Comment on Honor student truth
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
👏 Modern 👏 Honors 👏 Programs 👏 Exist 👏 To 👏 Segregate 👏 Integrated 👏 Schools 👏
Your kid isn’t special. You just came out on the top side of a system designed to deprive a percentage of your neighbors of quality higher education.
Acinonyx@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I wanted to comment because I’ve seen your comments and thought of you as a thoughtful commentator and I suspect we have similar political alignments.
My child is in an urban school district. For several school board administrations, the focus has been on equity prioritizing black and indigenous peoples. I agree with this. I think systemic racism has led to the deterioration of these communities resulting in a downward spiral that we, as a society, have to work hard and pull out of.
My child performed well enough to be invited to the alternative, accelerated program for highly gifted students. We decided noto send him as he was well integrated into his school, but his performance is an outlier in his cohort. For a number of reasons I won’t go into, his current school is a language immersion school. It is unique because it was started by the language speaking community and has operated for several decades. It takes children from all over the district via lottery. It sounds like equity at first, but there’s a limited number of people who can spare the time to send their kids to a school not in their district (bussing can help) and learn a language that isn’t their primary one. This has helped him not be incredibly bored the entire school day.
His school is a mixture that leans towards the affluent. The language community that supports the program is a “model” minority and it attracts affluent people for the reasons stated above. The school performs well in testing and their funding reflects that. Unfortunately, this has led to the worst class room ratios in the entire district and high performing children are neglected because teachers need to make sure those not meeting the norm or need the help to meet the norm are getting that help. Giving these people that help is very important. Neglecting high performers deprives them of metacognative skills.
High performers need to accelerate and be challenged in a way that is different. Their brain solve problems weirdly, sometimes rigorously, sometimes with leaps that don’t make sense to anyone but themselves. While my kid isn’t in the top ten percent of the top one percent, these kids need special attention that our system can’t provide.
All of this isn’t to say you’re wrong. I think parents perpetuate a system that lets them access the basic education that we all deserve and find perpetually underfunded.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
High performers need to accelerate and be challenged in a way that is different.
That’s a theory, certainly. I’ve seen others, suggesting that kids can perform better when they collaborate with their peers. More advanced kids who tutor a subject they’re familiar with outperform advanced students who simply race on to the next lesson.
But, broadly speaking, the three prerequisites for a good education are
- Small Class Sizes
- Educated/experienced teachers with a focus in the field they’re covering
- Well fed/rested students
“Gifted” programs tend to shrink their class cohorts and provide more experienced teachers. Their kids come from wealthier families that don’t let them leave the house hungry. A lot of the behavioral problems you see in “low” performing students are the consequences of hunger and stress.
That’s the difference.
When schools provide breakfast programs and equitably distribute resources, offer social services rather than bullying kids with police, and keep the lesson plan from being busy work everyone hates, they improve the performance of the entire student body rather than a select privileged sub community.
TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I agree with the bulk of what you’re saying. I think those three points are essential. I’m even a strong proponent of collaborative learning. Hell… I forgot to include a paragraph on it, unschooling, and free schooling.
I think programs like Math Circles focus on creative engagement with the material through collaboration. The instructor engages with the conversation flow and hints in directions when they get stuck. This type of engagement is crucial and requires small class sizes. My kiddo is a talker and gets labeled as an “innovator” or just “a little disruptive”.
And in no way am I suggesting making the race on to another subject, rather, engaging at different depths for subjects they’ve shown competency in or are actually bored with. Hell, this is true for all students. Different depths may be the thing that spark engagement.
I think segregated gifted classes are a mistake. In class acceleration, exploring at depth, compacting, interest led projects, and backfilling with a well educated teacher who, frankly, the kid likes goes a long way. For a while, he wanted to be a second grade teacher because she used to have very little rules and kids wouldn’t get in trouble for being themselves. She was also probably the oldest teacher at the school with the warmest disposition.
He is, to my hesitancy, choosing to accelerate into the next grade for one subject. Normally, I’d be a pretty hard no, but he has genuine excitement to do so. That and a non trivial portion of their math is on a computer. The computer is filled with crap animation and rote engagement that it slows him down which means boredom for him.
I’m a little hesitant to back tutoring especially at this age. He’s so invested in being smart that it gets in the way of being present in the way one needs to be to clarify mistakes and introduce concepts. Hell, identifying where one makes a mistake and how to guide someone back to the core concepts is a skill. And many kids need the repition to demonstrate competency. Getting a kid who just “gets it” to tutor is a mistake until they are a little older.
