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> Ik people tend to point to Russian, Chinese, and Indian Olympiad students as being examples of success, but most of them also attended top universities due to their Olympiad attendance, so I doubt the Olympiad itself had an impact compared to attending a Tsinghua, FyzTech (Citadel still hires from there for the London office at least circa 2023 despite the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia), or IIT Delhi.

Path to FyzTech lies through FMSHs which accept high school students largely via regional-level Olympiads. And path to that lies through the Olympiad "circle" in your local school.

You probably can build a stratified education system without Olympiads, but as a matter of fact in Russia they do actually play an important role in the overall structure.

> Ik people tend to point to Russian, Chinese, and Indian Olympiad students as being examples of success, but most of them also attended top universities due to their Olympiad attendance, so I doubt the Olympiad itself had an impact compared to attending a Tsinghua, FyzTech (Citadel still hires from there for the London office at least circa 2023 despite the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia), or IIT Delhi.

First, if you remove the Olympiad-based admission, there's no guarantee that these students could _get_ into the top-level universities.

Second, people in the US _love_ to point out that athletics "builds the character" and sets people up for success later in life. Well, do you think that training for Olympiads and competing in high-stakes academic tournaments also does nothing?

> it's questionable whether this is a net benefit for Romania as a whole.

it depends what's most beneficial: having a few percents of very mathematically experts people in maths-heavy professions? Or having everyone somewhat decent at maths, even when it doesn't affect their productivity in their jobs?

I don't have any hard data about this, but instinctively I'd bet on the former: I'd rather have a few hundreds more Sutskevers, than most of the country's bakers know their way around PDE.

Yet Ilya Sutskever was not an Olympiad participant.

Heck, he attended a correspondence college for 2 years (Open University of Israel) before his family immigrated to Canada and then attended UToronto (an amazing university, but not significantly selective by any means).

Ilya is by definition an example of why heavily stratified systems are subpar for human capital development - they remove the opportunity to identify talent from a broad pool, because humans can change.

And as I pointed out from personal experience, the difference in outcomes between IMO and non-IMO participants when I studied CS at HYS was nonexistent - we all did equally well professionally as well as academically. The difference was we all had the ability to study and get guidance from the same professors if we so chose.

A rising tide raises all ships.

> Ilya Sutskever

And alternative explanation is that he's really nothing special. There are literally dozens of people like him in my social circle. Heck, my very spouse has a more impressive school record. The difference could be connections. He lucked out with his circle and a field of study.

Absolutely! And that's my point! Broading access to education is a net benefit to society, because fortune prepares an able mind.

> The difference could be connections

In Ilya's case, not really. He was an immigrant twice (first USSR to Israel, then Israel to Canada), and wouldn't have been able to do an MS/PhD at UT without actually being capable - it's not difficult to enter UToronto, but it's difficult to leave with a CS bachelors degree.

I've always felt a broad access system like the Warren-era UCs along with LBJ's "Great Deal" is of better benefit for a country than investing in building isolated ivory towers for education, because we have the ability to better ourselves, and that door should always remain open.

I don’t necessarily see a problem with enabling like talented groups to be mingled together, that said it depends on the metrics. A friend who had a 3.2 in HS did way better in life than several 4.0+ students.

The other end of the spectrum is the way most of the US handles high school. Long gone are gifted and talented programs before high school and in many cases, for instance those with an ability for math are stuck in classes with those that will top out before algebra.

I understand your point, but the catering to the mediocre that happens these days in US grade schools isn’t the right answer either.

The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds and legitimately don't have a strong predictive capacity on student success that couldn't already be explained the parental background and early childhood care.

In my case, I never placed in gifted academic programs in elementary and middle, but by HS was able to take 14 AP classes (and auto shop - always liked tinkering since elementary school; which was a major reason why I never placed well in gifted programs) and end up at HYS. Most of my peers there similarly didn't attended gifted programs or high schools - amongst the non-legacies the biggest predictor of success was SAT scores and GPA.

While giving and funding academic and gifted tracks within schools should be allowed, "gifted" students should not be segregated from "normal" students. There's no reason a high school can't both offer as many AP classes as possible ALONG with vocational classes.

Edit: can't reply

> Why should gifted schools need more money than normal schools

It's not that they need more funding. The issue is gifted programs tend to overlap with upper income families [0] - the same kinds of families that are overrepresented in School Boards and PTAs [1]

I'm not saying go all "San Francisco 2.0", but recognize that gifted only schools does lead to a moral perception that other students are not as deserving for funding or are "bad students".

[0] - https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2019/09/30/socioeconomic-status-...

[1] - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584188180...

