Me, I smoke weed and that’s about the only thing I’ve really done consistently since high school.. more consistently than music, and programming, even.
Frankly, I wish I had been better separated from the other kids. I would have been far happier in middle school just hanging around other nice, smart people. (With a few exceptions, the smart kids tended to be kind). The mixture with the “gen pop” led to bullying, repeated physical abuse and harassment by other kids from ages 10-12. This was decades ago when physical abuse amongst minors was often ignored, even by police.
By freshman year of high school, I was worn down and switched back to some non-honors classes mid-term. This unfortunately led to dysfunctional friendships with the “cool” kids (same bully crowd), introduction to drugs and a low achievement life. There was some form of Florence nightingale syndrome involved here, due to unresolved physical abuse leading to friendships with the abusers in high school.
Separating gifted children for accelerated learning is great. Ignoring social development by blindly sticking all kids together in unstructured environments where bullying and physical abuse is allowed to persist will override any hope for some kids. I know, I was there. Still here.
Stuy was a different world, and the first time in my life I felt the opportunity to actually just learn, and not have to hide my report card or test scores as soon as I got them, because doing "too well" meant a beatdown after school.
2/3 of my MIT admission essays were about this experience, incidentally.
[edit 1] Aside: one additional anecdote is that I was constantly getting in trouble before Stuy; I was always bored, because the work was easy, and nobody ever gave me additional work to do, so I would talk to the other kids. I was always an extrovert, and very bad at being bored; I could not sit in one place and just stare at the wall, or pretend to listen to a teacher drone on about some geometry thing I already knew. So I got in trouble constantly for distracting the other kids. That stopped in Stuy, because I wasn't bored; I was challenged.
[edit 2] The other corollary to this, of course, is that on the last day of JHS, after having held my reactions entirely for nearly a decade, and just taking the beatings...I finally lost it. It was really bad, and on the last day of JHS I went absolutely apeshit on this kid for pushing me around and punching me, after I gave him three warnings. Easily one of the top 3 least proud moments of my life. That could have been avoided, too, though you could make an argument a large part of that was also due to it being taboo to actually talk to someone about your feelings in the 90s. I never wanted to fight back because I was afraid of hurting them (I had been training in martial arts for like 7-8 years) and because I didn't want to get in trouble. It was dumb.
Can't we fix bullying in the first place ?
I want to echo this. I too was bullied like crazy (I was ridiculed/outcast for being "gay", in the homosexual sense, except I was completely straight. But that doesn't particularly matter to middle-schoolers. I was ridiculed for the clothing I wore (it fit funny as I grew in spurts) and was physically beat, too.)
Our local schools had some advanced schools ("tracked", as the article calls it); I applied. In my system, if you met the entrance requirements, your fate was tossed into a lottery. For one particular school, ~100 students were accepted from ~600 applicants. I was 500th on the waitlist for that school. (It was the worst of several.) I spent an extra year in my assigned school because of that, and it was hell. It was a gift from God when I got out of there the next year. (I got off one of the wait lists!)
It took ten years to really work through most of the resulting depression and confidence issues my time at my assigned school left me with. I have no idea if I would have succeeded if not for "tracked" education.
The author is wrong on several points:
> Eight Bay Area school districts found similar results when they de-tracked middle-school mathematics and provided professional development to teachers.
Perhaps it was the professional development, and not the de-tracking that led to better results? The link doesn't seem to support the author's conclusion, either, and largely seems to credit the professional development.
> [other remarked about "fixed-ability"] We are at a point where the negative impacts of fixed-ability thinking are undeniable.
I have never heard of "fixed-ability", and at least where I was, it was never the argument for separating out achieving students. The arguments was not that the lower-performing students weren't capable¹ of performing, it just simply that if you taught at their level, you were wasting the potential and the time of the students who were outperforming their peers, as you would have to teach significantly below their ability, which is inevitable when you cater to the lowest common denominator.
> When students, instead, embrace the knowledge that there are no limits to their learning, outcomes improve. When students develop a “limitless perspective” positive changes go through their lives,
And the bullies I was schooled along side with joined hands with the bullied and sang kumbaya. (/s) This is absurd.
> International studies show that the United States is one of the most tracked education systems in the world, but tracking hasn’t led to high achievement for the country.
Tracking is a symptom of people trying to escape the poor baseline education; it is not the cause of the poor baseline education, and eliminating it will not improve that.
> Instead, it has brought about stark racial divisions in opportunity and achievement.
Ah, now it's racist to want to receive an at level education? This argument was bantered around in my school system, and it never made any sense. Some combination of socio-economic standing and what generation you were mattered a whole lot more. (Those with good socioeconomic standing either moved out of system, or enrolled in private schools. First-generation kids — with the exception of the Hispanic community for whatever reasons — seemed to do considerably for whatever reasons. Our "tracked" schools were overrepresented in Asian and (I believe, but these demographics aren't measured) first-generation African-Americans, and under-represented in Hispanic and all other African Americans … and it only ever seemed to me that it was that last one that bothered people.
> Now is the time to invest in the teacher professional development that allows this to happen.
Sure, but this is orthogonal to eliminating tracked education. Add in that every government I've seen seems awfully reluctant to pay the teachers. (And you are paying them for the time they'll need to do this, right?)
> For when we tell students they can reach the sky, and provide them with opportunities to do so, amazing things happen.
This was as patronizing then as it is now.
I can't understand why someone is so eager to shut down the only thing that gave me a future.
¹many of them lacked discipline. They were poorly behaved children, and it's a miracle the teachers wanted to continue to be there at all, IMO. Many of them were clearly not getting discipline taught at home … and teachers are forbidden nowadays from imposing any meaningful discipline themselves.
> The other corollary to this, of course, is that on the last day of JHS, after having held my reactions entirely for nearly a decade, and just taking the beatings...I finally lost it. It was really bad, and on the last day of JHS I went absolutely apeshit on this kid for pushing me around and punching me, after I gave him three warnings. Easily one of the top 3 least proud moments of my life. That could have been avoided, too, though you could make an argument a large part of that was also due to it being taboo to actually talk to someone about your feelings in the 90s. I never wanted to fight back because I was afraid of hurting them (I had been training in martial arts for like 7-8 years) and because I didn't want to get in trouble. It was dumb.
On one of my final days prior to transferring out, I almost lost it on another kid. I think my body language threatened violence, and I think it scared him a bit because I'd never done that. We both still ended up getting dragged to the principal's office, though as I remember I wasn't punished. Today, I regret not actually exacting violence on him. Which runs incredibly contrary to most of what I think my own morals are. But do you just keep trying to fend off the incoming violence forever, or at some point take a stand that might actually make a difference? (It wouldn't be until much later that I read Ender's Game, which argues this very point.) (Or who knows, his friends might have come rushing to his aid, and it would not have been a fair fight at that point.) It was dumb.
For me, being separated from the bullies made all the difference in the world. And it wasn't separation as in "hang around only with other smart kids" - my charter school was academically worse than the public school that I left behind, and like I said, I hung around with the stoners, rockers, and drop-outs. But the charter school focused explicitly on building community and accepting people for who they were. In short, it made it a point to address the emotional needs of teenagers that so many public institutions conveniently forget about. That made all the difference in the world.
For you - if you can muster the money or get insurance to pay for it, I'd highly recommend seeing a therapist that works with trauma. This stuff sticks with you a long time, but it doesn't have to define your life.
There's nothing to really help people who've already experienced it, but seeing the numbers somehow really helped to put it in perspective for me.
It's kind of an epidemic at this point.
Which tallies with my own experience, in the UK there's secondary school and college (AKA sixth form) before university, which basically means the last two years of high school are separate from the first 5, you go to a different school (sometimes, some places have both on the same campus). And I made the choice to go to a college further out of my way that added 10 hours of cycling onto my commute every week pretty much so I'd never have to speak to anyone from my secondary again, the new place was just another college, no special grade requirements, but not being around the same people and being able to basically "reset" made my life so much better that I can't really argue that never separating kids is a good option.
In my case, I still got bundled in with the "high achievers" in the IB honors program in HS, but it wasn't any better for self-esteem. The kids in that program weren't genuinely smarter or nicer for the most part - they just had parents who were wealthier and able to afford tutors/extra-curriculars plus stable home environments. The teachers in that program were incredibly unaccommodating to disabilities and there was a sickening elitism that the IB kids has towards everyone not in IB. The "normal" kids weren't the ones making me miserable, it was my peers.
I eventually couldn't take existing in that state, and the toll it all took on my mental health came to it's reasonable conclusion in the form of self-directed violence. Eventually transferred schools. Almost dropped out, but found a loophole that let me take some community college classes for credit and graduate a semester early, so I still got through.
Took me a long time to get perspective on all that. My only long-term friends I still have today from HS were from electives - they were skipping class and smoking up in HS. I never considered that option for myself (did no drugs at all back then), since I wasn't really interested in "coping" so much as getting out. But still, I don't think being separated helped at all. Sure I passed every test, but I was socially out of my depth the entire time. Just being surrounded by other young people in general can be a recipe for misery for people who can't fit in. I'd like to think online school would have been better, but not sure if being completely isolated would have just messed me up more in the long run.
Edit: left out a key word, "physical" bullying. There was definitely tons of the other sort.
Interestingly, people actually graduate from these schools and sometimes go to college afterwards.
I think it's a better system - why make the victim switch schools when obviously they aren't the problem here?
Bullying and peer pressure cause serious harm, not just emotionally but economically when good kids drop out of society. These harms would be magnified if kids who don't fit in with the crowd had even fewer options to escape.
The idea isn't to just get rid of private schools, but to take money that goes into that and finance better public education (which can still include ways for people to move around if needed!)
Having a separate world for the rich means that kids who "don't fit in with the crowd" but don't have wealthy parents won't have any way out.
In an alternate world where more money is invested in the public system, having wealth would no longer be a necessary requirement for having access to alternatives.
That's perhaps a good argument for having smaller free-and-equally-funded public schools with more within any given radius of every residence, with policies that leverage that to provide greater permitted and practical choice for students/parents independent of wealth, but unless freedom from bullying and peer pressure is desired to be gated by wealth I don't see how it opposes, in any way, abolition of either private schools or public districts with superior funding because the local residents are richer.
A Hawaiian school did not offer a G&T program due to a lack of funding for it. Participating in the normal classroom changed her to the point that it contributed to withdrawing her from school and we instead opted to home school. Coming from the mainland, Hawaii's general curriculum was behind and she became bored, faced relentless bullying from peers for being a "...know it all haole...," and found it difficult to make friends. She often came home with stories regarding the teacher spending significant time dealing with behavioral issues, negatively impacting instruction to the few children looking to learn. The teacher was also culpable for practicing a less engaging and micromanaging teaching style involving smothering children with worksheets during the school day, and forcing parents to initial all assignments and fill out learning logs at night. The teacher treated learning like a chore instead of a fun discovery process, and it killed her curiosity and motivation. After she was assaulted at her bus stop, we pulled her from school.
Fortunately, we only lived in Hawaii for a short time period and I was capable of taking a hiatus from professional life to home school her until we moved from Hawaii. We involved her in local home school groups to facilitate like-minded friendships and the customized, self-paced curriculum enabled her to make substantial strides in her subjects. Thankfully the damage done to her was temporary and she resumed her happy normal curious behavior.
In every other school with a G&T program, she has fit in and flourished. Good teachers, friends, and personal growth on her part. Not acknowledging that people have different aptitudes and motivations, then forcing them to learn from a cookie-cutter styled teaching program is a defunct social experiment gone awry. In our Hawaii case, it seemed like crabs in a bucket when it came to peer bullying. I get it, you're only as strong as your weak is a decent metaphor, but sometimes people and institutions are taking this concept to a degree that forces others down instead of boosting people up. I'm just guessing from personal experiences, but mixing students of all abilities appears to generate a net negative social welfare outcome.
As someone who had both experiences--being in classes that were separated for more advanced students, and being in classes that were not--I second this observation. I was much happier in the separated classes and got much more out of them.
Making them unnecessarily cut off from everyone else who isn't quite as "gifted" is worse, in a way. How is that kid going to get out of his/her bubble?
To be frank we already let social norms over reason lead us into enough nightmares and stupid decisions - we shouldn't be encouraging them.
And as I did mention in another comment I still can barely believe the cases of bullying people describe here, they are horrible! I don't think bullying at such a level is a global problem. I suspect such huge bullying problems must be just a symptom of a deeper society issue. We had a kid with Down syndrome in class for 8 years of primary school and nobody did EVER put a finger on him. By 12 years old I had known my classmates my whole live, quite a few of them also from activities outside school. I didn't like all of them, we had arguments which were not always handled diplomatically, but we had some basic decency towards each other.
Bullying and whether kids should be separated by ability are two orthogonal problems.
I had no idea that calls to public_policy return type bool.
Not sure what you're going for here?
That said, in my experience, the gifted/nerdy/aspy kids got the lion's share of the bullying. I still carry it with me decades later, and at least one of my comrades in misery killed herself because of it.
Marie-Louise Von Franz
1. Gifted / clearly university-bound
2. Potential college prep
3. Community college
4. Normal underperformers
5. Little hope, likely will drop out
6. No future besides unemployment or prison
You took all your classes with your own cohort, rarely had to interact with anyone outside your cohort, and coursework was tailored to your level. It was glorious. I went from boring, slow classes and having to run and hide from tormentors to appropriately paced coursework and always interacting with friendly, nice, smart kids. My childhood mental health went on a noticeable upswing during this experiment. Too bad it ended around 3 years later and I was thrown back into the prison "general population" full of kids whose talents included arson and filing other kids' teeth down in the metal shop. Not sure why they ended the program, because it really made school bearable.
I don't think there were other tracks, it was pretty much just high achievers classes and than the regular pool of students.
I can remember vividly my parents wanted to send me to private (Catholic) high school after Primary school. I begged not to be separated from my existing friends who were all going to the local public school (which didn't have a great rep). It was only the presence of these gifted classes which convinced my parents to let me go to the public school. Both of my younger sisters were subsequently sent to Catholic School.
My parents pretty much followed the 'tiger parent' stereotype they put enormous pressure on me to succeed I remember I got 93% on a math test once and my Dad yelling at me and berating me for not doing well enough.
My friends thought my parents were insane, especially when I'd tell them I couldn't go to the movies because my parents were making me study for an upcoming test and things like that. None of my friend's parents seemed to give a shit about their grades.
I'm grateful for opportunities I had as a result of my upbringing, I got into the course I wanted at a good university etc. But looking back now decades later it feels like I was robbed of an adolescence. A lot of people have fond memories of their time in high school all that really stands out to me was enormous amount of pressure I felt, I'm honestly surprised I didn't have some sort of breakdown.
I can remember one of my good friends, who I'd be constantly competing with for top marks seemed to breeze through class with about 1/10th of the effort I put in he'd never study for any tests, he'd be writing up his homework 10 minutes before it was due and getting full marks. I always felt like such a fraud compared to him. I got good grades because my parents leaned so hard on me to put in the work, even at the time I was conscious of that. He got good grades because he was naturally gifted and school came 'easily' to him. Today he has two PHD and is still one of the most intelligent people I know.
I wonder if he might not have felt the same way because he put in so much less effort, but still did well. If you put in a lot of effort regardless of the outcome you can think back that you tried your best. If you half-ass it and things go well, then you might feel that you don't deserve it, but if things don't go well, then you feel bad for not trying.
Being able to work hard is a talent itself. In many cases it's the most important one.
Ironically if we had stayed in Birmingham, my mother said that the would have tried to use my Grandfathers influence as an ex headmaster and tried to get me into King Edwards (Tolkien's old school) which is normally ranked no 1 or 2 in the UK
On a related metric, if you look at the top 10 students in my public low rated high school in the south, the top 10 students (which I was one) were made up of kids whose parents were in the school system, one kid of a prominent lawyer, one was the daughter of a plant manager, and only one came from a poor background.
Probably even if we went to dystopian radical equality measures like mandating all kids be kept in government creches which would play hell with mammilian bonds and rightfully piss many people off.
It is hardly a child's responsibility to suffer from the violence, bullying, and general disinterest in any academic achievement by another group of children.
Not a lot of parents are going to be thrilled to hear that their third (or 7th) grader is probably going to drop out. And they're going to wonder if the teachers are just going to give up on the kids in that track.
To do this in a way that would be perceived as positive for all tracks, you'd need to put more resources towards the higher numbered tracks, and make it clear that's what's going on. Smaller class sizes / more instructional aides / better teachers go to the kids who need more help; and put gifted kids into larger classes, because they'll probably manage fine.
Of course, smaller classes needs more teachers / money. It's cheaper to lump everyone together and hope the kids that get it help the other kids.
Also, you need to make it possible/easy to move tracks to adjust if screening got you in the wrong one. And be mindful of systemic bias influencing track selection.
The problem is the reasons kids end up in the bad classes are all different.
Some kids have a learning disability that requires individualized attention. You need more teachers for that, or more parental involvement.
Other kids have a different learning disability where the only thing they need is more time to do the same work. You can put them in a normal sized class with other students who work at the same pace and everything is fine.
Some kids have a bad home life and what you can do for them is to get them into after school programs so they have more time at school to do homework and interact with other students and less time at home where everything sucks. But in that case you don't need smaller classes, you need longer hours. More after school programs.
Some kids used to have a bad home life and now it's better, but the experience affected them and now they act out. What those kids need is counseling.
Some kids have been exposed to environmental toxins at home that predispose them to violent behavior. They needed prevention -- lead abatement etc. -- because once it has already happened they're pretty much totally screwed and there is not a lot the school can do about it.
All of these kids have to be separated from the other kids or they'll disrupt the class, but "pour money on those classes" doesn't fix most of it because most of the problems don't come from the classroom to begin with. The school can't fix the fact that some of their kids are living in apartments with lead paint, so spending money on smaller class sizes for kids with lead poisoning is a lot less effective than spending the money on lead abatement.
Problems in school generally have causes (and solutions) outside of school. Treating the classroom is treating the symptom.
The kids in the middle get screwed. How would you like to be tracked as only worthy of community college because of how you did in 4th or 5th grade?
I was a trouble maker at school. In my final two years, my history teacher took a special interest in me for whatever reason. I now have a masters degree from Cambridge university. I was forced to study with the good kids (who actually tried to bully me ironically) but it worked out really well for me. I think a lot of disruptive boys can really benefit from a strong masculine teacher that forced them to see that there's a better way.
Also, there are some kids which are just going straight to jail. No idea how to deal with them.
Absolutely. They're hungry for a leader who wants to lead them.
> Also, there are some kids which are just going straight to jail. No idea how to deal with them.
Those kids need serious individualized attention, which we normally "can't afford". Yet the cost of fixing it then and there is so much less than the cost of their future crimes and imprisonment.
It's both moral and economical to do the right thing, yet we kick that can down the road. Sigh.
Everyone has different motivators and different idea's of success. Some of those ideas can lead to being classed a criminal, but the state wont accept its own part it plays in people's failures. Until the state recognises this, you will continue to have failure's in people who shouldn't really be failing. Family can also contribute to a persons failure, you cant help it they have different idea's to your own but a lot of parents view their kids as possessions and they don't always accept a kid can form strong beliefs and desires from a young age even though we hear of people who have managed to pursue childhood dreams.
>Sometimes disruptive kids need to be told they are capable I'd agree with that, but having a suitable person to recognise this and guide them is hard, some benefit from a hands off approach others benefit from a hands on coaching position. Out of all the secondary school teachers only 1 would defend me in the staff room, I really pushed the boundaries and challenged people even teachers, but anyone will know cognitive dissonance can create powerful anger in one or more people. I don't think the UK is geared up to educating and exploiting the talent of each individual to their max yet but I hold out hope. >I think a lot of disruptive boys can really benefit from a strong masculine teacher Certainly at primary school I gave female teachers a hard time especially if they didn't "flirt" with me and yes kids can have feelings at that age largely controlled by oxytocin imo, but I think it was a respect to the hidden but generally controlled anger you would sometimes from older male teachers, it was a shocking sight in some ways because older people are generally more laid back so to see them lose their temper was more of a shock than a younger adult who lost their temper more frequently. I also respected the older teachers more than the young teachers, whilst at primary school (6-7age), I am supposed to have caused a young female teacher to have had a nervous breakdown which perhaps backs this idea up, but I came from a very strict background where extreme corporal punishment was also the norm. Even at primary school I was very competitive, often completing work in the classroom first then disrupting the rest of the class as I hated having to sit in silence. When the teachers started setting me extra work to keep me occupied, that lasted for a few days as there was no extra benefit, but it proves some primary school kids can be highly motivated and quite likely the most disruptive. I wrote my first program on a ZX Spectrum one summer around 7-8yrs when it first came out because student neighbour had one and was studying computer science at Uni. He taught me to write basic programs. I didn't know what I was doing was considered hard or difficult because I hadn't been socially conditioned into thinking it was hard, here was something novel and fun which fitted in with the scifi like Dr Who/Star Wars I liked to watch. That I think is an important point, kids learn when its fun, if you have everyone including the teacher saying we are going to learn some hard maths, physics or sciences, the teacher, parents and older peers have subconsciously created a barrier to learning in the classroom. Its why we need to be careful what we say around kids because they are sponges for knowledge and we should be exploiting that better, but I think AI will be taking over soon, which is my primary interest. Cambridge is nice, could have gone, but education held me back imo so I pursued my own non educational path. Do I need those pieces of papers, no, I work for myself because no one has yet to build a general AI and so no one can teach people how to build one. Having a belief in yourself is also important which can be hard some days when things don't go right and then it can be easy to blame others for our own failures which I see a lot of in this thread. Noone will do it for us, we need to do it ourselves, but getting the right environment to make that happen can be hard and we don't always recognise what is a bad environment for us, in fact that can sometimes take years to spot so having periodic times of reflection can be a good thing when looking for ways to do things better and trying to be the best in the world!
