Reply to Someone please explain to me the difference between tracking and the AAP program/centers.

Forum Index » Advanced Academic Programs (AAP)

Reply to "Someone please explain to me the difference between tracking and the AAP program/centers."

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The CogAT and NNAT aren't IQ tests.

AAP isn't full tracking from the top to the bottom of ability. Maybe it could be considered partial tracking. Just the top 15 percent or so are educated separately, so this system avoids some of the pitfalls of tracking. No one (individual, or socioeconomic group) is singled out as being in the lowest group. For all anyone knows, any child in GE could be at the 85th percentile. The lowest performers can benefit from the influence of the highest performers, and the highest performers can develop more confidence. [/quote]

AAP/GT is a track and gened is a track that also serves sped ...aap can have sped students but they are not sped due to intellectual capabilities.  I am older and there was tracking when I went to school beginning in middle school.  Tracks were not as STATIC as aap.   There were students from lower tracks that did specific subjects with other tracks.  [/quote]

I think some people want more different levels within gen ed. [/quote]

[b]This is what's known as AAP Level 1/2/3.
It seems that folks aren't happy with how its implemented.
So why change the entire system?   Why not instead lobby to make AAPL123 more meaningful.[/b]
[/quote]

Thank you for raising this excellent point. All the DCUM discussions about AAP focus just on centers and Local Level IV. Very little is ever said about Local Level I, II, and III options within base schools -- that system is supposed to serve kids at different ranges of academic aptitude and should be thought of and talked about as part of any discussion of AAP, but AAP has been reduced in people's minds to "centers versus Everyone Else."

Unfortunately, though making Levels 1 to III more meaningful and challenging and interesting would be simply great, it would probably be seen by the folks posting here as "tracking," which somehow they think will hurt kids' feelings and destroy general ed. Not sure why they are so threatened by the idea.

From what I saw in our base school before we moved our kid to an AAP center (Local Level IV was not offered at our base school), the services offered in I-III were just once-a-week pull-outs and were totally disconnected from the rest of the curriculum the kids were doing. Maybe that's not the case everywhere now. It would be good to hear on this thread from some parents of kids getting Level I-III services: What have your experiences of this been?

What's truly needed is, well, tracking, where kids in upper elementary move to different classrooms for different subjects and are with peer groups who are working at their same level subject by subject--kids ready for tougher math take the tougher math class; kids with an aptitude for social studies get grouped together for a social studies class that's more challenging, etc. That was how the old "GT"  used to work when I was a kid, and no one was scarred for life by it....But that is "tracking" and seems to horrify some parents here. Why? Because the kids in the less-advanced classes will feel bad? Seriously? won't they feel worse if they are in classes that are moving too fast for them? Oh, right, that isn't going to happen.

The way these parents seem to think, the kids who can do harder work or need more challenges are supposed to sit back and twiddle their thumbs in the same class with everyone else while the teacher teaches to the level of those who need the most help. But these parents would be the first to complain if their kids who needed more help were forced to sit there, frustrated and lost, while the teacher taught at the right pace for the more advanced kids.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics