I had a similar experience. It was wonderful to be put into a magnet school filled with kids that were smart and generally wanted to learn (every one of them went to a college/university), and to be separated from the kids that hated school. That is the sad thing: so many of the kids causing problems in the normal schools wouldn't cause problems if they attended schools that focused on their vitalities in the way that the magnet schools focused on ours.

I have exactly the same experience as the previous commenters, I was also basically rescued into a (learning-)conducive environment and I'm seriously thankful for that. The alternative would've very likely been awful because I've seen on a good friend of mine what happens when there isn't an opportunity to get into a "magnet school". It basically caused clinical depression and such a strong distaste for school that it made completing even high school basically impossible.

Having been educated in probably a different country, with a different school system, I am surprised to read all these comments.

Not saying my country school system is perfect, it isn't. And there are cases of abuse, bullying does exist. But 30 years ago I was the good, shy, student in a poor neighbourhood of a big city and never suffered or witnessed anything too bad (and from 4 to 12 year old we had a kid with Down syndrome in our class). And nobody would even think about splitting kids by ability, we don't have "advanced"/"honours" classes.

In Germany we split children into three kinds of school at around age 10-11. There is decent mobility between the schools if you over- or under-perform, and little to no splitting within the same school (well, until age 16/17). It's generally a positive experience for everyone, with everyone getting the right teachers and the right mix of practical and theoretical work/learning.

At some point, every fully developed education system splits kids by ability. Not everyone goes on to advanced studies, engineering school, law, or medicine. Not everyone learns a trade.

That split might not happen until age 18, but my wager is that it does happen everywhere. The question is when is the optimal time? I tend to think earlier rather than later.

How early is “earlier”? Children have no clue of possibilities or consequences. This is why we have an age of majority: to protect kids from long term consequences of life choices they are not ready to make. Why should education be different? - what right have we to put a big cross on a child’s future and declare “you can never amount to more than this” based on childish behaviours and choices they may yet grow out of? We do this in no other area of life.

There's strong evidence that early childhood nutrition, how many words of adult conversation a child hears in a week, how safe and secure they feel as infants/toddlers, and many other differences in children's early experiences can cast a much longer shadow over their lives than the difference of being put into a class where they learn single variable algebra in 6th vs 9th grade.

What right do we have to impose these impacts on children? Or is the school tracking a form of trolley problem where it feels wrong to some to take an active choice?

Because you asked the direct question, I'll give a direct answer. "How early is earlier?" Based on an N of 5 (myself, my two siblings, and my two kids), I think it can be done productively as early as 3rd grade or so. (For me, it was done earlier than that [age 5], which I'm extremely happy about, but I'm not sure that's scalable or even typically appropriate.)

I do think that a periodic re-assessment is also appropriate. If someone "runs well" in 3rd grade and then reverts to the mean, they should revert to the mean academic leveling as well. If someone develops late and starts to excel in 7th grade, there should be a way for them to pivot towards the advanced classes then as well.

The split doesn't need to be permanent, you could always rearrange the top/bottom achievers in each group.

But that never happens. I come from the opposite side of the equation.

I was not allowed into the gifted and talented program in my school because I had a lot of trouble with reading when I was young. However, I was probably the most gifted person in mathematics. But the G&T program was only for people who scored high on both.

So what happened? I was stuck in the average kids where I excelled but was bored. Anytime math was being worked, I was sent to the computer lab to play on the Apple IIes.

I eventually caught up from a reading perspective but the damage was already done. The american school systems aren't prepped to manage anything out of the ordinary. So since I wasn't in the gifted program, I didn't have the accelerated math during elementary school. Therefore, I couldn't start algebra as early. That means through out high school I was bored stupid. All because of what happened when I was 7 years old.

They made a decision on a 7 year olds ability.

Did it change my life for the worse? Probably not. Unintended consequences and all. I got super interested in computers since I was stuck in a computer lab all the time. I excelled in math in college. Majored in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics.

