>for example, when i was in one of these programs, our overwhelmingly White class (in a school that was about 60% Black) got to learn about the stock market by

>for example, when i was in one of these programs, our overwhelmingly White class (in a school that was about 60% Black) got to learn about the stock market by simulating a working exchange. There’s nothing about the notion of buying and selling that can’t be understood by any student—yet this was part of the curriculum only for the small number of students deemed intellectually worthy of the extra attention. It's all well and good to point out that buying and selling are fundamentally simple concepts, but that's not the same as saying that the instruction could be given universally. First, students have to be stable enough personally and in their lives that they can show up and pay attention for all the instruction that makes the exercise get off the ground at all. Then, students need to care about the material and believe that there is justification to learn it, or it's casting pearls before swine. In my public school experience, you've just lost 80-90% of the student body with those two factors. Then, if you have all that, you need teachers who are confident enough with stock markets to teach the material and go beyond a narrow track of reciting facts, and that goes way further than just 'buying and selling'. On top of that, the teacher needs to be able to make or facilitate a simulation that moves at the right pace and adjusts as necessary, including getting all the students to work well together. From the perspective of a school administration, you only get a few teachers who will have those skills and personality, and it's pretty important to have them doing work like that, because teaching-as-remedial-fact-recitation for a standardized test will get rid of those good teachers pretty quickly, and now you have no one left to teach the kids who could have benefitted from the differentiated curriculum. Source: I went to public school and now teach and manage at a school that focuses on a lot of simulations and role-playing.