A friend of mine who is a teacher says that he has MORE discipline problems from the smart kids who aren't challenged enough.
The real secret should be to embrace independent, computer-mediated systems like Khan Academy. Everyone can move at their own pace. That's the best choice going forward. We have the technology. We have the ability to liberate our children to learn at their individual pace. I don't know why we cling to the old sage-on-a-stage model.
First, they cherry-picked studies. Second, the few studies they referenced addressed overall school performance, not performance of the gifted students.
A perfectly valid way of reading this article is: gifted kids in de-tracked schools do the teachers' jobs for them by helping out the slower kids, which results in better school performance.
It might be true that the higher achievers do better separated, but that the reduction in performance for the lower achievers more than offsets that. This makes sense, because the high achievers are probably going to do pretty well either way, and as you get to the higher test scores (on which performance is measured for these studies), there is less room to improve for the top students.
Of course, this is a complicated question. What is the relative importance of helping lower performing students verse maximizing the top performing students? This is not a question that can be answered with raw data alone, because it is a values question.
Meanwhile, in terms of special education: "Ever since its initial enactment, the federal law has included a commitment to pay 40 percent of the average per student cost for every special education student. The current average per student cost is $7,552 and the average cost per special education student is an additional $9,369 per student, or $16,921. Yet, in 2004, the federal government is providing local school districts with just under 20 percent of its commitment rather than the 40 percent specified by the law, creating a $10.6 billion shortfall for states and local school districts."[2] Well, if they currently pay about 20% of $7500 per student, that comes out to $1500-ish.
So that's a difference of ~400x. Not that I think the federal government should be funding such things, but given that it is...
[1] https://ednote.ecs.org/do-we-really-need-to-fund-gifted-prog...
What makes you think society wants to allow that, let alone encourage it?
I feel like HN is not the best place for this sort of discussion, since everyone is coming at the problem from the perspective of the high achiever. The low achievers deserve help, too.
Behavioral issues negatively correlates with intelligence and effort in school (by both the parents and the students). Increased tracking (i.e. separate low achieving and regular achieving) can be used to 'rescue' the majority of students that are average from having their education disrupted from the behavioral issue kids. Effort and behavioral (i.e. evaluate based on behavioral infractions) based hoops for parents and students can be used to separate the low achieving from the disruptive.
But I wasn't doing drugs or fighting (minus the one or two times), so there's that.
If anything, separating high, medium, and low achievers and allowing them to move at their own pace seems like a preferable situation for everyone.
You can probably get good milage out of recursing this up until the point you're dealing with fractional people.
One thing I'm not saying is that we should just give raises to everyone who's currently in the profession. It would have to be for jobs from here on out. I know of one school that does this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Equity_Project
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/critical-issues-as...
If you want to help them, find a way to improve society that’s overburdened with unskilled workers with middle class aspirations. The gen pop group doesn’t disappear when high school ends. It’s still just the majority of people, just perhaps less socially empowered than in high school. We didn’t fail to make them love science, they just don't care about science. It would be far better to recognize that they would be just fine with less education, no college debt, and some encouragement to make a better society for everyone.
> But as the facts now show, smart kids don't always stay smart, and when they are bored or bullied or ridiculed or neglected, some turn off and some drop out. Thirty-plus years of experience and research into how these students learn has taught us that the academically able can and must be challenged and engaged, inspired and encouraged in order to cultivate their creativity, spirit of innovation, and passion for learning.
Here's IMHO a better perspective on how to "close the excellence gap" in NYC schools, in particular, by changing the way talent is identified and by using local norms. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-11-what-can-we...
Finally, here's a twist: Eliminating gifted programs disproportionally hurts poor parents since rich parents will just pay for any available opportunity to get their kid ahead.
Even if we solve the talent identification problem, SOME kids are going to be the lower achievers.... are we willing to sacrifice helping them do better to help the top achievers do their best? How much are we willing to sacrifice in either direction?
I think that necessarily means segregating the kids by ability in a subject, but I’m not married to that input or mechanism near as much as married to the outcome that every kid is appropriately challenged.
If challenging kid A results in a worse outcome for kid B, so be it.
The right way to do this is obviously that everyone gets an education adapted to their needs and talents!
That means special programs for the "gifted" as well as for the "not much with the book learning" kids.
A "one size fits all" education will always be a compromise that's maybe optimal for the median kid.
If society wants to help poor kids, it should use tax money to pay for people to help those kids. Forcing other kids to give up their possible achievements is exploitation.
It's not clear to me that separating more talented kids into their own groups and classes hurts less talented kids. What is your thinking here?
It seems intuitive that separating students by aptitude/achievement would make it easier to teach the cohort effectively.
If the range of abilities is too wide in a group of students the teacher is going to be miserable and so are all the students who don’t fall within the range the program is optimized for.
It is so strange reading this comment, as I know how Americans are primed to respond to it, and how precisely opposite my response is.
There is no shortage of bad opinion pieces with all sorts of terrible politically driven opinions out there. This is one of them.
I agree, that article written by the director of CTY is biased. And most who attended were rich kids, so maybe in aggregate their approach doesn’t make a difference. But it made a difference for me. CTY provided opportunities for me I never would have had otherwise.
So is the topic achievement, or is the topic their feelings?
In a Postmodern twist of language, we've rhetorically connected a statistic around feelings and a statistic around achievement, but those are two separate items.
They eliminated advanced math classes until 10th great? I'm EXTREMELY happy I'm old now, because when I was a kid ANY class I took with the average or the below average, I was bullied.
Some people are better thinkers, some people are better as leaders, fighters or lifters of boxes. I'm sorry, Postmodernists, we're not equal and never will be.
In NYC they're wanting to remove the gifted and talented classes not because they don't work, but because of racial disparities. The idea here is that we should all fail together, since equality is most easily achieved by trimming the top.
>For instance, after San Francisco Unified de-tracked math, the proportion of students failing algebra fell from 40 percent to 8 percent and the proportion of students taking advanced classes rose to a third, the highest percentage in district history. Until 10th grade, students take the same mathematics classes. From 11th grade on, students can choose different pathways.
