Too Old-School?

Our school district is changing how it handles "gifted" children. Instead of a whole class dedicated just to the top 20 students (give or take a few who choose not to enroll in the class), they will institute a pull-out program, something akin to taking a child out of the normal class for a couple hours a week to receive some extra attention to foster his or her accelerate abilities. Color me skeptical.

Admittedly, I don't know all the ins and outs of the pull-out program, but as I see it, it will be a poor substitute. In the first model, the whole curriculum can be designed to engage certain children in a way that cannot be mimicked in two hours a week. The entire paradigm of teaching can be different. Children who under-perform in a typical classroom sometimes thrive in a more challenging, less conventional environment, and other children are pushed to reach their exceptional potential.

An impetus for the change is likely budgetary, but one also hears that a main benefit of the change is that more children will be served. Sure, I suppose more than 20 (40 in total, given there is a class for 4th graders and one for 5th graders) can be pulled-out through the course of a week. Spread the wealth around a bit. I generally think that is a nice idea--more opportunities for more people. Yet...

I believe the outcome of the change will be that some children who would thrive in the first model will gain very little or nothing from the second model--most of their time is still in a conventional classroom. Some will still gain something significant but not as much as they would from the first model. Others who may not have been invited for the first model might gain a bit by being pulled-out. Overall, I fear that a few people might be helped a little more but many more people will not be helped as much as they would have been otherwise. I also don't know how many more will be involved in the pull-out program--the numbers may not even be that different.

Philosophically, I struggle a bit with this issue. Help more people a little or fewer people a lot? Which model serves the objectives of education the best? If the objective is to give the best education to as many as possible, you could make a pretty good case for either model, depending on whether one emphasizes "best" or "many" over the other. I also think a case could be made that the second model for dealing with accelerated children is so watered-down that it is merely a symbolic move to appease certain parents or administrators.

What is the greater good? An excellent few can arguably pull everyone higher by what they contribute to the whole. Why should everyone have to be mediocre, or slightly above? On the other hand, the elite sometimes leave the rest behind, and a large gap can occur between the haves and the have-nots, the haves sometimes with astounding excess while the have-nots sometimes with utter scarcity.

Can both really be served equally well at the same time? With infinite resources and will, perhaps. Otherwise...not sure. It seems that serving one segment of a society always has some cost for the other, as does neglecting a segment.

Do elements of this scenario remind anyone of the health care debate at all (or just about any social issue with which the government is involved)? Will helping more (in theory) actually serve the country better, or bring us all down? With the infinite ways that things could be changed, I don't even know how to begin to really know the answer to this question, but I do believe that it is unsafe to assume that regardless of the specific ways to achieve it that either basic model is inherently superior to the other.