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Comment by mustafa_pasi | Hacker News Reader

Well, people are funding schools through taxes. Then they send their kid to school. Then the school decides their kid is too stupid* to do much, so they get relegated to dumb class and their future career prospects get nullified. This is how it works in many countries where schools are segregated by learning ability.

I make no judgement on how good or bad it is, but I get why people would be upset by this system.

*or has some mental issues like ADHD or whatever, which a lot of countries do not even recognize as a thing

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So rather than putting students that learn slowly into classes that move slowly, you keep them in normal classes where they drag along lost behind everyone else, and possibly drag the rest of the class down with them. I don't see how that is better for anyone involved, unless you think the credential is all that matters.

Because in practice concentrating the problem kids into one class tends not to help them. They get warehoused and fall further behind before being dumped onto society at 18.

So instead, let's put them with the high-achievers and force those high-achievers to do the teacher's job of tutoring them at the expense of their own educational opportunity.

I can see why schools likes it. But it's terrible policy and hurts the higher-achieving students, who will be the backbone of our increasingly winner-take-all knowledge- and services-based economy.

That's quite the straw man you've built there.

Nobody is talking about forcing the high achievers to do the teacher's job. The question is how we allocate the fixed amount of educational resources we have. You want us to choose the high achievers so that these early winners can turn that lead into even greater success later. Unstated in your post is what happens to those low achieving students. But it's pretty easy to assume that they're going to be the losers in the winner take all economy.

The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.

> That's quite the straw man you've built there.

> Nobody is talking about forcing the high achievers to do the teacher's job.

On the contrary, people can be quite explicit about this.

Indeed, it was only a couple days until an example popped up right here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27586576

> The question is how we allocate the fixed amount of educational resources we have

> The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.

Why do you think society is becoming more "winner take all"? Even if there's truth to society trending in that direction, I'm skeptical it can be solved in the education system if the causes don't lie in the education system. It's easy for me to imagine a world where schools eliminate their advanced programs, then the same students go on to become low-wage workers and the same (or fewer) go on to become scientists.

That's precisely why low achieving students are separated out. To give them extra help.

High achieving students are easy. Just point them and they go. This is why the second they started standardized testing and separating the students they were able to achieve results with high achievers. But their primary goal with these top-down programs was to actually help the slower students, that were graduating without being literature and whatever. Turns out it's just a really hard problem. It isn't that everyone in education somehow lacks the desire or common sense.

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