There is a major downside to selectivity as it's done right now, which is that you end up with a competitive pressure cooker in that program since the student body will mostly consist of kids with highly driven parents who demand top-of-class academic results, every assignment perfect. It makes kids anxious-to-suicidal depending on how much pressure they experience, but it doesn't make them uniformly better at the material; depending on the subject and the student, either they're way ahead or they are really struggling, and if they are already doing some work to think about the material, "study harder, do more homework" doesn't really increase that rate, it just makes them more performative and "grade-grubbing". And this doesn't change when you look at secondary education either; there are many "tough" and "competitive" colleges, but they don't turn out graduates that are of equivalently greater skill.
But that does not mean that dumbing down is a good idea! Selectivity within each school, and making greater use of online learning to offer advanced, fine-grained tracking, gets to the good part of selectivity, which is that learning becomes more focused on individual student needs. "Staying with the class" is in many ways the worst part of school and absolutely shouldn't be the thing to emphasize, whether we're talking about high-flying academics or troubled delinquents and special ed students.
Vast swaths of the country get by without having any choices in high schools. The idea that need a selection of different schools with different levels of prestige and focuses is such an urban entitlement.
If I need heart surgery, I’d rather be in NYC (Mount Sinai specifically) then BFE fly over country, and if I have the means I’m on the next flight. Same with education. Hard to find fault imho with those who want more than the lowest common denominator for their children.
I also think there's a value to be had in having the over-acheivers and under-acheivers together in the same social setting of school, if not in the same classes.
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not akin to burning libraries.
> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not the same as dumbing it down (whatever that is supposed to mean). In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans.
> Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
The admission criteria of a highschool do not necessarily reward merit. They are more likely to reward having been tutored on how to write highschool admission essays.
In some countries, the differentiation starts even much earlier than that, with 8 year long "gymnasiums".
First of all you don’t have to attend the school your teachers advised, you can still attend a Gymnasium if your teachers said you should go to a Hamptschule. So it’s significantly different from the selection criteria of that American high school.
Then this selection process is known to be biased against children of foreigners. Somebody said that without strict competition in high school admissions we wouldn’t have playstations and covid vaccines, so it’s useful to know that the founder and CEO of BioNTech (who is a Turk-German) was advised to go to a Hamptschule by his primary school teachers. So he wouldn’t have been able to attend university.
Said that, having a brother that works as a teacher in a Gymnasium, I insist that these kids are not learning anything esoteric or peculiarly complicated. If the average kid in an upper middle class neighbourhood returns an assignment with less than one typo per row, he would be remembered for years.
I had to do an admissions test, plus average grade from primary school (50-50 scoring ratio, if I remember correctly).
They score everyone, and put them on a list. The top gets in. The rest, good luck, try somewhere else.
So it's not random.
So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? The parents have three options: send your kid to school where they learn nothing (maybe get a tutor and self-learn?), send them to a private high school which costs north of $50k/year in SF (some are more like $65k... and that is IF you can get in!), or you move somewhere else. But there has been a country-wide effort to dumb down public schools combined with softer discipline (thanks to lawsuit fears), so you might simply end up at a private school anyway.
Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.