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Funny that I had very nearly the same experience in Texas. I had even been moved into a "Gifted and Talented" program which segregated us from the regular kids. While we did occasionally get to do something above and beyond the vast majority of the time was spent in a prison like setting where all we did was focus on standardized testing.

I remember literally spending weeks of schooling in primary school learning how to bubble in a multiple choice answer sheet. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for weeks on end having the fact we need a #2 pencil and that you shouldn't fill outside the bubble when answering the scantron on the TAAS test.

This. I grew up in Texas, first in a small suburb that had its own school system (elementary through 7th) and then as a part of the greater Dallas school system, in another city (8th through graduation).

My original school system was always trying to push me forward; they placed me in gifted programs, encouraged me to compete in academic competitions (you know the ones I'm talking about), and often recommended to my parents that I should be allowed to skip a couple of grades.

Conversely, my latter school system, in an attempt to meet standards and retain order (I assume), simply taught down to the lowest denominator. As a result, I lost a lot of the drive and motivation previously impressed upon me. It's only after growing up that I've gotten some of that back, however, I doubt it will ever reach its previous high.

So, as unemotional as it may seem, there should be a mechanism for either removing those at the bottom in order to accelerate their learning and return them back to the general population, or a similar mechanism to allow the higher levels to avoid decline.

Oh the TAAS...I spent 10 years being told I would finish that crap in the 10th grade...only to find out in the 10th grade that TAAS II was coming out and we were the lucky candidates to take it...in the 11th grade.

The #2 pencil is spot on. I carried an entire box of pencils and would trade them for a slice of pizza at lunch.

heh TAAS.

For those not from Texas or too young to have experienced it, TAAS was horrible even compared to other standardized tests.

Other standardized tests at least pretend to assess a student's learning. TAAS assessed a students ability to parse octuple negatives and poorly typeset mathematics.

Oh god, the TAAS.

So, there were three portions: reading comprehension, math, grammar, and persuasive writing. The maximum score for any of the TAAS portions is a 4, with 3 as the minimum passing grade. The first three were ridiculously easy, but the writing portion was a nightmare.

I don't remember all the details anymore, but IIRC you were expected to include a statistic and a quote from an expert in your paper. The kicker? You weren't allowed any outside materials, and you were expected to make up the statistic and the quote. That's right: the assignment was to write something that would be considered fake news nowadays.

I got a 2. I only passed because I got a 4 on the grammar portion, because for some reason the persuasive writing portion and the grammar portion were averaged together to form what they called the "writing" portion.

My year (10th grade 2000-2001) was the second-last to take the TAAS, and we were the last to take only the TAAS, as it was being phased out in favor of the TAKS. The year behind me took both the TAAS and the TAKS, with only the TAAS counting for graduation requirements (they only had to take the TAKS because the state wanted to do a dry run before switching over), and the people two years behind me only took the TAKS. The timeline went like:

* 2000-2001: 10th grade takes the TAAS (my class)

* 2001-2002: 10th grade takes the TAAS

* 2002-2003: 11th grade takes the TAKS (dry run, same class as above)

* 2003-2004: 11th grade takes the TAKS (for real)

I had an opposite experience in Texas (semi-rural Texas no less). The gifted and talented programs (i.e. things sometimes referred to in other districts as "Quest", "Omega", etc...not AP as occurs in later grades) did the exact opposite of focusing on standardized testing. The vast majority of time was spent on "above and beyond" and critical thinking. Granted you tested into it and all of your time was not spent there, but even times in standard classes were not heavily focused on standardized testing.

This goes to show that the problem is more localized than state level, it is a municipal and district-level choice so long as you meet minimum testing requirements. Now when students don't meet minimum testing requirements, most districts unfortunately fall into the trap of teaching to test as opposed to teach.

> Funny that I had very nearly the same experience in Texas. I had even been moved into a "Gifted and Talented" program which segregated us from the regular kids. While we did occasionally get to do something above and beyond the vast majority of the time was spent in a prison like setting where all we did was focus on standardized testing.

Exact same situation here, but Florida. Elementary school was alright, but middle school became pure FCAT preparation and nothing else. My parents withdrew me from them at that point and put me back into regular classes.

They also used a "block schedule", where each day, you would only attend half your classes, but for twice as long, alternating which classes on which days, and then rotating the order of the classes. (So of your 6 classes, you attended daily: 1,3,5 then 2,4,6, then 3,5,1, then 4,6,2, then 5,3,1...).

Here's an calendar I found of a school currently doing this, tell me this isn't confusing as hell:

http://ponce.dadeschools.net/blockschedule.asp

Ah, bubbling in the correct little bounded area. My experience was about the same. Maybe no one thought to stop that the kids who couldn't fill in a little area didn't know the answer to the questions in the first place?