The author is indeed trying to connect feelings about ability and achievement. I'm not sure how this is postmodern.
What we really want to know is how many students have passed Algebra 1 by the end of 9th grade. Unfortunately, the statistic in the article is useless.
So while an adherent to a purely rational worldview might ask, "what the hell do feelings have to do with measuring academic performance?", a postmodernist would be glad to, say, include data about feelings (i.e. opinions) in an article and try to pass them off as evidence alongside hard, objective data, as though someone's feelings about grades and the grades themselves are both legitimate data from which to make decisions or design policy.
This is also the state policy in France. Classes for gifted people are absolutely taboo. There are numerous programs for low-achievers of immigrant suburbs and special needs children so the ministry knows they are differences between people but refuse to fund programs for smart kids. Moreover, the whole educational staff are leaning (far-)left and facts like genetics of intelligence are vehemently combatted. Source: was a smart kid that lost a lot of time at school; both parents in education.
While the whole piece is a mess, I think the statistic about confidence is provided as a manner of providing a potential explanation of the manner in which the policy change produced the performance change (for which statistics are also provided.)
I grew up in Moscow, Russia in the 90ies (many people were not well off to say the least) and I was both super nerdy and extremely eh, daring (I would talk back to other kids who were much stronger/more popular than me all the time etc.). Sure, I was not popular, yet I was bullied lightly and almost never physically, mostly by a couple classmates who were just kinda generally messed up (interestingly enough both of them are software developers now, as far as I know), and in total perhaps for 2-3 years in late middle school (I think). The bullying just kinda never happened; I never thought much of that until I read stories like the ones here.
Sure, I hear it was worse outside of Moscow, but even in Moscow an average student's family in the 90ies was way poorer than say in Ohio. Outside of Moscow it's not even comparable. And yet, the level of bullying was probably still lower than what it seems to be in any average American school.
What's up with that?
If you do, I think that's the difference. Here in America, depending on the size of the school, every year there is no core group you share most classes with. You sign up for classes, and sometimes friends choose to stay together, but otherwise most classes come with a set of people that is likely to be selected from the whole grade. There are academic tracks for high/medium/low achievement in Math, English, Science, etc., but even in medium-sized schools you could have a class with a significant percentage of the students in the school every year. Some schools are quite large.
I went to high school in both Croatia and America, Croatia having fixed classes where students stayed with their cohort year after year, and I was surprised how different the social environment felt. Even for the more socially awkward people, people weren't really rejected or bullied-- because you would have to see that person for the next N years of your life. Whereas in America, "fuck that guy, I only had a health class with him once, his voice is annoying."
[1] Most school systems in the United States are vary by county to county. There's some oversight at the state and federal levels, but the higher up the government, the less oversight, generally speaking.
[2] I think it was the 3rd largest in the country. Large enough to be split administratively into three sub-districts.
[3] I was supposed to attend a different high school from my friends because of where I lived at the time, but the boundaries for high school shifted and I ended up attending the same high school as the rest of my friends. Strange now that I think about it, because of the three high schools in the area, it was the furthest one.
Why does bullying appear to be more prevalent in the United States. I can only take guesses.
First guess would be because there has long been (since the founding) a strong vein of social darwinism in the US. For a very long time the idea of "rugged individualism" was held up as the model citizen. Independent, able to take care of him or herself without depending upon the authorities/government, etc. There is a fine line between "rugged individualism" and social darwinism.
Second, people in the US have long been taught to break the rules. We idolize rule breakers, rebels, and teach a general distrust of authority. In the US this attitude really resonates with the poor, as the systems we have set up do not serve them well. If you are wealthy or gifted it behooves you to follow the rules and use the systems put in place.
Third, maybe self-obsession is a factor. We encourage children to find themselves. Reflect on themselves. Figure out what is best for them. We don't often tell our young people to think of others, and even those that are taught to think of others are taught to the think of others in a patronizing, not empathizing way.
Finally, it might be the result of America's melting pot. We have always been a country of many cultures living together. The Italians, Germans, Irish, and later Hispanics, Africans, etc. all used to fight with each other in school. Today differences are more due to income and family status.
I also have a kid that has been identified as gifted (tests give without a margin of error IQ well above 130) and bullied.
I'm from Western Europe (Portugal) but I would assume it is similar in the US/UK and other countries. The main difference I see and talk with 'eastern' europeans and westerns is the sense of community and civility. Whether you agree with communism or not, with USSR or not, there was (and still is in most places, but changing) a sense of community and the greater good. Parents knew each other and each other kids. I grew up just after my country left a dictatorship and in a more tightly knitted group. I knew if I ever bullied/hit a kid in school my parents would find out about it and most likely I would get a beating. I would also probably share a sport or some activity with them even if they weren't in my class. Nowadays here kids and parents in general don't have this relationship, which I think makes much easier for bullies to appear. If your parents met on Friday for coffee and they talked about you bullying their kid, it would be an issue for you, but now, kids have no sense of 'consequence' because their own parents don't care so much or have a sense that what is going on is affecting others (since they aren't in any kind of social circles).
I have seen this change nowadays in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia (not sure about Moscow but I can ping some friends there) and the idea of individualism is starting to gain there (as it gained here) and more problems are arising as well in those countries in the last decade.
my two cents
That doesn't seem like much time to choose different math pathways. For example, the "math kids" I grew up with took several classes post-calculus in high school. How can you do that if you're only taking calculus as a junior or possibly senior (depending on what the common coursework was up through sophomore year)?
Specifically, I had a parent that really, really wanted me to do honors math because my older brother did well at it(and he went on to get a math PhD etc.) and math seemed like a ticket to "success" - and so, in both middle school and high school, I was tracked into the middle options, and then within a few days of starting, parent had pushed around the bureaucracy to get me in honors, where I was not completely hopeless all the time, but suffered quite a lot from pressure to succeed and cheated a few times. Finally in my sophomore HS year I managed to fail a class and got switched to the lower track because for some reason you couldn't go from honors down to the middle option...and then some time later, parent tried to make me talk the school into letting me take the AP Calculus course anyway! Which they said "no" to, of course.
Basically, HS math ended with calculus, but even that "lower" track had a strong pre-calc foundation with some trig, linear algebra, etc. At most there was always about a year of difference at stake, in fact - so the post-tracking setup did not change that much. But when I went off to college all these feelings carried over and could not be left behind: I tried taking the engineering Calc courses, hit a wall with integrals, wasted probably a year trying to prove something to myself and developed a miserable self-outlook, settling on an economics degree because it had easier calc courses. (Had I realized that there was also some executive dysfunction in play it might have all been a lot smoother - oh well.)
Basically, parental worry about math tracking created a huge, huge sideline from taking on activities that would have actually helped along my development. It started early and to some extent wouldn't have been stopped by the system, but it would have presented less of a direct obstacle in daily life.
In contrast, the option of self-study and college courses as a supplement has been the path for the truly gifted learners, especially around SF(CCSF, SFSU, USF, and you can go visit Berkeley if that's not enough). That's a way more straightforward way to go about it w/r to a lot of academic topics.
