But won't it make it better for everyone else? Not even sure that bottom 5% should be in school. Just train them for a role that they can be competent in or decide that they will be a future ward of the state.

The bottom 5% is hopeless. Yeah it would be better if we did that, but people think about education as a means to provide the individual the chance for success in life rather than thinking about the broader impact of individuals on society and the disproportionate effect that the top has.

As far as most people are concerned, a kid that is acing everything is going to be fine in life and they don't worry about anything that could be going wrong there.

My parents were both [retired] teachers, and sadly this is the truth. Some bottom N%, I don’t know if it’s 1 or 5 or 10 or whatever, but they are absolutely beyond anyone’s ability to rehab, let alone educate. Often no fault of their own. Broken families, parents don’t care, gangs, lots of reasons. Any effort spent on them is wasted. They are inevitably fucked, and will end up in some kind of institution (prison, mental health) or unemployable, by age 25. It’s a sad reality and not something politicians like to talk about. We pretend that if we just whip the teachers so they teach harder, these people will miraculously grow up to be functional adults. It’s not going to happen.

I remember a guy in my high school whose claim to fame was he dragged some other poor kid into the wood shop and filed his teeth down to nothing with a band saw. Spending 50% of the school budget on these blockheads is not going to rehab them.

> I remember a guy in my high school whose claim to fame was he dragged some other poor kid into the wood shop and filed his teeth down to nothing with a band saw. Spending 50% of the school budget on these blockheads is not going to rehab them.

What year and what school district did this happen in?

I mean I'm curious because that's violent assault, of the sort that generally makes the local papers.

I'm struggling to visualise how this would be physically possible.

ryandrake says:

"I remember a guy in my high school whose claim to fame was he dragged some other poor kid into the wood shop and filed his teeth down to nothing with a band saw."

Citation needed!8-))

Sounds like an urban myth (albeit a good one)!

Also, it is unclear that the story demonstrates any relevant point in this discussion: one might say that using a shop band saw on another's teeth is a very clever, although, on the surface extremely unsocial, act."

Well, I was in Junior High at the time. It could have been exaggerated, but we all saw the ambulance. Both students were never seen around school again. The 80s were wild!

You make what you measure. We aren’t measuring whether gifted kids are challenged. That’ll never show up in data. But a kid who’s falling behind in reading who later catches up? That will.

That’s the reasoning anyway. It’s not like teachers are maniacally cackling over this situation - there’s significant turn-over. You remove the testing and suddenly all these problematic incentives go away.

> You remove the testing and suddenly all these problematic incentives go away.

IME the teacher unions are also opposed to advanced learning. It requires teachers to do more work if classes are heterogeneous, since they would need to make up more lesson plans and assignments. And the teacher unions are opposed to tracking because then teachers don’t all have the same mix of students, which leads to member complaints. At least this is what we’ve been told.

It's actually a lot more complicated than that, but that's some of it.

First, creating lesson plans/assignments (and grading them) is extremely time consuming. So it's completely reasonable for teachers protest having their workload increased.

Second, things like gifted classes and magnet schools create a "creaming" effect, where the best students are pulled from regular classes and either sent to a separate school or in separate classes with high performers. If you're a math or English teacher that's getting professionally evaluated based on your students' performance on standardized tests, you are strongly incentivized to keep any high performing student in your class - the existence of gifted classes and magnets hurts you.

In the tech world, we sort of had a version of this during the Ballmer era of Microsoft, where engineering managers were sometimes reluctant to grade top performers too highly in fear their best developers will get reallocated. Some managers would give elite team members bad rankings just to keep them captive.

I agree that it's reasonable for teachers to not want to do more work. And I understand that creating tracks will separate students — but that doesn't require creating the perverse incentives you describe.

Teachers can simply be evaluated based on how their students do, relative to the students' prior performance. This wasn't a problem before 2014, when CA made GATE optional. Everyone understood that different teachers had different cohorts with different average abilities.

The teachers with lower-performing students weren't dinged because their students scored lower than the students in advanced classes. Instead, teachers could specialize in remedial, typical, or advanced learning.

It's partially babysitting. But also waiting for them to mature. They might make a great mechanic, truck driver or factory worker, all valid good and required jobs, but at 13-14 it is unsafe or they're not mature enough to drive or operate heavy machinery.

Slow walking someone through learning a vocation over 2-4 years while sprinkling in some academic outcomes is a good option.