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[RedKing]

I'm really not okay with implementing the basic premise of a thousand shitty animes as a patch for a real-world school system, RedKing. You're going to be fucking over way too many kids who're borderline on whatever exams you happen to pick, if absolutely nothing else. Sure, they can "try and get better", but after being officially classified as stupid, how many do you think are going to internalize that and become exactly the sort of little monsters you want walled off? Kids' personalities aren't set in stone - there is literally no more formative time than childhood.

Maybe I should phrase it differently then -- instead of having a "dumb" track, how about a "disruptive" track? One of the reason that the lowest tier tracks often underserve the students there so badly is that the teachers spend 90% of their time dealing with the dipshits who want to turn class time into "hey look at me! YOLOSWAG" and 10% actually educating.

Yes, I realize that childhood and teenage years are a time when kids make terrible decisions, and this could be penalizing some kids who aren't bad, they just have a shitty home life and bad parents and are craving attention. NOT MY FUCKING PROBLEM. We can't save every family from itself, especially not at the cost of dragging down truly gifted children just so everyone can feel like a special snowflake.



Now....there is a radically different alternative to this, which I think can and does work but only under a narrow set of circumstances. You spread the "disruptive" kids out so that there's only one per class, and you spread out the bright kids to a few per class. If there's no audience for the class clowns' bullshit, they'll rein it in. And the brighter kids will often welcome the chance to help their peers, IF they're not going to get teased and mocked for it. This is the situation currently in my daughter's elementary school class and it works well. The teacher actually moves her around the classroom every month or so because they've noticed improvement in behavior and academics in the kids sitting around her. Smart kids *can* bring up the whole class, if given a healthy atmosphere in which to do so. Which means thinning out the disruptive kids as much as possible. But this only works if the number of disruptive kids is low enough that you can thin it out to that level. When you have major portions of the student body coming from low socio-economic strata and where a culture of failure and disregard for school is already entrenched, this isn't going to work. Honestly, I don't know what the solution is in situations like that, short of some kind of indoctrination camp where you completely reprogram the kids and rip them out of that culture of failure. (and that's not some kind of coded racism thing...it's equally apt for white trash kids as it is ghetto/barrio kids).

[Reelya]

I'm really not okay with implementing the basic premise of a thousand shitty animes as a patch for a real-world school system, RedKing. You're going to be fucking over way too many kids who're borderline on whatever exams you happen to pick, if absolutely nothing else. Sure, they can "try and get better", but after being officially classified as stupid, how many do you think are going to internalize that and become exactly the sort of little monsters you want walled off? Kids' personalities aren't set in stone - there is literally no more formative time than childhood.

Chucking everyone into one classroom, ignoring differences in ability is worse. The top kids learn at the mandated pace, because it's not "fair" if they excercise their potential. The bottom kids feel overwhelmed and left out, permanent losers who always get shit for having the worst scores in class. "Why don't you score 99% like johnny?" over and over ever week. How would it feel to come to class every day and basically know you're the worst in the class, for 6 years of highschool. Versus the abstract "not being in the top maths class" feeling, but you don't have that fact reminded to you every day in class by competing directly with geniuses. It's like putting amateur athletes up against olmypic athletes with the premise of a fair contest, then going "wow you lost so bad - AGAIN". They have leagues for a reason.

It's basically a huge lie that everyone has the same skill in every subject, and that there's an average proper amount you're allowed to learn in every subject based on your age. Also, tracks tend to focus on different things: top maths focuses on abstract stuff that is a primer for engineering, maths and computer science degrees, whereas the middle and lower streams focus on useful maths for real-life situations. So it's just recognizing that someone who sucks at maths and has no interest won't go on to use all that advanced calculus, even if you manage to teach it to them, but they need basic maths and accounting skills for real life, so the bottom classes focus on that.

[Bauglir]

I don't think you understand that I meant your system would be encouraging kids to act out because they crave attention. Not just their shitty home life and stuff - you get classified in the disruptive track as a kid, that becomes an expectation. Kids are good at living up to expectations. It's you and your children's fucking problem when they have to get out of school and live in a society that's got an elevated population of jackasses because you sculpted the educational system to produce jackasses and saints in equal measure.

I'm really not okay with implementing the basic premise of a thousand shitty animes as a patch for a real-world school system, RedKing. You're going to be fucking over way too many kids who're borderline on whatever exams you happen to pick, if absolutely nothing else. Sure, they can "try and get better", but after being officially classified as stupid, how many do you think are going to internalize that and become exactly the sort of little monsters you want walled off? Kids' personalities aren't set in stone - there is literally no more formative time than childhood.

