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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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