Traditional education has been designed to teach a set of standardized norms and then test on those norms. Teachers are told to construct their classroom plans based on standards that are issued by the Federal Education Board. There are many positives with this aspect, and many negatives. The purpose behind teaching norms was first influence by the speeches and philosophies of E.D. Hirsch. He believed that to have an educated society we must all know the same things, and therefore by teaching students across America the same information, there is the hope that they we will all have a higher understanding of the educational elements around us.
The negative to this approach is that the universal approach is not affective for everyone, and not everyone is learning the materials that have been prescribed. In an effort for fairness the material is changed to accommodate those learners, but in the spirit of norms, those changes are across the board for everyone. This means that those that were understanding the material just fine are also have to learn with the accommodated situation. What we have found is a that the standards are being lowered for a select few, but affecting all.
There are some new schools of thought on how to approach this dilemma, and online learning has had a large role. The idea is that students can have a full or supplemental education completely online. This is a way to help curb the affects of the lower standards, and will promote higher learning for those that can handle more. Some students have found that learning online completely is the best for them anyway because they tend to be independent learners, and therefore can handle the environment that inevitably asks more of them. This also leads into collaborative learning where students and teachers work together to formulate a system that works for the individual, not the whole group. This is most affective in working with people that have key interests in the math or sciences.