Teach to the Top

I was driving by a local high school yesterday when I saw this frightening message on the billboard in front of the school: TEACH TO THE TOP.

Okkayy...maybe they mean't teach so that everybody gets to the top. Aside from being an impossibility at least it's positive.

I'm concerned with another, more sinister implication...a return to the teaching of the mid-twentieth century. TEACH TO THE TOP back then meant identify the best students through mysterious standardized tests, reading ability, or obedience. Concentrate all teaching and behaviour modification practices on those few. Furthermore, identify the bottom students (those who were not identified by the "tests" as top students or those with attention deficits, learning disabilities, poverty, independence, anger, low reading scores etc) and ignore them, punish them, suppress them until they can be buried under avalanches of bad grades and get 'em the fuck out of here. Here being "regular" or "honors" classes or in many cases, the education system entirely.

I remember attending a conference in which the administrator was trying to convey the idea to a resistant parent that his son would have to be put into "alternative education" or be expelled from the school. The father resisted the idea on the grounds of " what will changing programs do to his chances of getting into college.?" The administrator kept coming back with the insistence that if he didn't accept the change, he'd would be thrown out of high school right after "this meeting" so don't worry about college. The father kept "worrying about college" until the administrator finally made clear  "if the boy goes "alternative", he's got a chance for college but if we kick his ass out.....he's gone, a future welfare case, a cost to society, a dependent (unless of course he saves up enough money to buy a gigantic Marshall amp)

After a kid left the regular track and became a "general" student or an "Occupational employment" student or a "non-Regents" student, or whatever they were called wherever you're from.... they were placed in double if not triple jeopardy. They got the worst teachers who were the most discouraging evaluators and they were surrounded by students well known as ball breakers, dumb shits, dweebs, doofuses, delinquents etc.

No teacher wanted to be identified as being "good" with these losers because if you were "good" with them, you'd keep getting them and your status in the department would be diminished because you were perceived as just as goofy as the kids you taught. A further reward was also Cafeteria duty.

Meanwhile the teachers best at identifying, avalanching and burying students became "honors" teachers and if a teacher had real contempt for anything except the mysteriously identified star students, then those teachers became Advanced Placement teachers.....revered and respected by  parents, students, administrators and community because these were the outstanding teachers who didn't take any shit from students and were now employed TEACHING TO THE TOP.