Chucking everyone into one classroom, ignoring differences in ability is worse. The top kids learn at the mandated pace, because it's not "fair" if they excercise their potential. The bottom kids feel overwhelmed and left out, permanent losers who always get shit for having the worst scores in class. "Why don't you score 99% like johnny?" over and over ever week.

It's basically a huge lie that everyone has the same skill in every subject, and that there's an average proper amount you're allowed to learn in every subject based on your age. Also, tracks tend to focus on different things: top maths focuses on abstract stuff that is a primer for engineering maths and computer science degrees, whereas the middle and lower streams focus on useful maths for real-life situations. So it's just recognizing that someone who sucks at maths and has no interest won't go on to use all that advanced calculus, even if you manage to teach it to them, but they need basic maths and accounting skills for real life, so the bottom classes focus on that.

That's something I've said multiple times now, so thanks for the backup, although tracks as a specific implementation of specialization remain something that aren't likely to work. Do I need to summarize my posting history over the last couple of pages?

[TheDarkStar]

There's no formal branching. Some high schools will have Honors classes or AP classes (which are essentially the same thing, but with a national, standardized test you can take for sometimes college credit), which you can substitute for the ordinary variety of the same class. Sometimes there will be something like a GPA requirement or something but mostly it's up to the kid's choice of which to register for (read: often the parent's choice).

In terms of self-selected splitting up by academic ability, that's actually fairly close to what I've been harping on about, but it's far from universal in the States, and as applied it tends to segregate student bodies into cleanly-split Honors/not groups when it is available. Also, my experience with it was at a fairly good high school, just under a decade ago (and my understanding is that the system's been increasingly crippled every year), and they suffered from all the other problems that have been rambled about. I doubt it's exactly representative of the current situation.

There isn't formal branching, but there is often an equivalent in the form of classes taken in a certain order. In a lot of highschools, for example, you have a few (3-4) math tracks, ranging from algebra-geometry-algebra II for the easiest path and honors algebra II-enriched precalc-AP calc AB - AP calc BC/calc II at a college for the two-years-ahead track. Science usually has two, with an AP and a non-AP track. English is similar.

I do agree that the US education system is slowly getting worse. I've literally seen a school get forced to stop teaching a math class two years ahead of the average student's class because the school district couldn't afford to lose any more funding over it, despite the fact that the class was completely full and was not in any way too difficult.

PPE: People in the smart tracks tend to be almost as disruptive as those in the lowest tracks. It's partly the fact that they know most of the people they interact with well (because they all take the same group of classes), but the tracks cause students to get to get attention. Lower tracks have people who want attention because no one gives it to them; higher tracks have people who want it because they're used to people always listening to them.

[Reelya]

There's also the language used to refer to the tracks. They try and avoid a ranking-based system, and use descriptives of the intended outcome of the track instead.

Here, the middle track is normally couched as the "normal" one and the high track as "advanced". So if you're in the middle one, that's for normal people and advanced has a "math geeks" connotation, thus preventing people in normal maths feeling like they lost out while still providing the needed skills for people who want to specialize.

The bottom track is often refered to as some variant of "practical" or "applied" mathematics, and has a syllabus related to using maths for highschool graduates in everyday life and accounting.

Once you hit 16 and start preparing for the year 12 exams which will get you into college, you do get to choose the track though, it's not restricted by exams. People pick whatever they're comfortable with so it's not like low-track people feel like they lost. They more tend to feel they dodged the bullet of that yucky maths they hate.

[Bauglir]

Maybe treat elementary/middle/high school like college in that you need to take x number of credit hours in x number of subjects across all years, and you get to take your pick as to when (or rather, your parents do for the first few years)?

This is exactly my face right now.

...make deep cuts into the math and science (and English and art and foreign language...) courses that are mandatory, but dramatically expand their elective choices after grade school so that all these things are still available, make their first year of middle school a series of Survey Of classes that jump around between subjects every couple of weeks to provide the barest taste (to inform their elective choices), and for the love of every fucking God, do not establish predefined course tracks that need to be completed for any to count. If you want to take Spanish one year and switch on over to German, go right the fuck ahead. Let them experiment...

...I want the separation thing to happen by self-selection by the students more than by way of assessments or teacher decisions... not everybody's equipped to accomplish the same things in school, and they shouldn't be expected to... And that works both ways. Setting up the people who need challenges to have none at all is as catastrophic as setting people up against challenges they can't do (see Vector's experience, above).

