Long ago somebody tried dividing an elementary school class into regular and advanced students. At the end of the year, the advanced students had done better. The selection was a random lottery. The difference in performance, was entirely based on expectation.
As someone with teaching experience, I find this incredibly hard to believe if you were sorting by raw talent on not something that can be gamed like basing it on grades/good behavior. Certain students have a better natural aptitude for certain subjects.
> By starting so young (kindergarten!) in NYC they were creating the division out of essentially nothing.
I think that by kindergarten you already have lots of factors that will statistically influence school performance. I would argue that some will be environmental, and some will be inherent to the kid.
> Long ago somebody tried dividing an elementary school class into regular and advanced students. At the end of the year, the advanced students had done better. The selection was a random lottery. The difference in performance, was entirely based on expectation.
I mean, that's obviously going to be true. But how big was the difference? Was it bigger than when students are chosen with another method? Which method? Which one performs the best? What you're describing is basically the placebo effect, but applied to this situation. It's a good control group, and we already know that placebo works. The interesting part is to see if the current programs work better or worse than placebo, and by how much.
It is the epitome of shitty studies cherry picked to support the idealology/politics of the day.
But there's a lot of truth to this I think people should cognize.
That said, I'm wary of NYs move, in the later years of high school, providing programs where kids can be among other kids that really want to learn is powerful.
At my school, they didn't actually 'vet' students in the advanced program. You just did it if you want. I think that's fair.
You can have Algebra 101 and Algebra 101++, which covers more ground, at an accelerated pace, and it's your choice to join. I think that would work.
But regardless, that doesn't change the fact that there are difference between people, and they're shown very early in development. It's things like, a kid not understanding whether a train is alive (it moves!) or not. Later, it's things like a person being able to understand basic math or not (I was the smartest kid in class, and had to tutor one of the worst... it was painful - he simply couldn't understand math! I tried all different ways of explaining, ended up having to teach him a mechanistic formula "write parenthesis this way, then keep trying numbers until the sums match").
Straw-man examples of differences in kids are cute but not helpful. The issue was the imbalance in NYC advanced programs was clearly racial, which begs some kind of correction. Or do we have to resort to "Black kids aren't ever smart enough?" Is that your argument?
This is a nasty lie that you just made up.