BUT just because it worked out doesn't mean they didn't fuck up.

Now I have children. My oldest son ALSO did not qualify for G&T program. Can you guess why? He struggled with reading in early elementary school(we tried to help but sorry, people develop at different rates). Oh my gosh but he is good in math. The difference now is there is no escape for him like I had. He is stuck being bored in class.

My youngest son is adopted so we don't have much insight on family history from an academic standpoint but he is killing it in all aspects of school. He likely will be in the G&T program. Yet, I don't believe he is superior in intellect compared to my oldest. They have different skillsets.

So yeah, I think doing G&T determination in elementary school is pretty dang stupid. That crap will all fall into place naturally in middle school.

It is a system based on laziness and testing to the tests.

I didnt see this growing up and dont see it now. Anyone can enter G&T at any time and kids drop out as well. Be an advocate for your kid with the administration. At one school we attended, math was done in 4 week blocks. There was a test to rank the kid for that block and then they were grouped with like skilled kids.

My wife volunteered a lot for the school and as a result she knew all the administration. She was able to get our preferred teacher each year etc. Get to know the teachers and administration, help them out. They can bend any rule at any time.

We are in private school now. In my son's 1st grade class (mostly 7 year olds), there is a kid who just turned 5. Private school could be a good option.

Public schools even within the same school system can be different, so dont generalize across the entire public school system.

Similar story here but in a different country in eastern Europe where there's no G&T program. I had access to intensive math though and shudder at the thought of my son would have to deal with that. He's currently just 2yo so we don't have an insight yet..

Immediately thought of Microsoft and their horrible stack ranking. Sounds like a way to get overly stressed children.

In the US we have increasing numbers of students who don’t speak English? Is it ability grouping to give Spanish instruction? Are such students not “disruptive”?

The solution is not to pull out a handful of high performers, it’s to kick out the even smaller number of disrupters.

This is 95% of why we send our kids to private school. In the rare case a disrupter makes it in, they're "counseled out." It's a travesty that schools permit a handful of bad apples to ruin the learning experience of everyone else.

It’s not the schools permitting it, it’s the justice system making getting rid of disruptive students impossible.

https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2019/08/06/public-sch...

> Wonder what allows a school to at least consider permanent expulsion? The student has to be convicted of:

> murder drug dealing aggravated assault rape possession of a deadly weapon

> But expulsion can be permanent if and only if he or she is over 16 or older. And of course, forget all those criteria for the disability manifestation exclusion–if the student was convicted but disability is the reason for the behavior, no action can be taken.

That's for expulsion, which makes a certain amount of sense. A student with home life problems or a psychological condition is still entitled to an education. But why is it incumbent on every other student that they receive their education in the same classroom?

Because there’s only so much money to go around and trying to educate people who don’t want to be educated is expensive. They need very small class sizes to show any improvements and you get very high staff turnover if you concentrate them because teaching apathetic students is bad but teaching hostile or violent ones is just awful.

And any kind of discipline or moving them to special classes or special schools leads to being sued.

Education is not the first or second priority in the school system or things would look quite different.

It's short sighted of course, because the money will be spent many times again over a lifetime for every botched kid. Both on the giving and receiving end of abuse.

Yes, but how would that work in practice? Special schools for high performers is much more palatable than special schools for quarantining children who aren't going to amount to anything (no matter what you call it and how you design it, this is how it will be perceived).

We have them - even in my small town there was a high school where the kids who were in and out of juvi would attend - everyone at the school knew it’s reputation. It’s where you went if you were expelled.

Yeah we had one too. Though, the one we had actually tried. It had an auto mechanics program and a few different trades classes and other more specialized stuff the regular high school didn't have. A lot of those kids actually started doing better themselves when they got expelled and were sent there.

If mandatory school attendance were repealed, it would work itself quite quickly.

All well and good, but those people still get to vote.

There is no difference between voters who attended school only because they were forced to, and hypothetical voters who weren’t forced to attend school.

