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Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was very difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, just didn't give a fuck. It really sucked.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.