Academics on Long Island is like football in Texas: something worth fighting over. And having been around long enough to watch babies have babies, you tend to see the same fights revisited as a new generation discovers the same problems their parents fretted over. Except they forget Santayana’s admonition.
In a Newsday op-ed, Lane Filler revisits the plight of the student who, at least in daddy’s eyes, is smarter than the others.
Deciding what to teach children based on how old they are makes no more sense than basing their lessons on how much they weigh, or how tall they are.
The folly of relying on such irrelevant metrics was highlighted this week when a national study was released by the Center for American Progress. According to the researchers who compiled it and the media that reported on it, the study showed kids find school too easy. But that’s not the important conclusion to be drawn from the data, and that interpretation is so political it makes my head not just swim, but drown.
It’s also not quite what the study shows. Rather, some kids find school too easy. Others, too hard. Still, others just right. Apparently, the tale of Goldilocks wasn’t bedtime reading in the Filler household.
Welcome to the current educational model: “No Child Can Be Allowed Ahead, or Left Behind, So Let’s Just Sit Here.”
Have you figured out the gripe yet? Of course you have, as it’s impossible not to see this freight train barreling down the tracks. Crash:
Years ago, students were divided into classes by aptitude and competence, so they could learn at the pace best for them. This has largely fallen by the wayside. Too many of the “gifted” kids came from white families with money. And besides, we now know that all children are special and talented, even if only at staring uncomprehendingly when faced with a curriculum beyond their ken.
So what happens now? Everyone has the same lessons, the kids who are falling behind get special help, and the gifted kids get screwed.
Actually, years ago schools consisted of one room. Children of all ages sat together, and the teacher roamed about, from youngest to oldest, smartest to, well, not smartest, teaching as much as she could. It was always a “she” back then.
But the smear of the parents of Slackoisie children couldn’t be made more clear. The idiot children are “special and talented,” Filler’s pen dripping with contempt and ridicule, in order to make the only worthwhile point, that it’s the screwed gifted-children who are really special. And why would he say such a thing?
Last year my daughter tested in the 92nd percentile of eighth graders in Language Arts. But she was in the fifth grade. In math she’s only just above average, but again, for a class three years older. By law and practice, my daughter is not allowed to learn in school.
And the alarms go off. The gravamen of the editorial is that Filler’s fifth grade daughter didn’t receive the level of instruction he thought appropriate to develop her brilliance. For the record, anecdotal studies show that 94% of all Long Island parents are absolutely certain their little darling is gifted, far above the median, and in desperate need of education that leads directly to freshman year at Yale.
There’s nothing new about Filler’s gripe. Public schools are geared toward the average student of necessity. Although every parent believes the school should adjust their curriculum to meet the personal academic needs of their precious baby, The logistics are problematic, there being far more students than teachers such that each child deemed gifted by daddy can’t have a teacher all their own.
Of course, nothing stops a parent from supplementing their child’s education, whether by the wealth of special programs offered to gifted students (it’s a cottage industry on Long Island, since parents of means spare no expense to compensate when it comes to their baby), or spending an hour doing calculus around the dinner table. But why should parents have to exert such energy when they’re paying ridiculous taxes to schools to provide a boutique education geared specifically to each child’s individual needs?
In a few years, Filler will find out that students are divided up by skill level, with some herded into special ed classrooms and others into advance placement. This never happened in fifth grade, but accuracy tends not to guide the parent scorned. If you think his head is drowning now, just wait until his daughter is told she’s “not quite right” for AP physics, forced to wallow with the groundlings in mere Honors courses.
This attitude, of course, is nothing new. Nothing new at all. Filler replays the boomer demands that gave rise to the Slackoisie, the entitlement of their special children to a bespoke life, which in turn left them sitting on the basement couch munching Cheetos and wondering why the rest of the world doesn’t recognize how special they.
But that’s not why Filler’s op-ed deserves to be called out, and why Lane Filler, who can barely muster enough sympathy to admit that learning disabled children should get a free appropriate public education while his gifted darling gets screwed.
Lane Filler sits on the editorial board of Newsday. Lane Filler gets to parlay his editorial board position into a column to vindicate his personal gripe on behalf of his daughter in a newspaper. There are issues of consequences affecting the world, not to mention New York and Long Island, but Newsday has turned over precious column inches to a father whose baby isn’t getting all he wants for her. Since he’s got the keys to the backdoor, why not use it for his personal advantage, right? Isn’t personal gain what freedom of the press is all about?