We don’t trust kids with the choice to smoke, drink or have sex. Hell, we don’t trust them to watch certain films. Why should we trust them with the choice of education any more than other choices that can screw up the rest of their life?

Who's trusting kids with anything? Do they not have parents?

The point is that students who are not engaged themselves, and whose parents are not engaged enough to ensure that they go, will no longer make school less valuable for all by their very presence.

This seems like it's probably very wrong.

But would bring other problems. The cure is likely worse than the disease.

Most of history? I'd argue three Rs is the basics everyone needs, and then they can find their own way.

Most of history was a very different place before advancements outright snapped assumptions in half. Before most of the population was farm laborers and societal hierarchical complexity and knowledge was limited by this.

Industrialization was raising pollution and standards of living and making it clear that a lack of education wasn't a healthy option - although partially driven by wrong reasons - paranoid anticatholicism that ignores basically all of European history of how much influence the church /actually/ has over secular power.

Even post WW2 industrialization the population was still at a high school diploma as an actual advantage but "optional".

We need more informed not less. Problematically the populace also needs more critical thinking and self guidance while there are many unhealthy attitudes towards learning.

Why do you believe public schooling improves critical thinking?

Compared to nothing on those who try to fill the void? Hell yes. Look at those raised in literal cults for example or among fundamentalists. Now I know these are tripping hazards for ants low goal posts but for once "it could be worse" is pertinent. An education can provide the prerequisites to evaluate and enable it.

Often they do try to put their bullshit in it but their hamhandedness in practice often backfires by adolescence - especially with their own twisted priorities and misrule related discontent.

Yes, it can help, but do you think public school can provide its own 'cult'?

If you look at the opportunities and statistics for high school dropouts, it makes a compelling case to the contrary.

And I argue this as an education system skeptic and college dropout myself.

Presumably most people who “find their own way” would not drop out of high school, and their experience would be better — because there would be no one present who was only attending because the law mandates that they do so.

Reading and writing are unnecessary for much of the population given the progress in speech to text and text to speech algorithms. We can go straight to learning how to express ideas in speech and learning how to locate, access and understand information.

And calculators have rendered arithmetic unnecessary for some time. The focus should be on how to use calculation for financial and technical purposes.

I wonder if inability to do mental math explains the enormous debt people have these days...

Most of history was pretty bad.

On what do you base that claim? Some say other periods and places were much more idyllic than our current state.

I had a history class in school? No period sticks out even remotely comparable to modernity by any metric: violent deaths per capita, general life expectancy, education, leisure time available..

If some future historian were to look at the 20th century he would observe a huge amount of violence and death dwarfing anything that came before. I am not certain the modern age is altogether superior.

Just such a thing is done in Season 4 of HBO's The Wire. It profiles just such a class where the disruptive students are pulled out. Yes, it's fiction but you can see how it'd work and it's pretty interesting to see the changes in attitudes among the "gen pop" class and the special class.

Both exist. There are "last chance" public schools in some areas for those expelled from the main schools, in addition to charter and private schools for the higher achievers.

I don’t think the number of those disrupters is as small as you think it is. It really depends on the school though, for me it was much higher for 7th-10th grade in Vicksburg MS than it was for 11th-12th grade in Bothell WA (a much richer school district).

Disruptive kids can very well be gifted and are bored by school. Doesn't mean every disruptive kid is a genius in hiding of course.

The “disrupters” are usually “pulled out” disproportionately if they are poor or minorities while kids who do the same thing but have more influential families get a “counseling”.

https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/4/5/17199810/school-disc...

Yes, some demographics have it worse than others but that's a totally separate variable of the equation though. A rising tide lifts all boats. Not bettering the system because a particular group/groups will not do better relative to some other group even though both groups do better relative to their past position is foolish. This is true for systemic improvements in general, not specific to education.

How does a rising tide lift all boats when you systematically take people off the boat?