In any case, I'll share another funny anecdote: I took a reading comprehension test in 3rd grade. It said I was reading a college level. I'm not really sure what that meant then, but in any case it was as high as the system went. Not only did I have to take the same test in 4th grade again, my parents were sent a letter with a very concerned tone. It said I was not making progress on my reading skills and that soon I would fall behind the other children. It recommended I be placed in a remedial comprehension course so I could catch up.

I agree. This is going to sound conceited, but I really blame the public school system for never giving me a challenge.

Until I eventually got into private school for the last 2 years of high school, I had never had to work to get straight As. I could often complete homework assignments before class was even over.

Unfortunately, this conditioned me to be incredibly lazy. As I never developed a strong work ethic, in college I continued to put in a minimum of effort though that wasn't enough for straight As.

I've never really had the experience of consistently trying to do something hard. Even though I'm trying to force myself to do it now (setting ambitious fitness goals and taking advanced online classes), I can't help but feel that it would've been a lot easier to develop this grit when motivation didn't entirely depend on me.

You've described the fate of an entire generation of gifted students. It's awfully hard to overcome years and years of this instilled at an early/formative age. Teaching children to work for goals is one of the most important tasks that parents and to a lesser extent society, have.

>> "before my time there were English Grammar schools which were done away with"

I'm not 100% sure but I believe these were similar to Northern Irish grammar schools where at the end of primary school you took an exam to determine if you could go to the grammar school or if you would go to the standard high school. I went through this system. Recently they have been slowly removing it and personally I go back and forth on whether that is a good idea. The biggest issue is that the amount of pressure placed on 10/11 year olds to pass that exam and get into a grammar school, not to mention the 18 months or so of preparation is very high. Too high arguably. It also fails children who don't do well with standardised exams. I know people who failed that exam but were lucky enough to still get into a grammar school and who did very well.

A better system may be having one school with optional advanced classes (we even had this for GCSE Maths/Advanced Maths in out grammar school). That way people can take advanced courses in the areas they naturally excel at rather than hindering their entire education by denying them the higher quality teaching at a grammar school.

> failed that exam but were lucky enough to still get into a grammar school and who did very well

Could this be attributed to the school being of higher quality/better funded, higher performing teachers, or surrounding oneself with higher performing students? Or all of the above?

Possibly. Although there were also many people in that school who did well in the entrance exam and did not succeed in the school. Thinking about both groups of people it's very obvious in retrospect that that the people that managed to get accepted despite the bad grade in the exam worked very hard and wanted to succeed no matter how difficult they found it. They'd put in 3x as much work as everyone else.

You just described why so many people support school choice and voucher policies. It is absolutely mind boggling to me how anyone can consider more options to be worse than a one size fits all model.

EDIT: In keeping with the trend, took about 30 seconds to get downvoted.

> It is absolutely mind boggling to me how anyone can consider more options to be worse than a one size fits all model.

It's pretty simple, really: you're looking from your own, self-centered perspective. From the point of view of the society, it may be desirable to restrict options available to individuals in order to mitigate negative effects of everyone making self-interested choices.

Whether or not options should be restricted in schooling is a topic for cost/benefit analysis, but as a general point, I don't see anything mind-boggling about this perspective.

This makes no sense - you are proposing restricting the options of high performers so that they don't make self interested choices. Why not restrict the choices of low performers instead?

Because with this definition of the problem, the "low performers" don't have options to restrict.

My point, as applied to this case, is that giving the option of "smart-only schools" will predictably lead to people taking it, which may lead to issues described by 'habosa here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13483591. It's a reasonable question to ask if this is what is beneficial to the society (including its economy), and if the answer is no, then not giving such an option in a first place is an entirely logical approach.

Then why not just rephrase the problem, so the "low performers" can simply be removed from the education system entirely? That's what you're proposing when you tell someone gifted they can't have education that _actually educates_ them.

How is "getting a good education" a negative effect? It is the opposite. If smart people do the things they need to do to become even smarter, everyone benefits.

Smaller schools have less educational diversity. Suppose you want a gifted and talented education, but also want to play baseball. At tiny schools that may not be an option, but at a larger school you can have upper tier classes and a wider range of clubs.

EX: My high school had a swim team and a chess club. We had almost every AP class, lot's of general ed, even some handicapped students. When they split the school a lot of that was lost.

IMO, it's the disruptive students that need to go not the gifted. Unless your talking boarding schools even NYC does not really have enough exceptionally gifted students for their own high school.

You're also assuming that such a shift must play in the current model. There's no reason that sports couldn't be separated into community activities totally separate from the educational aspects of multiple smaller schools.

I can't find the link, but I've heard strong arguments for models where school days are 4 hours long and kids go to community centers afterwards where they do homework, play sports, games, club activities, hikes, music lessons and just hangout. As a bonus, the people in these areas DON'T need a masters degree to do their job as we separate educational aspects of schools from social aspects.

