Public schools are mandated to provide educational opportunities to all students and generally work very hard to support learners with profound deficits or differences. But what about learners who require enrichment rather than accommodations? Amy and Mike invited Kenneth Shores to examine the question of what public education owes to advanced students.

What are five things you will learn in this episode?

1. In theory, what is the purpose of public education?

2. Why has public education struggled to support advanced students?

3. Does harm occur when enrichment is withheld from thriving students?

4. Why shouldn't families be responsible for providing enrichment?

5. How does supporting advanced students align with the purpose of public education?

MEET OUR GUEST

Dr. Kenneth A. Shores is an associate professor specializing in education policy in the School of Education at the University of Delaware, and he is affiliated with the UD Center for Research in Education and Social Policy. His research is focused on educational inequality and encompasses both descriptive and causal inference. To this end, his work addresses racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in test scores, school disciplinary policy, classification systems, and school resources. In addition, he has examined how improvements to school finance systems can reduce educational inequality and how vulnerabilities in school finance systems can contribute to it.

Dr. Shores was a National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellow, a Philanthropy and Civic Society Fellow, a Stanford Graduate Fellow, and an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Predoctoral Fellow. In 2018, he was the co-recipient of the National Council on Measurement in Education's Annual Award for exceptional achievement in educational measurement.

He received his Ph.D. in education policy analysis from Stanford University. Prior to graduate school, he was a middle school teacher on the Navajo Nation.

Kenneth can be reached at https://kennethshores.com or kshores@udel.edu.

LINKS

Rethinking What Public Education Owes to Flourishing Children

High-achieving students deserve to be challenged in school

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WHY GIFTED PROGRAMS ARE UNDER ATTACK

THE NECESSITY OF GIFTED AND TALENTED PROGRAMS

HOW GRADING POLICIES INFLUENCE GRADE INFLATION

ABOUT THIS PODCAST

Tests and the Rest is THE college admissions industry podcast. Explore all of our episodes on the show page.

ABOUT YOUR HOSTS

Mike Bergin is the president of Chariot Learning and founder of TestBright, Roots2Words, and College Eagle. Amy Seeley is the president of Seeley Test Pros and LEAP. If you're interested in working with Mike and/or Amy for test preparation, training, or consulting, get in touch through our contact page.