Kids who are gift still require unique engagement. I met a 12 year old whose math skills far exceeds my kid’s ability. He was, still at that age, trying to get me to light up with his knowledge. And I was happy to. He had the math skills I had at 16 or 17, but emotionally he was a 12 years old. He was in no way suited to teach anyone yet. But he needed to talk with people who were capable and interested in hearing what he was learning. It was a lot of fun for me to do so.
So I largely agree: well fed students with competent, connected teachers who have a class size that lets them actually connect is definitely the starting point. Part of that connection, though, is tailoring the material to the specific child’s needs and helping where they need it. Collaboration and creative exploration is also important. But each kid moves at a different speed and being supported by kids who are moving neither too fast nor too slow will create an exciting atmosphere for learning. At the same time, kids also need to see, for some of the time, how kids move at different speeds and still get the material.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 1 day ago
I would disagree. A lot of countries provide a multi track secondary education too account for the desire and ability of different students. Having different education tracks isn’t just American invention. It just happens to be that there is an easier jump from the lower education track to college in the USA compared to other countries.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Tracking students into different careers is very different from separating students into “Smart” and “Dumb” cohorts, particularly when the membership in the “Smart” cohort is more closely aligned with one’s street address than one’s scholastic aptitude.
Even then, career tracking absolutely can and does take on a segregationist character when the wages of the labor make access to certain career paths a purchasable privilege. That’s how you get all the Eton College grads going into politics and journalism as a single congealed cohort, regardless of the competency of the school’s members.
The US has been at the forefront of privatized credentialing. And that’s created a rich vein of for-profit schools that exist above the High School grade, which people are obligated to assume debts to attend in order to be accredited for certain jobs.
That’s not a “jump” between tracks, though. That’s just the elementary public education system getting defunded. We’re leaving large gaps between “what you need to graduate high school” and “what you need to start your professional career”.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 1 day ago
And yet it appears in most countries, including Communist ones like China. This isn’t a uniquely American action.
That’s more due to family connections. Most UK students taking their A-Levels aren’t going into politics and journalism.
The USA still has one of the best public university systems in the world. This includes community college programs which help “lower” track students get a 4 year college degree.
And, going back to what I’ve said earlier, other countries have degree restrictions on their jobs as well. Senior government positions in other countries are usually the domain of the college educated, with a much lower percentage of their populations having a college degree.
You keep pointing to things happening in the USA as a uniquely American set-up and therefore evil without being able to contrast that with his the rest of the world handles secondary education.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m not sure how we shoehorned “China Bad” into the discussion. But a country with a large public non-profit education system that’s insourced enormous amounts of industrial research and development isn’t a strong example of this model. On the contrary, the Chinese state has been particularly good at pulling domestic talent into domestic industry. It’s one of the excuses Americans regularly use to condemn Chinese manufacturers for “cheating” and “stealing” intellectual property. They’re not hiring a bunch of American Ivy League grads to run their businesses in Shanghai and Chengdu. They’re hiring and promoting from within.
Eton’s family connections are economic connections. It’s one big aristocratic snarl. You’re rich because of who you know and you know these people because you’re rich.
20 years ago it did. Now our administrative overhead has exploded, our student-to-teacher ratios are shit, even historically prestigious state schools are becoming little more than diploma mills, and on top of all that you’ve got Trump snatching international students off campus and throwing them into blacksites based on spurious allegations of whatever-the-fuck has an online conservative frothing for blood.
Meanwhile, you can go to Berlin, Germany or Sao Paulo, Brazil or Melbourne, Australia or Singapore, China and get the same or better quality of instruction, facilities, and job prospects without the comical rent-seeking by privatized American institutions. Turns out undergrad organic chemistry isn’t something Americans have a monopoly on.
Which nation outside the US has anywhere near the level of college student debt? Canada and the UK are the only two countries that come close.
Americans pioneered the modern university system at the turn of the 20th century. That system began as a non-profit, research-oriented, academically focused public institution. And the idea of academic R&D spread globally, so that we now have university systems replicating the 20th century American model pretty much everywhere a large urban center exists to support it.
But then the Americans took a good, useful, public sector innovation and converted it into a mechanism for gatekeeping professional positions and rent-seeking young people. That particular model hasn’t metastasized as broadly as the former. Perhaps its just a matter of time. But it appears the root of the evil is the decision, back at the turn of the 21st century, to publicly defund university systems.
So much of the rot in US academia is driven by the privatization of the university model. Where you see the rot infiltrate other foreign universities tends to be where privatization has occurred the most rapidly.