Dozens of small schools could easily work together in a community under this model with changes in the classroom schools having no impact on the activity centers. You could even go to certain schools on different days for areas of specialization/interest being taught.

There are a whole world of possible options that open up if we don't lock in the model that we have today. IMO, it's not about defunding the schools. It's about WANTING to fund them.

You would need the same number of teachers if the day was 4h long unless you had some students start with community centers and then swap. Now, if population density was high enough your model might work, but you are going to sacrifice a lot of time busing people around in the middle of the day.

Unless, these are simply different building right next to each other. Which is fine, but you could do the same thing in one building.

If that is the case, public education does not exist to educate children (or at least this is not its primary goal), but rather exists as some sort of bizarre redistribution program. High IQ parents are then expected to feed their children into the hopper for the gain of others.

Personally, the biggest concern I would have with school choice / voucher policies is maintaining accountability and quality standards.

The recent fraud investigations in the USA for-profit college market (eg where several scam-ish type outfits churned out expensive but useless degrees to people lured in by slick marketing) absolutely shows that, sometimes, more options can be worse.

That could be really easily addressed. In order to accept voucher money, you must be a non-profit and your expenses must be transparent.

I agree that for-profit institutions have no place in education.

The issue is that funding for public schools is extremely limited. Having more choice means even less funding for those that need it the most. Ideally, there would be endless funding and so more choice doesn't negatively impact those at the bottom. But that's not the reality we face.

The solution to the problem you describe is different classes for students of different abilities, not different schools. The school I went to (in England) split most classes into 4 sets where the 'best' student's in each subject went to set 1 and the ones that need extra help went to set 3 or 4. Then there where extra-curricular 'clubs' in certain subjects for students that wanted to go even deeper than the lessons allowed. Even the most gifted of students may need some extra help in some subject. I, for example, was in set 1 for math and science, but set 4 for french.

In my experiences abilities in different subjects are highly correlated. So someone who is very good in science/math is unlikely to be completely dumb when it comes to history/language. So your proposal would actually give rise to (intellectually) segregated schools in all but name. So we might as well make it formal.

So your proposal would actually give rise to (intellectually) segregated schools in all but name

I didn't find that at all. There is more to school than classes, and we did have a bunch of classes that weren't segregated by ability (history, geography, religious studies, shop classes, sometimes PE, etc.) Plus we had lunch and all breaks together. My friends where absolutely not all in the same math set as me.

This is actually a great compromise solution (and practical). I had the experience of being in a "gifted" class from third grade to sixth grade. It seemed to be a win-win situation where the school (and students) got the benefits of intellectual diversity but allowed kids to learn more at their own pace.

I agree w/ dagw. Schools need to have extra classes, extra-curricular classes, etc based on set of similarly gifted students' abilities, or based on set of similarly non-gifted/regular students' lack-of-abilities to improve their abilities. If needed, eligible volunteer or paid teacher should be arranged on specific time. A separate school for gifted students or a separate school for regular/non-gifted students is very-bad/non-gifted idea w/evil & ineffective motives.

The other advantage of having everything in the same school is that it makes moving up (and down) in the sets a lot easier. A kid who is right on the cusp between set 1 and set 2 in math can be put into set 1 for a term and see how it works out. Or a kid who, for whatever reason, starts slipping can be moved down a set and given some extra support. If these changes required moving schools then that will never happen.

The very humble comprehensive I went to in Scotland addressed this issue with streaming - which seemed to work pretty well.

Is streaming out of fashion in state schools these days? I know its alive and well in public schools as my son was streamed.

Edit: For those outside the UK: public schools are a type of private school.

What's streaming?

Tracking.

You break kids up by test score and then put all the top kids together, all the middle kids together, and all the bottom kids together. My public school experimented with it for one year, but reverted. Rumor was, parents felt like their kids were being written off in the 6th grade.

Dividing students by ability, into groups such as honors/regular/remedial, with different levels of challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education)

Streaming is the best approach (IMO), as long as the schools are large enough or homogeneous enough (or have appropriate intercollegiate relationships with nearby schools) to make it happen. If you can't make a full class of pupils of whom you expect top grades, then the range of abilities can be a bit too big.

You ideally need to be able to promote and demote, which means having at least one subject teacher per stream per year, so that pupils can shift between streams without timetable changes, and having small enough class sizes that the teachers can all cope with a few more being added (as well as possibly doing a bit of extra coaching to get a promoted pupil up to the level of the rest of the class).

Selective schooling as a norm can write talented kids off at age 11 if their talents aren't broad enough. Streaming means that children can still excel in their best disciplines even if they are lacking in others.

I think we had about 8 parallel streams for main subjects (i.e. everyone did maths, english etc. at the same time).

People were moved between streams fairly frequently.