... education really isn't one-size-fits-all. Absolutely, you want these to be at the same actual buildings, you want recesses or whatever other leisure time you give them to intermingle the kids, and you don't want to create entirely separate class tracks for generically gifted students. Perhaps, given the self-selection thing, have a bunch of accelerated classes that get through the material of two or three ordinary ones in a single semester, and let the kids pick up to, say, two each semester... insisting everybody be treated equally sounds good but produces unacceptable results for students who aren't right along the average on whatever particular metric you want.

This is one reason why self-selection is important. People who want the easier courses can choose them without being branded with the stigma of stupidity. Frame it as optimizing their free time or whatever - you can make it seem like the smart decision it often is. Setting the system up in some way to avoid completely parallel education tracks (say, by setting an upper limit on how many of these separate courses you can take, although I'm wide open for suggestions) also helps prevent the clear distinction that gives rise to elitism.

Emphasis added.

[Bauglir]

Okay, glad we got that sorted out.

[UXLZ]

Don't like the 'restrict it to two per semester' idea. You can say it's to avoid parents forcing their children to pick the 'prestigious' classes (the accelerated ones), but that's going to happen anyway, and the kids who choose to pick those classes are going to be miffed because they feel like only two of their subjects are worth actually attending.

[Bauglir]

Yeah, that's definitely a problem. I would like a better mechanism. Any thoughts?

[UXLZ]

No idea. The issue is that the actions of parents are totally outside of the school's control.

[UXLZ]

And then you get 'smart' Year 8s going into a class with average Year 9s and 'dumb' year 10s... Who proceed to make the class hell for the 9s and 8s.

[UXLZ]

YEAR 8, not 8 year olds >_>.

In the Australian school system, you have grades prep to 6, then years 7 to 12, then college.

[Bauglir]

I mean, fact is, you need to combine student groups. Reduce the idea that there's a particular course you're supposed to be taking at a particular age as much as possible, and one way or the other you've got to keep a hard cleavage from forming along ability lines either, which means preventing anybody from sharing all of their classes with any sufficiently large group. That's where that 2/semester idea came from - you gotta have a variety of cultural surroundings throughout your classes.

Some of the smart or hard-working kids's classes are going to have to be with whatever other subgroup you care to identify. The important thing is to give them enough choices and challenges that they still have something to do. That gets into a different thing, though - gotta motivate the kids to want to pursue open-ended projects that let them fill their time in other classes once they've got the material there worked out. Quality of teaching problem, there, not a structural one, I'm thinking.

I'm pretty tired at this point, though so consider this post aimless rambling.

[RedKing]

And then you get 'smart' Year 8s going into a class with average Year 9s and 'dumb' year 10s... Who proceed to make the class hell for the 9s and 8s.

^^^
THIS.

When I was in 8th grade, they decided I wasn't challenged enough so they shipped me over to the high school next door one period a day to take Biology (typically a 9th grade subject). While the material was more challenging, it also made me stick out that much more like a sore thumb socially. You had high schoolers who were that much more miffed that a kid not even in high school was doing better at this than they were. And you had middle schoolers who wondered what the fuck I did to get to go to high school a year early (I wondered that myself...wasn't like I tested into a program or anything). The fact that it was just me, and no one else from my class of like 500 8th graders,(several of whom were just as bright or brighter) created resentment from that end. So while I learned more, it made my peer interaction that much more miserable.

Ultimately, I hate to say it, but the most workable solution might be something along the lines of what we have now -- a public system that tries to teach a "floor" of at least basic common knowledge needed to function in society, and the brighter kids can be served by private schools/homeschooling/private instructors. Granted, that means that only the RICH bright kids get fully served by this system.

I guess the question is, are you trying to improve the system in terms of median outcomes, overall maximal outcomes, outcomes per cost, or reducing inequality? Because you're not getting all four. Hell, I'm not sure you can get any TWO at the same time.

[i2amroy]

Ultimately, I hate to say it, but the most workable solution might be something along the lines of what we have now -- a public system that tries to teach a "floor" of at least basic common knowledge needed to function in society, and the brighter kids can be served by private schools/homeschooling/private instructors. Granted, that means that only the RICH bright kids get fully served by this system.

This is basically about what we have now, actually, and it's one of the main reasons we are talking about reform. The No Child Left Behind Act basically forces teachers to teach to the bottom of the class, and so far I've yet to meet a teacher who likes it.