His secret was that he created, with the cooperation of a set of middle school teachers, a “tracking” system to identify talented kids, separate them out from the mass and teach them to a high standard where they would not be held back by the need to pander to their incapable peers. These kids he would also “track” through High School till they could take the Calculus APs.
It worked very well of course, as this is what most of the world does. This was no great innovation, conceptually. Its whats done even in Escalante’s native Bolivia. It did take guts to do it in the US.
His system found and developed talent that would have been overlooked. The system hates tracking, it is ideologically repugnant to it, and would rather waste talent than admit their ideas are wrong.
true - but tracking very much exists in gov’t schools these days to those children fortunate to have interested parents. All sorts of magnet programs teach to decent standards. The tragedy is these magnet schools are the exception not the rule.
Trump’s approach to;
1) eliminate federal dept. of education
2) encourage massive expansion of non-Union charter schools
is great
It is an article of faith with the Left, that everyone is equally capable of learning, and that there is no significant genetic component of IQ. If you dare to disagree, then you're a fascist, and they will destroy you.
Escalante's great sin, for which he was never forgiven, was to demonstrate that there ARE people who are born more talented than others.
“It worked very well of course, as this is what most of the world does. This was no great innovation, conceptually. Its whats done even in Escalante’s native Bolivia. It did take guts to do it in the US.”
It was used in the U.S. up until the 1980s. It probably is used still in some places. I was educated in that system.
Yes, it is repugnant to the current leftist ideologues, but it was considered nearly mandatory by the 1950s/60s “progressives”.