I don't know about today, but this was how it was when I was in high school around 1990 in the US. We had "basic", "college prep" and "honors/advanced placement" levels, plus some kind of level for the special-ed kids. However, it was only at the high school level (4 years just prior to college); before that, in the earlier grades, everyone was mostly lumped together.

Strangely grammar schools still exist in Kent.

You have to sit an exam called the 11+ to enter which is much more like an IQ test than a standard subject based exam.

The most comman argument against them is that privelleged families can afford to tutor their kids specifically to pass this exam.

I was lucky enough to pass the exam, and while there definitely were instances of well off kids who had massive amounts of tutoring, the vast majority were from all kinds of different backgrounds, and levels of education.

For me it was an overwhelmingly positive experience, but I completely understand both sides of the argument.

But, on the flip side, faster-learning kids need to learn how to live/work/deal with slower-learning kids and vice versa. The purpose of schooling goes beyond the accumulation of facts.

Nice in theory, doesn't work in practice. At least growing up where I did, a lot of the "slow" kids weren't slow. They just didn't give a fuck and would disrupt the class. No one needs to "learn" to deal with that bullshit. I don't have to deal with disruptive assholes in the real world.

I was one of those "disruptive assholes" in school. It was simply too easy for me to take seriously. A big part of it was also seeing through a lot of the teachers. I realized if there was a way to be successful in the world none of these people have a clue how to do it.

Weirdly the smart kid that started this thread claims that he decided to disrupt the class and "seek fulfillment in acting out" because he was bored, so even if you segregate by ability you'll find the same if they're not stimulated. Maybe the same solution applies for the kids you are talking about.

Then separate out the problem kids, not the slow kids.

For some, the problem is the class is too slow. The slow classes are CREATING the problem kids.

This argument always comes up but I'm not convinced. In society people tend to congregate in professions and social where people have similar intellectual capabilities. How many people here were interested in a career in Software Engineering because the people in it had similar interests and values to you? I know I was.

Sure you need to be able to talk to other groups of people but not to the extent that you require 35 hours a week of education along side them for years. Additionally I'm not sure being educated alongside them actually helps. There are a a hell of a lot of intelligent people who become resentful of that situation and that attitude can take years to mature out of, if they ever do.

The problem is the entire class is geared to the slower kids. Since the faster kids learn the entire year's work in the first month or prior to the beginning of the year, the only thing they learn is how to deal with slower kids or amuse themselves quietly. My son read most of the fiction in his elementary school before I took him out to go to a private school.

I programmed games on my calculator, wrote stories and poems, printed out stories to read in tiny 4pt font so the teacher wouldn't notice, and constantly doodled drawings to keep my mind occupied. I sometimes think I learned more doing that than I did in school (at least until college, which was like a brutal wake-up call I wasn't prepared for).

Honestly I think the worst part is when teachers would get annoyed that you weren't 'paying attention' and force you to stop doing the crap that's keeping your mind busy and 'focus on school', even though you already get pretty much straight A's.

They learn to deal with slow-learning kids at the cost of not learning from a slower paced class at all. The negatives outweigh the positives for the gifted kids.

But they do. I went to a Dutch gymnasium at age 12. The smartest 5% of the population is admitted there. Did the concept of faster-learning kids and slower-learning kids disappear there? Hardly! There were huge differences in aptitude.

Why? Everyone always trots this out as though it's unequivocally true.

I ended up teaching my AP Statistics course. It was ludicrous: as a junior I somehow understood the material better than the teacher and was expected to teach a class full of seniors.

Yes, it was more educational than the alternative (sitting in a corner reading a book while totally phoning it in) but I also have no doubt that I would've learned far more in a course which actually challenged me.

---

Also, this notion that our real world experiences are anywhere near as heterogeneous as public schools is downright ludicrous. It's not like we hire random people off the street to be software engineers. The average IQ of everyone I interact with is well the national average.

We still have Grammar Schools in Northern Ireland.

I definitely believe that they work, it's a shame they don't have them in England.

Can you define "work" in this instance?

For example, if they made half the kids do better, and half the kids do worse, does that count as working? While you sometimes get claims that it's for their own good that less academically inclined pupils are sent to the non-grammar schools, I'd guess the same people who say this would freak right the hell out if their own kid failed the exam and didn't get in, which kind of undermines that argument.

I meant that they work for the individual, a child sent to a grammar school will get a solid education.

I take your point about the wider ramifications, but I feel as though I got a good education, and if I ever have kids, I would want them to go to a grammar school too.

One of the problems is that kids in the top streams in highly-selective schools do very well. The kids at the bottom often don't so as well, and sometimes become problem cases. These same kids -- who are very bright -- would be stars / top students if they'd gone to a lesser school.

Source: Personal experience. I went a grammar school in the UK. I also taught in a top UK grammar school and a not-very-good comprehensive school. I've seen it happen numerous times.