What if taking more than Calculus 2 in High school isn’t necessary?
Your school seems incredibly privileged to me, imho.
As far as privilege is concerned, it was a public IB school in Sacramento, and we had kids from all types of backgrounds. The average income (even in the IB program) was definitely lower than in other area high schools.
Stanford does not admit kids by IQ score. But it does have an entrance exam, as opposed to a lottery among those who applied.
That is, they likely see some value in separating by some measure of aptitude.
It puts kids through a lot of unpleasant experiences, requiring to exert a lot of effort and spend a lot of time. The problem is that not so much of that effort, discomfort, and time is due to learning new and useful stuff.
Instead, some kids waste time bored when they are ahead of the class, some waste time clueless when they are way behind the class. Quite some kids spend effort on fending off bullies, while other kids attain toxic experience of being successful bullies.
Most of the kids also have a very vague idea why are they studying particular stuff, hoping that maybe it will all fall in place when they go to college, or just hope to pass through it all and forget it after graduating.
Teaching children is what we, as a society, haven't yet figured out well enough.
Some people, when repeatedly thrown into a pool, learn how to swim. Unfortunately, some don't.
Comes from this article:
https://www.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Standards_and_Positions/W...
But as you can see, the change involved moving Algebra 1 from eight grade to ninth grade. Withholding this fact is pretty egregious in my opinion.
I tried looking for the other numbers she mentions by following her links, but the links she provided didn't contain those numbers. And the pdf I linked here wasn't provided by her, in fact not a single one of the numbers she used were supported by her links. I'd guess that the other numbers have similar problems as this one, but I can't know since she didn't provide a way for me to see where those numbers came from.
About the conflict between her and the others, it is hard to know who is right or not so I don't know. But judging by this opinion piece she cares more about her agenda than actual truth.
I was always of the opinion that separating based on ability level was not about improving the baseline, but about allowing those able to learn greater depth to do so.
Not every student is going to earn a Fields Medal or develop new medical procedures, and frankly, that's ok.
But we do need some who will push the boundaries.
The only issue I have is that the selection process itself has not been entirely merit-based, frequently showing preference for students from certain backgrounds at the expense of gifted children of color or from less wealthy backgrounds (and at the expense of society as a whole, who has lost out on the benefits those children could have provided, given the opportunity).
This is a super tricky question to answer... how much extra achievement by the top of the class is worth how much extra achievement by the bottom of the class? There isn't a simple answer.
Additionally, other kids in the system miss out from the interaction with top performing students whose habits and interests can rub off and help lift up other students. One of the most important parts of going to school is meeting people and learning new things from them and this isn't mentioned enough in the test score and percentile driven education age.
also fluid intelligence declines over time so it is absolutely in society's interest to identify talent and assist it as early as possible.
In other words, home-school your kids. Give them goals outside of pleasing some salaryperson who doesn't even like them.
The rest of the parent comment is paranoid drivel, which I do not endorse.
That'd be a great time for those with strong prospects in sports to receive individualized education with outside coaches/players from those fields.
It'd also be a great time for students at risk academically to secretly have tutoring and targeted coverage of core subjects they might be struggling with.
However I'm much more hopeful for actually personalized education; like turning school in to more of an MMO-RPG class system where assignments are like the quests in a game and participation on larger projects has real world commons / civic infrastructure improvements. Real mentor-ship and problems in the real world would give practical application to education that I feel would make retention much stronger.
Its purpose is to maintain the deception that the education system is designed to educate, rather than the daycare-disguised-as-education function it actually serves.
Fortunately for educators and parents, even gifted kids are still easy targets for the "we can't do anything else, so give them a token raise, a fancy title, and stick them in a room [maybe with others like them] so everyone else can get back to work" thing that quite a few organizations currently do. It's one thing to accept this when you have some idea of how much you as a person are worth; it's quite another to accept this when you're a child and have no idea that this is merely a token gesture (even though you may have your suspicions, you'll generally lack the opportunity to do something about it even if you're capable of acknowledging it).
And every adult that interacts with these kids all know (on a subconscious level) but will refuse to remedy this knowledge gap when they see it for pragmatic reasons- teachers and administrators don't want their job to become harder and/or don't have time, and parents desire obedience and subordination from their kids and/or don't have time/money to allow limit-pushing.
You may be in a unique position to remedy this; if you are I highly recommend you take advantage of it.
Separating gifted kids into “magnet schools” sort of works, but they’re just getting the same teachers they’d get anywhere else—we don’t really know how to select for teachers that can teach gifted kids any better, so we just select for teachers with impressive resumes.
You know what works? Academies. Specifically, military academies, though technical academies sometimes do too. Places where the students and teachers are of a selected population, not by natural talent, but by their driven-ness to grow and succeed. Those tend to product functional, intelligent, mature and mentally-healthy adults. And the difference is simple: in an academy, bad grades are stigmatized by the students, while good grades (and hard work to achieve good grades) are not. Everyone wants to be “the smartest kid in the class”, and popularity generally correlates with how well you do in the classes (i.e. everyone wants to be friends with the most-competent kids.)
The one core flaw of the academy model is that this constant mutual pushing of one-another to succeed, leaves students little time to actually get to know one-another or indulge in any outside interests. Hobbies aren’t actively discouraged, but you can only have one to the degree that it doesn’t interfere with your pursuit of top grades; so nobody ends up pursuing heavy-time-investment hobbies, since few others would, so even if one can make time themselves, there’s nobody to share it with. Since academy students are so busy working their asses off, they also essentially treat their fellow students as “coworkers” (interfacing with them only to accelerate their own productivity), skipping right over the stage where they treat the children in their own classes like friends, bonding over shared interests and the like.
Not sure if there’s any in-between, though. Give kids the time and opportunity to create their own subcultures with their own definitions of success, and all the problems of regular schooling re-emerge.
The faculty I had was enthusiastically involved in all of these things and performed well. The few exceptions that did not live up to that level were well known, and the very involved parents pressured the principal and leadership to change at every opportunity - but public schools don't have much flexibility for getting rid of teachers.
Of course, the caliber of the faculty is determined by many factors, and other magnet schools may have terrible teachers. But it is up to the principal, school board/leadership, parents, and teachers to give the kids the opportunity to reach their potential.
> For instance, after San Francisco Unified de-tracked math, the proportion of students failing algebra fell from 40 percent to 8 percent and the proportion of students taking advanced classes rose to a third, the highest percentage in district history.
This compares the number of 8th graders who failed Algebra 1 before the change to the number of 9th graders who failed Algebra 1 after the change. These are apples to oranges numbers. The appropriate metric is the percent of 9th graders that have passed Algebra 1 in either 8th or 9th grade before and after the change.
The following is arguably the most important metric that is omitted. From another article:
> While more students are taking precalculus now, the enrollment in Advanced Placement calculus courses has declined by nearly 13 percent over the past two years.
(The measurement of "achievement" used is percentage of students failing a rudimentary algebra class and percentage of students enrolling in an advanced mathematics class)
This seems uncontroversial -- the smart kids will benefit the rest by their presence, and being labelled as not-smart probably doesn't help achievement very much.
