I think most people accept that education has been a good and progressive force over time. Yet, regrettably, underachievement has been a chronic problem in public education. This has been especially true for the socially disadvantaged. In some key ways, the problem looks structural.

Beyond the challenges to learning posed by non-school factors like economic inequity, weak funding, and student stress, the achievement gap is also influenced by systemic schooling factors. Biased and rigid instructional conditions and overly narrow definitions of success also add to underachievement.

It's well known that after the first years of schooling, classrooms begin to lose their individualization and literacy skill focus. After that, most classrooms move in the direction of "left-brained," rote, content learning. This typically occurs in passive assimilation classroom conditions, with a mostly uniform delivery of instruction. These instructional conditions are skewed away from many "right-brained," less abled, and atypical learners, some gifted.

This mismatch between neurological strengths, background opportunity, and the instructional conditions in the classroom is a key factor at the heart of the underachievement issue. In fact, it can be argued that the achievement gap results, in part, from the way that the school system is designed and works. This is mostly because the system doesn't sufficiently tailor instruction to meet individual differences in students, despite a lot of talk to the contrary.


And here's why this issue is a core problem. When the environment is held constant, then it's the qualities inside students that vary the most and influence success the most. These are the neurological/cognitive capabilities that allow students to absorb and use the curriculum's content. These capabilities are often not distributed equally across students, and are critical to learning.

So when instruction, rate, and outcomes are uniform or equal, these internal factors dominate (unevenly) in terms of achievement. For the majority of students who are sequential, analytic, verbal-auditory capable there is a built-in advantage. The rest are at a disadvantage, because only one type of smart is being fully engaged.

Ironically, the more we try to minimize the impact of individual differences, the more they count. And "left-brain" learning counts the most. One-size-fits-all instruction and standards creates very narrow criteria and pathways by which to reach and measure success. Too much student potential and brain functioning gets left out. This creates an unfair instructional system for too many students.

By setting one standard and approach for everyone, but not sufficiently varying instruction or customizing goals, the static "factory method" generates underachievement as a by-product.

Many students, whose natural skills, curiosity and neurological system favor another type of learning focus, pace, or curricular goal, are negatively affected. They become most of the underachievers, and the system's "second class" learners. The standards-based approach to achievement has largely ignored the basic assumption underlying that approach: instruction will need to vary in order to get everyone to (or near) one standard.

Some propose that more rigor and higher expectations will actually solve the problem. But, in addition to the serious stress this places on teachers and students, it's hard to see how raising only curriculum expectations will be enough to change the underachievement pattern and the current insensitivity to individual differences. In fact, raising curriculum expectations, without personalizing instruction and goals, may lead to even more underachievement.

This is because students off the standard mark, or seeking it in other ways, will continue to be viewed as underachievers, and will be tacitly declared failures. Determining success, based on only one definition of success, also seems narrow and unfair, given the range of human diversity. And with recent fiscal reductions to the support parts of the school system, the parts that provide extra help and advocacy to underachievers, things may get worse.

It seems to me, no discussion about educational reform will be complete without re-examining how we deliver instruction to learners with lots of cognitive diversity, and how we define achievement to account for these variations in learners.

It seems to me, a truly modern system would be one that is designed to embrace multiple goals, and diverse pathways to success. It would accept and celebrate cognitive diversity, not deny or minimize it. It would use modern communications and technologies to help innovate and personalize instruction. It would acknowledge that what we teach is very important, but how we teach it is just as important, because "the how" of instruction is the way we reach everyone and be fair about it.

Don Marinelli, of Boulder, is a clinical psychologist.