The whole world is watching when international comparisons are made. In recent decades, a surprising hostility to high achievement has developed in our schools. It stems from the mistaken notion that individual differences in school achievements arise from unfair advantages enjoyed by good students. Believe it or not, there are people running our schools today who believe that assigning homework gives an unfair advantage to good students and that honors programs should be eliminated because they allow the better students to move still further ahead of their peers, increasing the amount of inequality in society. The notion that only those teaching methods and only those curricula that promote equal outcomes should be employed in the public schools is gaining in popularity among school administrators.
Egalitarianism makes about as much sense in the classroom as it does in athletics.
We know what would happen to performance if we adopted the attitude that our better athletes should be denied access to training or coaching just because they respond to them better than other people. Yet we seriously entertain such absurd notions when they are advanced about school performance. One thing is certain, if we are unable to rid our schools of these philosophical straight jackets that are being forced upon our better students, we will never be able to improve our schools. A school curriculum and the teaching methods used to deliver the curriculum to the students ought to be firmly grounded in the research showing what is needed and what methods work best. How children are grouped together for the purpose of instruction should also require justification according to research.