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Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

hechingerreport.org

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Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#161

Post by nitrogen »

barry-cotter wrote: post #145
borski wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this 100%, but the issues are not intertwined. We need to fix how classes are taught in "low achieving schools," but that's really hard to do when teachers are paid so poorly. Teaching isn't a lucrative career, and thus those that would be great teachers don't generally go into it. It's a really complex and difficult problem that I don't know I have a solution for. I do know that getting rid of magnet sc…

> on average, public-school teachers receive total compensation that is roughly 50 percent higher than what they would receive in private-sector employment. While salaries are at appropriate levels, fringe benefits push teacher compensation far ahead of what private-sector workers enjoy. Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries. https…

As someone raised by two teachers I can say that my parents both had to work two to four different jobs at times just to struggle to keep up. Whatever that statistic is claiming, it doesn't reflect reality in at least some cases.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#162

Post by bradlys »

I find it interesting that a lot of people here are referencing how they wish they could have been separated very early on. That the "smart" children were nicer and the rest were just bullies. I'll hedge that some of that is true. Sure - at my schools - some of the worst performers and bullies were in lower tracks. The worst moved or never went to the normal high school though. They ended up failing so hard and/or getting too many out of school suspensions. However - gotta say - plenty of assholes at the top marks. I can't remember any high(er) performers being very nice. Most were jerks outright. Bullying then was usually more psychological than physical but it wasn't foregone to see physical issues.

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.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#163

Post by pstuart »

notzuck wrote: post #141
ryandrake wrote: post #47

When I was in middle school in the 90s, I think around 7th grade (~12yo), the school district experimented with a new way of organizing the student body where they separated us into six distinct, equally sized cohorts based on some evaluation of each student's performance and capability. From what I could tell it was rougly: 1. Gifted / clearly university-bound 2. Potential college prep 3. Community college 4. Normal…

Sometimes disruptive kids need to be told they are capable and put with other people that are capable. Being told you're an idiot (lowest tier class) generally leads to a self fulfilling prophecy and that's a problem for society. 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 for…

> 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.

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.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#164

Post by nitrogen »

catalogia wrote: post #126
wwright wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not feel that gifted/nerdy/aspy kids reciprocated? It might just be that I’m a complete asshole, but I grew up in Mississippi feeling very isolated and estranged from everyone around me. I think I definitely felt like I was bullied when I was very young. But by high school and college, I was being outright toxic to people. If I am generous to myself, a lot of that could be attributed to anxiety, depression, la…

In my school, the 'gifted/nerdy' group had significant (but not complete) overlap with the 'socially/athletically outgoing' group, with the 'aspy' kids sprinkled around and generally respected by their peers. A lot of the dichotomies being described in this thread are therefore alien to me. The bigger divide was between the 'gifted/nerdy/popular/athletic' group and the 'prone to violence, nihilistic body modification…

Sounds like a good school.

In my home town, sports were incredibly divisive, and football was the worst. Teachers were expected to go easy on football players. Football players got mostly ignored for shoplifting and other misbehavior. Football players even excluded other football players if they seemed too nerdy. Football players dumped a swimming pool full of sand on student body officers during a school assembly. Every student was forced to attend pep rallies to promote the football games.

Not every athlete was an athhole, but the general tenor was violent and rude to anyone not in their peer group.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#165

Post by barry-cotter »

rayiner wrote: post #138
koolba wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is not to pull out a handful of high performers, it’s to kick out the even smaller number of disrupters.

This is 95% of why we send our kids to private school. In the rare case a disrupter makes it in, they're "counseled out." It's a travesty that schools permit a handful of bad apples to ruin the learning experience of everyone else.

It’s not the schools permitting it, it’s the justice system making getting rid of disruptive students impossible.

https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2019/08/06/public-sch...

> Wonder what allows a school to at least consider permanent expulsion? The student has to be convicted of:

> murder drug dealing aggravated assault rape possession of a deadly weapon

> But expulsion can be permanent if and only if he or she is over 16 or older. And of course, forget all those criteria for the disability manifestation exclusion–if the student was convicted but disability is the reason for the behavior, no action can be taken.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#166

Post by ravedave5 »

empath75 wrote: post #78
xhkkffbf wrote: post #10

I have to say that this result is wildly different from my experience and that of my children. It's boring to sit in class redoing a simple math problem just because someone wants to detrack math. 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. Ev…

I think they’d do better by taking the kids who understand the material and asking them to work with the kids who don’t. You learn as much by teaching as doing, if not more.

My daughter did this and it wore on her. She complained that she spent most of the math period helping the other kids, she liked it a little but doing it every day is a bunch of work & responsibility on a child.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#167

Post by cortesoft »

nitrogen wrote: post #161
barry-cotter wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on average, public-school teachers receive total compensation that is roughly 50 percent higher than what they would receive in private-sector employment. While salaries are at appropriate levels, fringe benefits push teacher compensation far ahead of what private-sector workers enjoy. Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries. https…

As someone raised by two teachers I can say that my parents both had to work two to four different jobs at times just to struggle to keep up. Whatever that statistic is claiming, it doesn't reflect reality in at least some cases.

Interesting... both my parents were teachers, and we lived comfortably enough (not rich, but never felt deprived)

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#168

Post by TylerE »

barry-cotter wrote: post #145
borski wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this 100%, but the issues are not intertwined. We need to fix how classes are taught in "low achieving schools," but that's really hard to do when teachers are paid so poorly. Teaching isn't a lucrative career, and thus those that would be great teachers don't generally go into it. It's a really complex and difficult problem that I don't know I have a solution for. I do know that getting rid of magnet sc…

> on average, public-school teachers receive total compensation that is roughly 50 percent higher than what they would receive in private-sector employment. While salaries are at appropriate levels, fringe benefits push teacher compensation far ahead of what private-sector workers enjoy. Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries. https…

Have you ever, like, talked to any teachers? Because that's total bullshit, which isn't surprising being from the Good Ole Boys Propaganda Office.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/heritage-foundation/

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#169

Post by yellowapple »

So wait, what exactly is meant by "de-tracked"? Does that mean that students are not allowed to advance faster if they happen to be quicker at mastering certain subjects? If I placed into Algebra in middle school when the "normal" course for my grade is Pre-Algebra, would I be allowed to take Algebra or would I be forced to take Pre-Algebra?

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.

----

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.

Re: Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement

#170

Post by eloff »

empthought wrote: post #134
solveit wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but how would that work in practice? Special schools for high performers is much more palatable than special schools for quarantining children who aren't going to amount to anything (no matter what you call it and how you design it, this is how it will be perceived).

If mandatory school attendance were repealed, it would work itself quite quickly.

But would bring other problems. The cure is likely worse than the disease.
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