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Comment by mattw2121 | Hacker News Reader

"because teachers must slow down and adjust their approach to keep everyone on track."

Do this and then you'll have your top performers start being absent as well -- out of boredom.

I'd suggest sending kids that are lagging behind, and those that have high absentee rates, into remedial classes. Education should get kids excited about learning. From my experience, nothing gets kids more excited than the feeling that they've accomplished something. Make them sit in a room to rehash the same old crap over and over and you lose the ones you want.

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Those ahead don't need additional benefit. We should be working to bring the left half of the distribution into the fold. If a student is so great that they're skipping out of boredom then there's little that a public institution should do to help them. They can go out with a head start and go get em.

This is a severely regressive policy, and -- by the way -- already the case. The vast majority of per-student resources are spent on the bottom 20% by performance.

Regressing to a point with less wealth and intellectual inequality?

>Those ahead don't need additional benefit.

Perhaps, but they also shouldn't be artificially held back. Life doesn't have a speed limit.

>If a student is so great that they're skipping out of boredom then there's little that a public institution should do to help them.

This doesn't follow at all. Why wouldn't you want to invest in the people with the most potential?

> shouldn't be artificially held back.

but are they? It seems like every school district has magnets, AP tracks, relationship with community colleges, extracurriculars, skipping a year,... for the smart ones.

We don't have "school districts" here nevermind any of that other stuff. Skipping a year is practically unheard of. There were "gifted and talented" programmes but those were just holding pens, there was no serious attempt to teach more advanced material

oki thx, I guess I don't have a clear idea of the wide range in how public schools are organized.

Agreed. Just shift them a year ahead, or in an AP track, or bury them in extracurriculars. It really doesn't seem that hard to me, to accommodate a precocious kid, especially in large schools or large public school districts. (shoot me down if I don't know what I'm talking about). The studious ones will be ok, has it ever been different?

Year-ahead works in high school where you're in various different classes anyway, but it can be harmful to the students in other ways, especially earlier.

Just because you're smart enough to perform at a 10th grade level doesn't mean you're mature enough or will fit in.

> because you're smart enough to perform at a 10th grade level doesn't mean you're mature enough or will fit in.

Makes sense.

If your top performers only perform to order then they really are not top performers at all.

Maybe we should call them potential top performers. We are talking about children after all.

Clearly you were a highly performant pupil. Most absentees in my experience were excited about tagging, smoking tobacco and other substances, working on their mopeds, consuming alcohol and going on adventures to other cities/countries.

Yeah, the ones that are lagging need more personal attention and fine-tuned lessons; unfortunately part of the issue is the teacher shortage, so they can't really make smaller classes.

Maybe sort the classes by ability, then?

The problem with streaming is that it is always tempting to put the best teachers in the more academically inclined classes because that is where they get the most visible effect. But of course it should be the other way about, the very best teachers should ve assigned to the students who find the whole affair the most difficult. The best students can often just be given an assignment and told to get on with it.

Sort the classes by learning speed, the faster kids aren't expected to do more or harder class work like today instead they get longer lunches, free periods, more recess and early dismissal. Only slow kids need homework, the fast kids get it done as part of class and peer grade themselves.

Frees up teaching resources for the slower kids and respects everyone's time. Puts the incentives in the right places, rewarding the diligent responsible students.

Are you rewarding diligent students or successful students? It usually ends up being the latter and the slower but diligent ones end up discouraged.

A diligent student with a learning disability or at the far edge of bell curve is in a sense "punished" I suppose, but they are punished with more instruction.

Like in life if they can find a way to work faster they can have more time for other things.

Ah yes put the kids struggling (let’s ignore it could be the teachers being bad that causes this) with the disruptive kids so it’s even harder for them to learn. Great solution.

I don't think I mentioned disruptive kids, but I have another solution for them. If they are disruptive, keep them out of the classes. First, in school suspension, then out of school suspension, then expel them.

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