Murray, Charles. Real education: Four simple truths for bringing America’s schools back to reality. New York: Crown Forum, 2008.
Chapter 2: “Half of the Children are Below Average”
“To demand that students meet standards that have been set without regard to their academic ability is wrong and cruel to the children who are unable to meet those standards.”
The author also discusses that people like me who read these kinds of books often do not have a clear idea of what “below the national average” really means. We cannot make inferences from our own high school experience because going to school in a middle class area very few of our classmates were actually below the national average. He goes on to give some examples of specific test questions that the bottom third of eighth graders got wrong that seem elementary to you and me. No matter how well you teach, even teaching to the test, many students just cannot solve math problems and make inferences from a sample of text.
“If you define grade level as the tasks that someone of average academic ability can be taught to do, then the proportion of students who are not at grade level will be approximately 50 percent.”
The best we can hope to do is to “move children from far below average intellectually to somewhat less below average.” To tell all children that they can succeed in school if they only try is to disregard the fact that abilities vary from one child to the next and humiliates the children who really cannot succeed. 