> the highest-ability schools receive a decrement in funding

But are overrepresented in urban areas where human capital is significantly higher than rural areas within Romania [2]. Students in rural and small town schools are less liked to be as healthy or a affluent as students in cities or major urban centers, and this does have a tangible downstream effect on education as a whole.

[2] - https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/abs/2021/06...

> If you look at SF...

Note how I said << I'm not saying go all "San Francisco 2.0" >>

There is a happy middle ground between being an exclusionary system like Romania's or a delusional bussed system like San Francisco.

Giving the example of a city with a population the size of Cincinnati is clearly a facile argument, as it is obviously not representative of the rest of California, let alone the US.

Why should gifted schools need more money than normal schools? I would imagine "problematic children schools" would need the most funds because you would need the lowest teacher:student ratio to maintain order

>The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds

The article points out that the opposite is the case in Romania: the highest-ability schools receive a decrement in funding.

> The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds

No, they don't. If you look at SF, the high-performing Lowell High gets a bit _less_ funding than the average for the district. Stuyvesant in NYC is right at the average spending.

I studied in a magnet school with other gifted kids, including a future Olympiad winner. Our school barely had heating in winter. It's really the _other_ kids that make all the difference.

That is a lot to read. I’m no longer in my 40s. Grade school - in San Jose - gifted and talented classes were classes at the school not a separate school.

Sadly education has evolved where schools teach to the norm rather than acknowledging people have different strengths and weaknesses.

It does not require separate schools, it needs funding and more importantly, someone good at math needs to be able to work with others good at math.

The educational curriculum in the US for grade school has been standardized to the mediocre and any attempt to encourage gifted is considered a problem.

I agree with you!

Give students the ability to test out of classes and/or dual enroll in community colleges, BUT make sure they are all still in the same school meeting and greeting and bumping into each other.

Dumbing down curricula is a bad move, and preventing students from being able to test out or take classes earlier is also a bad move. But segregating students into different schools based on academic ability is equally as bad.

> Grade school - in San Jose - gifted and talented classes were classes at the school not a separate school

Yep. This is a model I agree with, and am a product of as well being a fellow Bay Area native

The funny thing, I went to five schools, 3 different districts across Bay Area cities. All had accommodations for different levels. High school, I ended up at UCSC my freshman year with enough credits from transfer in (from high school school) and my first quarter as a junior. Most were community college courses friends and I were interested in separate from school.

My step daughter, I hear her curriculum and shake my head (my BS was in computer engineering and computational chemistry), I could not help with the bs “common core” forced on her.

Thankfully she settled into the ability to have college courses in her last year.

It’s ridiculous how much of a push there is “standardizing” the skills of individuals. When their strengths should be encouraged.

Not to be that guy, but in my parent's old country - someone like your daughter would not have been given a chance to even get a bachelors degree. And we're from a country with the same tracked educational system as Romania.

I agree that "common core" is bulls** (I'm part of that generation as well, but my Asian parents made me take Kumon and taught me personally, but I was also lucky/blessed that my mother was a teacher in the old country), but the motivation wasn't wrong.

And this is what pains me about American educational reform. It has become ideological, instead of outcome driven.

Personally, our outcomes should be

1. Building a talented workforce (we need more October Skys)

2. Giving space for creativity (we need more Darias)

3. Building physical fitness (we need more Currahee Hill montages, as an ex-ROTC [found out I'd lose my OCI if I commissioned])

And this requires giving students autonomy to explore their limits mentally and physically. If peeps don't want to learn, nbd, but why should we limit access to students who want to but didn't initially build the fundamentals.

We also need to decouple emotion from education - no major or degree is better or worse than others. We should treat a HS grad, an AA/AS grad, a BA/BS/BE grad, andn a grad school grad the same.

Let's be a "Great Society" [0] again.

[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KuuEFTgodc8

>Edit: cannot reply

What do you mean you cannot reply?

HN has limits on replies for threads that are popular, in order to prevent what it thinks is a back-and-forth flame war.

It can be overzealous at times.

Yes, but it does that by flagging and hiding the thread, not closing comments.

Both, actually. Both individual comment threads and individual users who post “low quality comments” too quickly get rate limited.

> individual users who post “low quality comments” too quickly get rate limited.

only if their karma is low, OP's karma is not low

> Neighboring Poland

they aren't neighbors.

What's HDI ?

> they aren't neighbors

Lviv will always be Lwow in my heart /s

Yep, but the distance between both isn't significant both physically and culturally.

> What's HDI

Human Development Index - it's a composite index that combines health, education, and economic indicators in a quick benchmark to compare relatively human capital development.

thanks

No worries! Good questions!