Reply to Science says: never get rid of AAP

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
 Why not just fund small class sizes of 15-20 ish for all students? That way every class can be mixed ability and teachers will have a manageable enough load to differentiate effectively.

Kids aren’t robots who all learn at the same pace for all topics and all subjects. One kids might “get” the Pythagorean theory  immediately but take a bit long to pass fractional indices. Mixed ability classes are much more flexible, allowing kids to go at their own pace.[/quote]

Except even with 20 kids you can have 100 different levels. I am hoping we will start seeing some change with the new reading curriculum being pushed out at the younger grades but you still have Level 1 and 2 ESOL kids in 6th grade who cannot read. I really don’t understand why in middle school these students have specialized ESOL classes for all subjects, but they have 15-20 mins of ESOl instruction in ES. [/quote]

People buy into the studies about immersion programs and assume that those programs work for all kids at all income levels and not just individual kids in a class or kids with invested parents. They don’t understand that when a significant portion of the class is in the native tongue that the immersion effect decreases and you need a different approach. Immersion programs n FCPS intentionally limit the number of native language speakers to something like 10-20% of the class with the other kids speaking English for a reason. And the parents in those schools are invested parents who are believe that their child can handle the rigor of learning in two languages at the same time. The parents can afford tutors for classes if a child falls behind or move the child into a non-immersion program, that is not the case for ESOL kids.

And then there is the optics, ESOL only classes in ES look like we are trying to separate the white kids out from other kids and it looks like segregation. And that is bad. And segregation is bad but the way we are teaching ESOL in ES is not working for the kids who need to learn English and it is not helping the kids in the class who speak English. Everyone is hurt. A solid ESOL program would move more ESOL kids into the mainstream classroom more quickly with a far better chance of success but it would look bad.  [/quote]

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