Schools are more willing to differentiate learning when it comes to reading/writing than math. This is because it doesn't require different lesson plans to let kids read different books during free reading time, for example. And when grading a kids' writing, it's not hard for a teacher to focus on basic skills for kids that are slower, and more advanced grammatical nitpicks for kids who have the basics down.
You make the point down-thread that parents do accelerated math because it's easier to show a kid has mastered a given skill. This is definitely relevant, in that schools that fight parents who want to accelerate their kids (across the board) have a harder time resisting when it can be clearly demonstrated that the child understands a topic. Even with this evidence, schools still resist letting children learn at their level in math; I can't imagine how much harder it would be to accomplish in a more amorphous subject like ELA.
FWIW, in my family we emphasize both math and ELA, but we might be nonrepresentative since I work in literacy/edtech.
> Schools are more willing to differentiate learning when it comes to reading/writing than math. This is because it doesn't require different lesson plans to let kids read different books during free reading time, for example. And when grading a kids' writing, it's not hard for a teacher to focus on basic skills for kids that are slower, and more advanced grammatical nitpicks for kids who have the basics down.
Ironically, that's exactly the kind of individual-differentiation-without-group-tracking that people around here object to when it is proposed for math.
Schools are, increasingly, willing to differentiate this way for math. Conservative (in the “attached to past methods”, rather than ideological, sense, though there is considerable correlation here) factions in the populace are opposed to it, though.
You make the point down-thread that parents do accelerated math because it's easier to show a kid has mastered a given skill. This is definitely relevant, in that schools that fight parents who want to accelerate their kids (across the board) have a harder time resisting when it can be clearly demonstrated that the child understands a topic. Even with this evidence, schools still resist letting children learn at their level in math; I can't imagine how much harder it would be to accomplish in a more amorphous subject like ELA.
FWIW, in my family we emphasize both math and ELA, but we might be nonrepresentative since I work in literacy/edtech.