Say the education system takes an input of children with a value of 1 and outputs educated people with a "value" between 5 and 10. Even if the system is overtly racist and only outputs minorities of values 5 and 6 it is still beneficial to everyone if the system is improved so that everyone gets a +1

So you mean a system that in practice separates kids by race. Didn’t we already try that before in the South? Ever heard of Jim Crow?

Where do you think all of the funding and resources go when you do that?

Stop trying to put words in my mouth. I'm saying that the fact that a system produces unfair outcomes is not a reason to not make improvement that cause the system produce better outcomes across the board. No more, no less.

It doesn’t produce better outcomes for the people you pull out of the system then get ignored and they don’t get the resources, access, or networking opportunities they need. That’s exactly what happened during segregation.

It was a relief when some of the worst bullies finished 9th grade and dropped out.

That’s illegal.

https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2019/08/06/public-sch...

> Wonder what allows a school to at least consider permanent expulsion? The student has to be convicted of:

> murder drug dealing aggravated assault rape possession of a deadly weapon

> But expulsion can be permanent if and only if he or she is over 16 or older. And of course, forget all those criteria for the disability manifestation exclusion–if the student was convicted but disability is the reason for the behavior, no action can be taken.

> That's illigal.

That is irrelevant.

This is done, to some extent, via auxillary schools in many affluent areas. If a student is problematic in any myriad of ways, off they are sent to the school with lower standards (often within sight of the other campus). For example, 1994 presidential blue ribbon Brea HS has the Canyon high school meters from its campus, specifically for this purpose.

> murder drug dealing aggravated assault rape possession of a deadly weapon

Without punctuation, this sounds like a ridiculously specific and esoteric crime.

To be fair you're lucky if murder-drug merely deals aggravated assault. The means by which the deadly weapon became possessed (who knew this was going to take a turn for the supernatural?) is pretty distasteful, though.

> Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was very difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, just didn't give a fuck. It really sucked

Can't we fix bullying in the first place ?

Lots of child psychologists and teachers believe that parental involvement is key to stopping a child becoming a bully (eg parents actively engaging with their kids welfare) and the most common thing that stops parents being involved in bringing up their kids is poverty. Trying to fix poverty is weirdly controversial.

Is there some kind of consensus that bullies are predominately poor? Even if thats true on a quantitative basis, the bullies that count are the ones with social standing.

Some even make it to president. Some even think, being a bully is mandatory for any higher position in politics ..

I wonder if it's better in old style schools not segmented by age. Then faster physical development gives much less of an advantage, and the immature younger students can have their behavior moderated by the older, hopefully more mature students. And older siblings can watch out for younger ones.

Every study I've ever read says this is much better.

I haven't given this topic a lot of thought, but at first glance it sounds like one of the very hardest problems imaginable to solve? It's hardwired deep into human psychology, and you have limited ways of affecting - or even communicating with - school-aged kids.

I think we have several millennia of proof we cannot.

> Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was very difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, just didn't give a fuck. It really sucked.

I want to echo this. I too was bullied like crazy (I was ridiculed/outcast for being "gay", in the homosexual sense, except I was completely straight. But that doesn't particularly matter to middle-schoolers. I was ridiculed for the clothing I wore (it fit funny as I grew in spurts) and was physically beat, too.)

Our local schools had some advanced schools ("tracked", as the article calls it); I applied. In my system, if you met the entrance requirements, your fate was tossed into a lottery. For one particular school, ~100 students were accepted from ~600 applicants. I was 500th on the waitlist for that school. (It was the worst of several.) I spent an extra year in my assigned school because of that, and it was hell. It was a gift from God when I got out of there the next year. (I got off one of the wait lists!)

It took ten years to really work through most of the resulting depression and confidence issues my time at my assigned school left me with. I have no idea if I would have succeeded if not for "tracked" education.

The author is wrong on several points:

> Eight Bay Area school districts found similar results when they de-tracked middle-school mathematics and provided professional development to teachers.

Perhaps it was the professional development, and not the de-tracking that led to better results? The link doesn't seem to support the author's conclusion, either, and largely seems to credit the professional development.

