1.b. Assuming the students can benefit from being like and paid attention to.
If you actually read the article, you find that they are talking entirely about 1.b. One of the student groups is African, so they have a mean IQ around 85. Vanishingly few of them are going to be studying calculus prep at age 13 (option 1.a.). They also explicitly state that they are teaching using techniques used for gifted classes, not the subject material.
So what they are really doing is moving kids out of warehouses and putting them in actual, you know, schools. Amazingly it turns out that an average IQ of 85 is enough to learn useful things.
Why the downvotes? African-Americans really do have an average IQ of 85, meaning they have real difficulty with abstract reasoning. They really did have horrific failure during the "new math" and "whole word" teaching era because they have trouble deducing general principles from specific examples, and school for them often did become pointless warehousing. And this research does show that people with an IQ of 85 can in fact learn useful things and are valuable members of our society.
There are two independent factors here:
1.a. Assuming the students have a high IQ.
1.b. Assuming the students can benefit from being like and paid attention to.
If you actually read the article, you find that they are talking entirely about 1.b. One of the student groups is African, so they have a mean IQ around 85. Vanishingly few of them are going to be studying calculus prep at age 13 (option 1.a.). They also explicitly state that they are teaching using techniques used for gifted classes, not the subject material.
So what they are really doing is moving kids out of warehouses and putting them in actual, you know, schools. Amazingly it turns out that an average IQ of 85 is enough to learn useful things.