But the purpose of separating out the really gifted kids was never for the benefit of the folks that couldn't cut it -- it was for the benefit of the gifted kids so that they could actually achieve at the level of their ability.
It seems to me quite uncontroversial that removing all of the disruptive kids and eliminating all of the remedial study time would aid students that are both interested and able to achieve.
"Separating gifted from non-gifted children hasn't led to better overall achievement of both groups combined."
It says nothing about whether the streamed gifted children do better than if they are not streamed it says much about those not deemed gifted doing worse.
(Just quietly, I'd suspect that given the choice of having your child streamed as gifted or not the best thing to do is to put them with the best teacher(s) - who will handle whatever psychological downsides there are of whatever that is).
> Eight Bay Area school districts found similar results when they de-tracked middle-school mathematics and provided professional development to teachers. In 2014, 63 percent of students were in advanced classes, whereas in 2015 only 12 percent were in advanced classes and everyone else was taking Math 8. The overall achievement of the students significantly increased after de-tracking. The cohort of students in eighth-grade mathematics in 2015 were 15 months ahead of the previous cohort of students who were mainly in advanced classes.
Huh? What's "Math 8"? How was "overall achievement" measured?
How could decreasing the proportion of students in "advanced classes" from 63% to 12% result in a "cohort of students" that is "15 months ahead" of the students who were in "advanced classes"? (What definitions of "advanced" could possibly mean 15 months behind "non-advanced" coursework?)
If there's a strong case, and the writer understands it, it would be explained better than this – and probably include tables & graphs, rather than just rambling assertions like the above paragraph.
This isn't a reason students do well in non-differentiated groups, but a confounding factor to the basic question of whether or not they do (one directly underlined in the case of the unspecified other bay area district studied where detracking and teacher professional development were simultaneous interventions.)
It's well-known that students do better when material is tailored to their individual ability, so if you are comparing students grouped in broad ability groups without this individualization and those detracked from broad groups but provided individualization, you lose the ability to distinguish between effects of broad group tracking and the qualitatively well-known effect of individualization.
I can relate, since I switched schools myself to get away from bullying (though to a Waldorf school rather than any kind of gifted program). But have you stopped to think, if this study is correct, then some of the following seems like they must be true:
* you would actually have done as well if you stayed
* you would have done worse if you stayed, but others who went into gifted programs would have done better if they didn't, making up for it
* people like you are just too rare to make a difference in the statistics.
My older brother wasn't actively bullied, but was in an infamously dysfunctional class. He just filtered them out somehow, never changed school, and did far better than me academically in the end. So maybe an anecdotal data point for the first option.
There are other things besides achievement. I can certainly see an argument for separating kids who actively hurt other kids, whether it matters for achievement or not. But it seems giving high scoring kids extra stimulating environments isn't all it's cracked up to be (If the study can be believed).
I'm not going to lie, being separated from the "smart" kids felt bad. I knew I was just as capable, but someone had the power to decide who is gifted and I guess they didn't like me. I was placed in classes where the teachers were of lower quality and the material was even less interesting. One of the teachers who didn't like me while I was with the gifted kids was my science teacher and that made me dislike science as a whole. I had a couple of math teachers who were extremely supportive throughout my early education and that made a world of difference. I decided to study CS in large part because I could avoid a lot of science courses and focus on math.
I also have a sister who was indirectly affected by me being in gifted programs. She later admitted to me it made her feel really bad that I was placed in those programs while she wasn't. I think this really hurt her self esteem and had a negative impact in her education. I could imagine other kids feeling similarly when some of their peers get labeled as gifted while they don't.
Looking back, the biggest benefit of being in gifted programs was simply that the teachers were better. So the kids who didn't necessarily need better teachers got the best ones, while the rest got packets to read through. The kids also weren't that different. The main difference was how much the parents of the gifted kids were involved in their education and they were generally wealthier. Overall it seemed like an unfair system that told kids who were just starting out whether they were smart or not. I think we really need better and more teachers, but they aren't paid enough. School is more of a place to put children while parents work than it is a place to educate.
I know from experience that being in a classroom that functions at the level of the lowest common denominator is basically abusive to everyone else. What would you feel like if you had to spend high school English class reading Dick and Jane out loud, for example? That's what a poor combined class is like for "G&T" students (and I had a couple real rough years when things felt like that). But that's also a far from saying "GATE kids" should always be "tracked" or feel like they're stuck in a particular lane and loaded down with ridiculous expectations.
My public school district implemented a combination of pull-out programs, advanced sections, and tracking on a per-subject and sometimes per-previous year's performance basis. A lot of effort was made to keep class cohorts together, while allowing students who excel at a specific subject to engage in a more challenging curriculum for that particular subject. These were all based on independent assessments. There wasn't a notion of "track" because most students were in a hodgepodge of "advanced/ahead" and "regular" courses, depending on the subject, depending on the previous year's performance, or depending on whether they themselves decided to sign up for the class or not.
A high school kid could:
- be a year ahead in English (which would only separate them from classmates for freshman and sophomore year; English curriculum was completely open, like college, after sophomore-level English.)
- be in one of three math cohorts
- be in the honors or regular section of a science course (based on the previous year's science performance). It was always the same science subject (eg, honors bio vs bio).
- take any AP course they met the prereqs for (iirc, pretty much all APs were available to all students within four years, save AP Calc, which would require a summer school catch up for those in the baseline math track).
- have been in the gifted pull-out program in elementary school (no special curriculum for "gifted" students in high school, afaik)
I ended up making friends with a senior (as a freshman) because I'd help her with the problem sets after I quickly finished them. This not only helped her, but it helped me master the material better because I had to know it well enough to teach it. The teacher encouraged this by allowing all of us time to work together in class, so this happened with a bunch of small groups.
I was quickly shot in and out midyear due to my rather unpredictable performance (go figure - regular bullying, alcoholic parents, harsh punitive measures, and high neglect never fared me well). I never noticed the bullying change beyond the superficial. (Physical vs psychological - but, even then, that wasn't off limits really much either)
If the goal is to increase test scores - maybe fix the core issues that get in the way of students learning the material. But - I get it, that's basically impossible. Shit parents are ubiquitous. They seem almost universal.
One point from TFA jumped out at me
— others shared that they’d learned they shouldn’t ask questions, as “gifted people are meant to know everything.”
I remember being astonished at this attitude at the time, that when the hardest problem sets were being worked through, consistently there was this sense that students were afraid to ask questions or make suggestions for fear of being wrong. The class kept moving because of a combination of no-nonsense teachers and a couple of students with a habit of blurting out the first thing that came to their head. Those students weren't often correct (I was occasionally one of them) but they definitely kept the class from stalling
From my personal experience, I think that separating kids in lower income areas leads to positive experiences. Before being in the gifted program, my classes were often interrupted by fights and stuff that was more fit on world star.
What if schools were more proactive to weed out and separate the bullies from everyone else. I think we'd end up with an overall healthier society, wherein 90% of kids will get a good education and have a good experience in school vs trying only to ensure the top ~10% get separated from the rest.
