Democrat and Republican politicians are loathe to do.

* Think there’s something wrong with a same-standards-and-tests-for-everybody approach to educating? Think a math whiz shouldn’t be held back just because he can’t write a good five-paragraph essay? Think a gifted writer shouldn’t be refused a diploma because she can’t solve a quadratic equation? …. If you think there’s something fundamentally, dangerously wrong with an educational reform effort that’s actually designed to standardize, designed to ignore human variation, designed to penalize individual differences, designed to produce a generation of clones …. [complain to] to your senators and representatives before they sell their vote to the publishing and testing corporations intent on getting an ever-bigger slice of that half-trillion dollars a year America spends on educating. (Brady, 2011)

But wait: Brady is wrong. Retention works. That’s why we do it over and over and over. If a kid fails, the only way to help him is to retain him in grade until he gets it right. Right? That’s what decades of research show.

Wrong.

(read the rest of the post for the research)