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Is it really that bad that 25% of students get individualized coaching? The IQ spread between a student with an IQ of 70 and one with an IQ of 130+ is far too great to teach them together.
The speed at which students will learn 9 years worth of material will vary vastly and the pain points and bottle necks in learning will vary vastly. It isn't at all surprising that at least 25% of students will be out of sync with the curriculum.
That explains five percentage points and assumes that half of "special education programs" are for gifted children.
If you want to map it to one tail of IQ, then 25% of students have <90 IQ. I don't think that the typical student with an IQ of 89 needs coaching, so something else is causing those numbers.
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My understanding is that classrooms are generally integrated and they therefore go at the speed of the slowest student. Streaming is generally seen as reactionary and antiliberal in the public system.
But it is inclusive if we rebrand it as special ed.
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Our solution to that was to just split the kids into four or five classes based on their performance. Seems vastly cheaper than individualized coaching or trying to figure out the specific issues.
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The IQ 130+ students aren't getting individual calc tutors in middle school, it bears pointing out.
Differentiated education is good. But you could go much further with the same amount of resources by grouping students of roughly the same ability and teaching classes targeted to their abilities. Even if you want to put more resources into students at the lower end, it makes more sense to group them in low student-teacher ratio classes appropriate to their learning rate.
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