Laboring Under a Misapprehension

Term 3 began Tuesday at Emmanuel and I was actually excited to start. Over the break, I thought a lot about my Form 1 reading program and decided to make some pretty significant changes. Last term, I focused primarily on a handful of students who needed the most help and only sporadically read with the other students, if at all. This is a good strategy, since the students who are furthest behind need the most attention, but I hated neglecting the other students - in the end, they are ALL in the remedial program. This term, I have more free time since I'm no longer teaching the Integrated Science course (that's right, we're getting an ACTUAL science teacher), so I'm going to use that extra time to work with every student in my Form 1 class (all 40). I've created reading groups of 4 students and each group will meet with me twice a week, every other week. We'll read a story and work on critical discussion the first time, then the second time we meet, I want the students to write something about what we've read and discussed. I will still spend extra time with the few students who need the most work, but this way every student gets the opportunity to improve. I was especially excited about this method, because there are also a handful of students in this class who I think could be quite good readers, with some practice. I kind of hoped that if I worked with some of the more motivated students, perhaps they could improve enough to get out of the remedial program and into regular classes. I understand that the remedial program is a necessary part of the school, but it's certainly not a pleasant one. There is a huge stigma associated with the program - it's called the dunce class by students and teachers alike, there are lots of behavioral problems and many teachers don't even bother with them at all. For these reasons, I was excited at the possibility of getting even just one student out of there. Excited, that is, until I ran the new program by the Form teacher, who told me straight out that no students were going to be moved. They were labled "remedial" from elementary school and would remain "remedial" throughout high school. And no amount of improvement would change that. Which leads me to the question...what am I doing here? If these kids are being marked as "failures" at the tender age of 11 (which is when many of them take their high school entrance exams) and there is no opportunity for them to move away from that, then what am I doing here? Sure, any reading help is good and necessary, but it's not going to solve the central issue, which is, of course, if you consistently tell a kid that he is a failure, he will FAIL. And barring all possible exits from the remedial program tells the kids just that. That they are failures, that they will always be failures and that no amount of work could possibly prevent them from failing. Plus, students in the remedial program are so far behind in the curriculum that if they do beat the odds and make it to Form 4 (the remedial program ends at Form 3), they'll be so far behind the non-remedial students that no amount of work could catch them up. Which I think is the ultimate argument for moving motivated students up NOW, while they still have a fighting chance. As it stands, these students are simply being conditioned to fail, which, in the end, fails us all.