I am impressed and grateful for the way the school board and administration are working together and in public on a great many issues facing the district and our children. We all celebrate in the successes of our best and brightest students, whose honors and awards are well documented in the local press and the mailings to all residents in our district. For the most part our honors and AP tracked students are doing as expected. Unfortunately, the students who are not in those tracks are not achieving at the same level. They are, however, doing as expected by those in charge of the sorting, gatekeeping and tracking.

At a recent school board meeting the community was presented a vision of expanding opportunities for all children. Some of the highlights include new components to the gifted and talented program, foreign language introduced in kindergarten and changes in the middle school math program. The heart of the presentation seemed to be differentiated curriculum. The gifted students get more challenging work, faster tracks. The less gifted get less challenging work, slower tracks. Differentiated curriculum is the latest codeword for tracking and gifted and talented programs.

Based on a growing body of research, we now know that not all children learn in the same way. We do, however, continue to teach children in the same way. Those who "don't get it" are labeled less gifted. Instead of providing a different (slower) curriculum, those children need to be taught differently. This approach uses differentiated instruction. It is an approach that requires a greater effort in the classroom, but far less money to implement.

The school district provides support in many ways for the gifted. The community seems to want more. AGATE played a major role in the curriculum vision presented by the administration. In fact, it hosted a review of that vision. The Port Washington Education Foundation, purporting to want to help out financially where the district can't (or doesn't want to), raises money for additional support for the gifted and talented.

Parents of children who don't quite fit the mode, grateful for the limited services their children get (they don't get a discount on their taxes, however), don't speak out. Their needs are really individualized so they can't advocate a group approach to meet them. They can, however, ask the district, the board, to put their money behind their rhetoric of advocating a heterogeneous approach to education. The board should support differences, celebrate diversity . It must stop tracking, sorting, labeling and gatekeeping. In the long run this would be truly money saving. Keeping all children on track from day one eliminates the need for remediation later.

As long as we are focusing on children, let's focus on what's best for all the children, individually.

Larry Tietz