And now, some personal advice from a father who is a veteran of almost every battle one can fight with a school district at the polar extremes of the educational spectrum. You never stop advocating for your child, but it’s lunacy to think that schools can recreate themselves to meet the demands of every parent or every student in every instance. Public schools can’t neglect the mass in the middle to cater to the handful of gifted students, and even if they could, they’re not up to the task. Push for as much as you can get, and supplement it with whatever else you can provide.
But to air your personal issues in a newspaper, your elitist expectation that your own special child should be the center of everyone’s universe, is a whine too far. Newsday should never have published it, and you should have had the good sense not to abuse your access to fight your personal battles at the expense of a free press. You were not only wrong, but embarrassingly so. If your daughter is truly gifted, it must have come from her mother.
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Ouch! Lane, you’ve been outed! Nice, SJ. The only thing I’d have added is that the author might have used his podium to advocate for MORE educational funding. I always liked the license plate that read “if you think education is expensive, try ignorance!”
The amount of money spent on public education on Long Island could feed all the children of most third world countries. In my own district, the per pupil expenditure is $32,050. Ignorance is expensive. So is education. Whether it has to be that expensive is another matter.
I always liked the license plate that read “if you think education is expensive, try ignorance!” ~ an example of Murphy’s Law applied when trying to appear clever in blog comments. No doubt, Mr. Murphy here is fondly recalling a bumper sticker.
Well, it looks like everyone is feeling witty today.
Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I clearly remember getting tracked in elementary school. We were broken down by reading capabilities from 2d grade on and math from 5th (perhaps 4th). Maybe Mr. Filler should look into moving to Lexington, Kentucky for his child’s benefit. Heck, if the goal is Yale or Harvard his child will have the added advantage of filling a national diversity quotient.
I heard about the tracking of reading in Kentucky in second grade, those considered capable of independent reading one day and those doomed to the coal mines.
Supplimenting your child’s education at home is a really bad idea in the juvie prisons we call public schools. From personal experience, it was a bad idea 35 years ago.
Imagine getting marked wrong because you worked math problems (and getting the correct answer) but doing it the way your Dad taught you (as he did it in school back in the 50’s), but not the way the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania prison system deemed it should be done.
Thus began my disrepect for authority, or as the government calls it today; Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
I can’t speak for the Long Island School system, but my experience in public school in upstate NY was the opposite of what he suggests. Most schools that I know of have choices for kids of different levels. There was an “Advanced Placement” version of every major subject at my high school, which could be taken for college credit. There was even a class called “BC calculus,” which was supposed to be the toughest course offered by the school. Kids could also satisfy their English sequence by taking either 2 electives from a list of relatively easy courses (speech class, film class, etc), or by taking AP English. In my experience, there’s a lot more variation and opportunity in public schools than Lane Filler is imputing with his article.
As someone who took most of the supposedly higher level classes at one of the better Long Island public schools, let me say, it’s still a joke. I took every AP class offered at the school, aced all the AP exams, often felt bored in class, and still wasn’t all that prepared for my Freshman level engineering classes at an Ivy League school. Too many parents like Mr. Filler forcing schools to put their kids into AP and other advanced classes when they don’t belong in them causes the classes to not be all that special. In today’s era of grade inflation and all it’s kin, “advanced” and “honors” are really just being better than the remedial classes that the “normal” classes have become.
[Ed. note: Normally, your comment wouldn’t post because of your failure to provide a legit email address, but I’ve allowed it because it offers a view that’s worthwhile. Next time, use a real email or it won’t post.]
Bear in mind that Filler’s discussion revolved around the edcuation received by his fifth grade daughter, not the educational opportunities offered students in general. This is one of the reasons why his rant was disingenuous. No doubt his daughter will have other opportunities in high school, and likely he will have a different gripe about it then as he learns that the educational system isn’t perfect for anyone, and he (and his daughter) aren’t special.
Having endured public schools and found himself in an Ivy (though you neglect to say whether it’s a top Ivy or a lesser Ivy), you should realize the inherent limitations of high school and even most universities. Constrained by curricular requirements, the median (or lower) skill level of classmates, the qualifications of your teachers (how many Nobel winning thinkers teach high school?), even the AP classes can only take you so far.
If you notice my use of the phrase “polar extremes” in the post, I know what it’s like to have a kid spend a year making origami swans in AP physics while acing every test. But if you’re as smart as you say, you will realize that this is the best you can do. It may be an unfortunate waste of time, and hopefully it doesn’t crush your spirit in the process, but it’s the nature of the beast. You can’t change the nature of the beast, so you make the best of it, moving from swans to dodecahedrons to pass the time.
I thought Oppositional Defiant Disorder is another term for creativity.
It’s all according to who’s doing the disagnosing.