> I didn't really know how the world worked, and it seemed to me like the system had been designed for the purpose of dragging me down to the level of the brutes around me.
A huge amount of education "policy" in the US is driven by the goal of closing the "achievement gap" between blacks and whites (for educational purposes, Asians are honorary whites).
Since when you improve instruction, high performers tend to benefit as much or more than low performers, gap closing is usually accomplished by enforcing a low ceiling for achievement generally.
"Enforcing a low ceiling" is a very bias conclusion, with no logical support provided here.
The school system as we know it is a mass education "factory" system. There is and always will be cracks for students to fall through. Furthermore, it is not clear that the system ever served top students very well -- I emphasize issues around the "ceiling" is not actually new.
How to deal with those cracks in the system is a complex topic. But that hardly matters for purposes of this discussion because...
The school system is under intense pressure to produce results in the form of standardized test scores. What are they supposed to do? They focus on inching up the scores of those below the median, of course.
That has exactly nothing to do with "enforcing a low ceiling". The school system simply no longer cares about the brightest students, while the taxpaying voters are clamoring for those average test scores to climb. Individual teachers would love to care, but they are generally not allowed to until those scores go up first.
You're reminding me of a High School I went to that has a large mural with the words "Don't mind the gap" and a bunch of different colored children on it.
Please provide a statistically significant number of examples when effective teaching strategies were discouraged because they improved education for whites and blacks equally. Otherwise, I'm left to assume you made this up, because it sounds good.
A huge amount of education "policy" in the US is driven by the goal of closing the "achievement gap" between blacks and whites (for educational purposes, Asians are honorary whites).
Since when you improve instruction, high performers tend to benefit as much or more than low performers, gap closing is usually accomplished by enforcing a low ceiling for achievement generally.