> [other remarked about "fixed-ability"] We are at a point where the negative impacts of fixed-ability thinking are undeniable.

I have never heard of "fixed-ability", and at least where I was, it was never the argument for separating out achieving students. The arguments was not that the lower-performing students weren't capable¹ of performing, it just simply that if you taught at their level, you were wasting the potential and the time of the students who were outperforming their peers, as you would have to teach significantly below their ability, which is inevitable when you cater to the lowest common denominator.

> When students, instead, embrace the knowledge that there are no limits to their learning, outcomes improve. When students develop a “limitless perspective” positive changes go through their lives,

And the bullies I was schooled along side with joined hands with the bullied and sang kumbaya. (/s) This is absurd.

> International studies show that the United States is one of the most tracked education systems in the world, but tracking hasn’t led to high achievement for the country.

Tracking is a symptom of people trying to escape the poor baseline education; it is not the cause of the poor baseline education, and eliminating it will not improve that.

> Instead, it has brought about stark racial divisions in opportunity and achievement.

Ah, now it's racist to want to receive an at level education? This argument was bantered around in my school system, and it never made any sense. Some combination of socio-economic standing and what generation you were mattered a whole lot more. (Those with good socioeconomic standing either moved out of system, or enrolled in private schools. First-generation kids — with the exception of the Hispanic community for whatever reasons — seemed to do considerably for whatever reasons. Our "tracked" schools were overrepresented in Asian and (I believe, but these demographics aren't measured) first-generation African-Americans, and under-represented in Hispanic and all other African Americans … and it only ever seemed to me that it was that last one that bothered people.

> Now is the time to invest in the teacher professional development that allows this to happen.

Sure, but this is orthogonal to eliminating tracked education. Add in that every government I've seen seems awfully reluctant to pay the teachers. (And you are paying them for the time they'll need to do this, right?)

> For when we tell students they can reach the sky, and provide them with opportunities to do so, amazing things happen.

This was as patronizing then as it is now.

I can't understand why someone is so eager to shut down the only thing that gave me a future.

¹many of them lacked discipline. They were poorly behaved children, and it's a miracle the teachers wanted to continue to be there at all, IMO. Many of them were clearly not getting discipline taught at home … and teachers are forbidden nowadays from imposing any meaningful discipline themselves.

> The other corollary to this, of course, is that on the last day of JHS, after having held my reactions entirely for nearly a decade, and just taking the beatings...I finally lost it. It was really bad, and on the last day of JHS I went absolutely apeshit on this kid for pushing me around and punching me, after I gave him three warnings. Easily one of the top 3 least proud moments of my life. That could have been avoided, too, though you could make an argument a large part of that was also due to it being taboo to actually talk to someone about your feelings in the 90s. I never wanted to fight back because I was afraid of hurting them (I had been training in martial arts for like 7-8 years) and because I didn't want to get in trouble. It was dumb.

On one of my final days prior to transferring out, I almost lost it on another kid. I think my body language threatened violence, and I think it scared him a bit because I'd never done that. We both still ended up getting dragged to the principal's office, though as I remember I wasn't punished. Today, I regret not actually exacting violence on him. Which runs incredibly contrary to most of what I think my own morals are. But do you just keep trying to fend off the incoming violence forever, or at some point take a stand that might actually make a difference? (It wouldn't be until much later that I read Ender's Game, which argues this very point.) (Or who knows, his friends might have come rushing to his aid, and it would not have been a fair fight at that point.) It was dumb.

This! Martial arts, in my case Judo where the first hour was just muscling up, made all the difference: being able to flip and never hit, let aggressors accidentally hit corners of things instead... In the US I don't know how this would have worked, depending on how high escalation can go. Still learning to fight is good advice for bullied kids.

Reading this and the parent post makes me think that prisons are actually kind of like elementary school except for adults. Same kind of bullying, establishing pecking order, repercussions of snitching etc. Although a lot more dangerous/scary.