Word: teacher
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...supplies; for a few moments, all order broke down. "It's overwhelming," says Clapp, who has taught for 39 years. "Dealing with this many kids and this many different needs wears you out. And by a long shot, the average student loses out." In Buffalo, N.Y., seventh-grade teacher Rebecca Heim confronts similar frustrations. Eight of her 24 students last year had special needs. "They end up holding back the class because of the constant disruption to the classroom," Heim says. "That's a disservice to the regular-ed students...
...detrack one course--ninth-grade literature--so that students of all abilities and test scores would sit next to each other and read the same books. School officials say students who previously went unnoticed are flourishing. "Kids have started to find they have a voice in the room," says teacher Dana Sherman. "When you start giving kids a voice, achievement is one of the outcomes." Still, after five years, the program hasn't spread to any other classes in the district. "You know who the parents are who are upset," says Sherman. "It's the parents of the kids...
...Math teacher Zbigniew Zielina was puzzled by the silence. It was early in the school year, he was about to begin his algebra class, and the Santa Paula High School instructor detected none of the loud talk and scraping chairs that usually marked his students' entrance. He turned to investigate. "I see 30 kids quietly copying the questions," he recalls. "They were ready to work. In all my years, I have never seen this...
...ability grouping"--is practiced in at least 80% of U.S. high schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But in Santa Paula, anger at the grouping system had smoldered for decades. "This is a small town that's been run the same way forever," says special-programs teacher Lisa Salas, who went through school on the "standard" track and says she struggled unprepared through college. Her father Robert, a retired investigator for the local district attorney's office, was so angry about his own low-ball education that he ran for and won a seat on the school...
After months of debate and a raucous school-board meeting, supporters of detracking, like science teacher Ray Sepulveda, won out. On his own, Sepulveda had detracked his classes a decade earlier, eliminating prerequisites so that any student who wanted to take college-prep or honors courses could do so simply by signing up. "I think everybody should be exposed to the good stuff," he says. To ease the transition to the new, detracked environment, principal Antonio Gaitan organized after-school tutoring and Saturday enrichment classes for 700 former standard-track kids. "It's vital to build in curriculum support," Gaitan...