“I have yet to find any schools making more progress by challenging their students less.”
That’s the closing line on Jay Mathews’ piece last week that challenges schools to in turn challenge their average and below-average students. Encourage all students to enroll in an AP course and show them that someone believes they are capable of taking and even passing an AP exam for college credit. Changing school culture to encourage students to challenge themselves, and placing them in a classroom led by a teacher who presents them with a hard topic and believes that they can come through it, can have surprisingly positive results on student achievement.
If your students think school is easy, then you’re doing something wrong.