The biggest problem with education for gifted or even average students is that our standards are too low. It would be like if we set a 10 minute max for the mile run. Anybody that could run faster would still get a 10Min score. Then we rate the school based on the average running time of the entire student body.
There is no incentive to push kids faster than 10 min. All the resources go into the 2 kids on crutches.
This is an opinion piece, it is not evidence based. Why was "OPINION", which is part of the original title, removed?
After a year of this I asked to be excused from the program and spent the next year in not a "normal" class, but a remedial class because the school had sacrificed their non-GAT classes to create academic space for the GAT kids. So basically you were either doing some kind of advanced literature analysis or you were being tested on how to spell such challenging words as "ball" and "dog". There were other elements of the GAT program that were similarly discouraging.
I couldn't get out of school fast enough and it was such a damaging experience that I didn't go back to university until years later.
There's special education for kids with special needs; why is there no special education for smart kids that will help them deal with social situations? Smart kids have to deal with social land mines that will scar them if not handled correctly. No matter how smart someone is there is no way to know what to do in all social situations especially since most of these kids will not have a role model to follow. Even if they are kids of parents that had to deal with the same issues it does not mean that the parents will be able to help.
> Eight Bay Area school districts found similar results when they de-tracked middle-school mathematics and provided professional development to teachers. In 2014, 63 percent of students were in advanced classes, whereas in 2015 only 12 percent were in advanced classes and everyone else was taking Math 8.
How did they "de-track" anything? Just the numbers were reshuffled. Advanced classes continued, with reduced enrollment.
Could it be that though 63% were in advanced classes in 2014, only 12% (or fewer) actually belonged there? So the 2015 picture was a rational correction?
I find it difficult to believe in a sudden shift in the student worldview from a relatively minor change. I'd tend to assume any effect was a shiff in classroom norms.
We all tend to take behavioral hints from those around us. If you go from a class where most people aren't paying attention, to one where most people are, it can sway the behavior of the remainder.
This is where I learned to program. This single skill was hugely impactful to me.
But the rest of the time was probably actually more helpful, as I was forced to do all the rest of my classwork for my regular classes and pass all my regular tests in addition to all the work for Gifted. This kept me much, much more engaged in education than I would have been otherwise.
Middle school had 1 class per day the same way, but it was a pale shadow of the Elementary version.
High school had "Honors" or "AP" (Advanced Placement, IIRC) classes that totally separated me from the kids that were just there to put in time. They had no interest in learning and were actively against it, but I was no longer associating with them for Literature, Science, and Math classes, and there were no class clowns to slow everything down. We also had dual-enrollment classes where college classes were taught at the high school for credit in both.
Missing out on these 3 systems would absolutely have stunted my growth and I doubt I'd be where I am today without them.
My wish isn't to separate kids, though. I wish they could all enjoy learning like I do. We haven't cracked that nut yet, though, and it seems like separation is still necessary in order to give everyone their potential.
A lot of other kids will try and keep you down. Make fun of you for using big words and knowing things and learning things.
At the same time I'm glad I didn't grow up in a bubble with only gifted kids. Coping with people different than you is an important skill.
It seems clear that people in the upper half of the ability range suffer when the very top of the ability range are creamed off. Does hot-housing the very top make up for the losses in the almost-good-enough?
This is a value judgement, and I think it's disingenuous to say one is absolutely a better trade-off than the other.
There's a lot of conflation by other people on this topic with the social structure of US middle and high schools, with all the bullying. I think that's an orthogonal topic and specific to US, and distinct from streaming / hot-housing.
1) Sometimes I wish I had the opportunity to get special education, but it seems that most people complain about bullying and liked gifted education to be protected from bullying - thank God bullying was not a big problem for me.
2) Looking in retrospect, I can remember that many colleagues and friends were also gifted in some way or another. They just didn't care as much to get high grades.
There was one guy that learnt English just from watching VHS movies, he could listen to a music and understand it, something I can't do even today. Another guy slacked the whole year and bet everything on the final exam (and passed every time), he played guitar and keyboard (other 2 things I can't do).
I think parents of gifted children are first concerned with how well their own children do, not the others.
I question that even "learning together" as in school is the most effective way to learn. Some homeschoolers achieve stellar results (see Polgar sisters), indicating that there may be better ways.
Growth Mindset is weak scientifically. I believe that the belief in it drives articles such as this submission, so I think it is directly related.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-grow...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/07/growth-mindset-4-growt...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/what-is-your-mindset
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism
important to note that there is a necessary baseline necessary for someone's potential to be unlocked. you can't be starving with poor nutrition and no education and become einstein. stable home environment is important. baseline being necessary to unlock talent does not mean talent is not important.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Limitless-Mind-Learn-Without-Barriers...
There are a lot of smart people that have spent their entire lives in a bubble that is only inhabited by people at least a standard deviation above average, if not more. And it shows.
If so, then given how much I struggled to stay engaged even with "tracked" courses, I can guarantee that I wouldn't have graduated high school. I would've fallen even harder into the "I already know I'm gonna pass all the quizzes and tests, so why bother with paying attention in class or doing this homework?" trap.
I'm fully on-board with helping students get out of academic ruts and regain their footing and not feel like they're being left behind, and giving them whatever extra resources are necessary to help them do so. I'm not at all on-board with holding back the higher-achieving students to give some illusion that "hey, you poor-achieving student's aren't so poor-achieving after all". It's an insult to both sets of students.
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The article's sources, meanwhile, don't seem to actually relate to what's written in the article. Most egregious:
> [Eight Bay Area school districts found similar results] when they de-tracked middle-school mathematics and provided professional development to teachers. In 2014, 63 percent of students were in advanced classes, whereas in 2015 only 12 percent were in advanced classes and everyone else was taking Math 8. The overall achievement of the students significantly increased after de-tracking. The cohort of students in eighth-grade mathematics in 2015 were 15 months ahead of the previous cohort of students who were mainly in advanced classes.
The link (the part between square-brackets) points to a screenshot of a report (not the report itself, a screenshot of it; who in the actual hell does that‽) that has zero to do with the text after it.
> Recent national data show the same downsides to ability grouping: [In the National Assessment of Educational Progress study for 2017], elementary schools that reported using reading groups “almost always” scored lower on average than those that used them “hardly ever.”
Of the three links within that linked source, zero of them contain the phrases "almost always" or "hardly ever". Whence did the author quote these phrases?
> The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers.
Absolutely nothing about this article was in-depth, I was unable (in the ten minutes I allotted myself to read this article and actually check sources) to actually validate whether or not it was fact-based (which leads me to believe it was not), and I get a strong feeling that nothing about this article was unbiased.
I'm in America now. Did it the hard way. It wasn't as easy as showing up to class and having the choice of working hard to apply to some of the best educational institutions in the world.
Bloody hell, it's no wonder everyone in America is terrified of immigrants. They're going to eat your lunch because they will go through all these things that ruin you and instead come out resilient and able instead of reduced to just smoking weed all the time or whatever other activity you've decided to blame on society.
