PLANK EIGHT:
EARLY INTERVENTION AND SPECIALIZED INSTRUCTION

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound
of cure."

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC

We should work early with kids who show the first sign of learning difficulties in school. Education leaders should focus on immediate, micro-remedial action to help these children, by putting in place tutoring and mentoring services for kids who fall behind. Summer and vacation times should be used, as needed, to provide catch-up classes for lagging students.

Most urgently, school administrators should stop the insanity of social promotion--advancing students to the next grade when they are academically unprepared--all in the name of preserving their self-esteem, or perhaps simply because it happens to be easier than addressing the child's real learning needs.

Never let a defect pass on to the next station. Many of the world's best manufacturing companies practice this basic tenet of quality control. Industry leaders know from hard experience that if defects are not identified and solved, the long-term costs to repair, maintain and re-design a product become exorbitant. In the case of education, social promotion from one grade to the next only results in harming the student, who then suffers from a continuous lack of competency in tackling ever-increasing complex subject matter. Worse, social promotion only dilutes a classroom filled with kids ready and anxious to learn with unprepared, unmotivated students placed there by administrators who know these students lack the requisite skills.

The result is "least common denominator" learning, in which the teacher is forced to lower the rigor of the day's lesson to the level of the least prepared student, or else condemn that student to falling even further behind his peers. This approach to learning makes little sense. Nor does diverting precious teacher time