The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a public live-in high school
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IMSA was an amazing place. There are so many smart people with so much motivation and it feels like anything is possible there. There is a dark side, though, not often mentioned publicly. Mental health issues are quite common, as could be expected when you put 14-18 year olds in a highly stressful, high-pressure environment, and people generally aren't very physically healthy, either (4.5 hours of sleep a night is common). I had some of my best times and worst times at IMSA.
I imagine many folks find it a wonderful place to be.
Once you accomplish everything the school gives you, you want more. You think of new ideas and no longer constrain yourself to what is given to you. This is just one dynamic that happens here. A lot happens when you tell the most driven and brightest to "advance the human condition".
I am an IMSA alum who was by and large, a below average IMSA student during my first two years. However, I learned a lot just by being exposed to my very smart classmates. Eventually, in my senior year I matured and started to work harder and got good grades. Had I stayed at my original high school I would have skated through at the top of my classes without much adversity. Then, based on the average college dropout rate of students from my original high school, I would have faced adversity in college and not know what to do. IMSA is a big part of why I am where I am today.
I attended a school very similar school to IMSA in the early 90's (the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science), and it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me at that age. I had a pen pal at IMSA who, like me, was sys-admining the school's UNIX server, so it was fun to trade notes. I had plenty of other experiences later in life that expanded my notion of the possible, but attending that school certainly got me on the right path.
The consequences of a failing education system are underemployment, unemployment, antisocial behavior, civil unrest, and criminal activity. Even worse, the impact is felt across generations, as children born to parents the system has failed get less enrichment at home than children born to well-educated parents. Case in point, the US's massive educational achievement gap and world-leading incarceration rate.
The word meritocracy was coined [1] to describe a system where resources are lavished on those who have proven their worth. Like the originator of the term, I severely doubt our ability to actually measure intellect/merit/achievement decoupled from unearned advantage and luck.
I'd argue that we should be doing a lot less for the gifted. They'll turn out fine with guidance and resources. If we actually invested the time and resources into the most at risk, we might actually be able to get them up to speed, rather than socially promoting them and kicking them from school to school. Furthermore, I'd posit that an education should be considered a human right, and a bar by which we measure our achievement as a country.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
There is a common perception that gifted students are "like other students, but smarter and better at school stuff".
This is a flawed perception; it's not at all uncommon for gifted students to do very poorly in school, and not just for social reasons.
Instead of thinking of "gifted" as "better", you should think of gifted as "special".
(FWIW, I agree with your criticism of your parent post and upvoted you -- gifted students aren't more important than any other student.)
But in my original comment, I was using "gifted" in the more traditional sense of "high performing" or "high testing", which doesn't necessarily correspond with brilliance. A big criticism I have of the gifted track is that it misses out on a lot of students who are capable of doing accelerated work.
I taught math in Baltimore, and on the pretest I gave my students at the beginning of 9th grade, my students tested anywhere from 2nd grade to 9th grade in terms of current math skills, all bundled together in one room. On the low end of that scale, many students had been socially promoted to keep them with their age group.
What really gets me is that across the city, there are plenty of students who get delayed a year in their education, for a variety of reasons. Now we should be attacking those underlying issues, but that aside, it seems to me like we could much more proactive about getting those students truly focused remedial services, to either get them back on track or to at least maintain parallel pacing with their peers so that they get to the same endpoint, even if it's a year later.
We're rather fixated as a nation on the K-12 concept, rigidly linked with age, and with all subjects progressing in lockstep. I think we'd have much better outcomes with a more flexible system that recognize that a person's academic development doesn't scale so cleanly. I think even in a more flexible framework, we've got more than enough students to still take advantage of the economies of scale of systematic education.
While I don't disagree we should do more for at risk kids, not allowing the brightest kids the best possible opportunity in an environment free from "at risk kids" hurts us all in loss of societies potential productivity.
A relatively ignorant populace is societal cancer.
IMSA and OSSM were founded around the same time, are of similar size, history, and philosophy. They are also both members of amazingly-named National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science and Technology. If you're looking for a school like this in your area, you should start there[2].
1: http://www.reddirtreport.com/red-dirt-news/ossm-only-adequat...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Consortium_for_Specia...
It was a fine schooling model, significantly better than my public school experience. Some students did have emotional trouble with moving away from home at fifteen.
Also as proof I went there: Chickadee dee dee
"The Math Team at Naperville North ...and won ten consecutive Math Team state championships (1998–2007). ... The WYSE team won the state championship from 1999 to 2005, 2007 to 2009, 2012, and 2013."[1]
=P
IMSA and other high schools in the area were pretty close, as you'd apply to IMSA after doing a year at the other high schools in the area.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naperville_North_High_School#A...
Ah, memories.
I think schools like this are _especially_ useful in rural/poor states like our own, where cultural and educational norms are a bit behind. Imagine going from a school where the highest level of math is trig and there are no comp sci courses to one where you can take differential equations, astrophysics, or robotics.
For me personally, it was validating to find a like-minded community where nerdiness is a virtue instead of a scourge.
Actually, they repeatedly call it a "live-in school." Is there a difference between a live-in school and a boarding school?
Most boarding school kids I knew only went 'home' for summer, winter holidays, spring break, etc.