There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality of achievement. If the school system was about education more than childcare acceleration would be the norm for bright children and we’d have 14 year olds starting their Bachelor’s level studies in every school and 20 year olds who already had doctorates in every city of any size. Instead we waste their time, to their detriment and ours. Theirs, because if you’re going to be in school you should be challenged, and ours because they’d be able to start their professional lives earlier or with substantially more education, and hopefully skills.
I experienced long term psychological effects from lack of proper education pacing.
From the very beginning, I entered kindergarten as the only one in my class able to read. The teacher, doing her best, sent me off to read by myself in the corner as she taught the rest of the class. In the years where your brain is programmed to adapt itself to the environment it expects for the rest of life, I only ever had to do things which were to me trivially easy. There was this constant social distance and having to put on a sort of mask in order to interact with my "peers". At the same time everyone around me was always telling me how smart I was.
Everything was easy until it wasn't and my subconscious was simply unprepared to cope with not everything being trivial and socially making it very hard to actually be myself around people because of this very strongly built in assumption that nobody cares about what I think in conversation (amongst other things) so that I simply couldn't think of anything to say.
The struggle is real and never really has gone away.
Yes. Exactly. Precisely the same thing for me. I was reading at an absurdly young age.
School for me was a special sort of hell where I was able to read at a 12th grade level in 3rd grade, and yet a decade later was in class with people who could not yet read. I would stare at the clock and switch between sleeping and being insanely bored.
I'm 31 years old now and I feel I have enough life experience to call it what it was: Neglect. I was left in a corner to rot in child jail for a over a decade, during some of the most important years of my life, and constantly punished for the crime of being a bored young person whose time is being wasted.
I wouldn't go and say I am of just of average genetic predisposition for intelligence... but really a bigger part of it is the people raising me, parents and grandparents, they taught me to read before I went to school. I don't think a child has to be particularly exceptional to learn to be able to read at 4 or 5, somebody has to go and teach them though.
And let me add to "child jail": not only was I sent somewhere to be bored for several hours a day, I was drug out of bed far before my body wanted to be awake to be sent there.
If only not sleeping well and boredom were the only issues. Being born in a post communist country, teachers here have a really powerful position, work used to be scarce, parenting is... Different, and thus my parents placed way too big importance on school. School has ruined my childhood, robbed me of all joy for more than a decade, made it very hard to have (and trust) normal human relationships, made me seriously neglect my body, and nearly destroyed my family.
Thankfully I was still able to pull myself out and try to repair the family as an adult. And I like the person I am now, with the experience and relationships I have, so I don't need the past to change, but things could have turned for the worse just as well. I am fighting negative/destructive thoughts (as in "oh if you did this to me I would beat you SO HARD", not suicidal) to this day.
My children will never go near a school.
(Edit: I really wonder who and why downvotes this)
Oh yes, teachers in post communist countries can be separated into two groups:
* majority that's absolutely horrible at their job, whose only goal is to average all the children. Hammer down nails that stick out, and artificially inflate grades of struggling children without helping them at all.
* few great motivated teachers, who are genuinely great.
Usually the latter ones were part of protests, or some anti communist movement. at least in my experience.
Supposedly all communist countries had gifted programs, but those were stripped/forgotten in transitional era(at least over here).
Small observation: i haven't met any PE teacher that was part of the second group, nor any of my friends(and their friends) ever did.
The gifted program here was simply about doing more homework and more, harder tests. I was terrible at that. I need to learn by my ways - based on curiosity, with different explanations and methods like spaced repetition.
I am very sure that I would do something really bad to the school and teachers if I didn't meet the school's IT teacher, who pulled me out of some of the really bad lessons to work on computers with him, and was the only person who viewed me positively and treated me like a human. I am still coming back to visit him.
I had one good PE teacher, this wasn't in a post communist country though.
He just asked us at the beginning of the year what we wanted to do, we all replied that we wanted to do 5-a-side football indoors so he organized that.
Nah, we don't think we should have kids while we're holding full time jobs. We own a house and live in a cheap part of the world. As a developer for a foreign company I can support the family more than well enough on a single part time job, maybe not even that will be needed.
> I was left in a corner to rot in child jail for a over a decade, during some of the most important years of my life, and constantly punished for the crime of being a bored young person whose time is being wasted.
I read the story of Thomas Edison and think what would have happened to him in our time. He would have been medicated up the wazoo until he finally became a quiet, docile little boy who sat in class and did as he was told. I doubt he would have however turned in the massively productive revolutionary inventor (with apologies to Tesla of course) that he did.
Can you point me to this story of Edison? I’m resonating with a lot that’s being said in these comments, and now I have two toddlers who are precocious and for years I’ve wanted to homeschool them.
> One day I overheard the teacher tell the inspector that I was “addled” and it would not be worthwhile keeping me in school any longer. I was so hurt by this last straw that I burst out crying and went home and told my mother about it. Then I found out what a good thing a good mother is. She came out as my strong defender. Mother love was aroused, mother pride wounded to the quick. She brought me back to the school and angrily told the teacher that he didn’t know what he was talking about, that I had more brains than he himself, and a lot more talk like that. In fact, she was the most enthusiastic champion a boy ever had, and I determined right then that I would be worthy of her and show her that her confidence was not misplaced.
According to the snopes page, he was taught by his mother until age 16
What helped me get through the boredom of school was to learn to daydream. Any time there's something boring going on I can tune out from that and daydream. Walking around while doing it is great. The downside of it is that it's not productive and once you're out of school you don't need it to occupy your time, but you still want to.
I struggle with this. Daydreaming is my instant Dopamin release system, always available, especially when I have to deal with something boring.
But I'm getting better by improving work package size, removing barriers beforehand. That increases flow and flow is pleasant even while doing mundane tasks.
I think you have crystallized the essence of much of our educational system. A sort of daycare/prison that also selects winners and losers (usually somewhat capriciously or even maliciously), with large rewards and punishments.
Somewhat different for me, I was slow to read, at 8 school wanted to put me in remedial class until I got a teacher who realised it wasn't me it was the source material - she started feeding me books that were far beyond what we should have been reading.
In 6mths of her giving up her lunch hour to teach me I'd caught up, In a year I'd passed everyone else, once I realised I could teach myself the things I was interested in (computers and science) there was no stopping me, I lived in the local library and read 2-3 fiction books and at least one factual book a week for the next couple of decades.
School after that was easy, I'd just go get a book and teach myself because the pace at school was too slow.
It's a habit that served me well, the first thing I do when approaching anything new is track down the perceived best book and devour it.
I came from a pretty shitty background (poor and parents with mental health issues) but I ended up with a good career because of Mrs Speck and the thousands of books.
I seem to have a bit of a unique story: Early in elementary school, I was identified as a good candidate for the accelerated program. However, my parents didn't just say yes or no, they gave me the choice.
I remember actually saying something along the lines of, if they had asked me any time earlier, I'd've gone for it, but I didn't want to leave the friends I'd made that year.
This set the tone for a large chunk of my schooling: When given the choice, I always ended up choosing the middle path so I wouldn't stand out, even though every time I quickly got to the point where I'd've done fine in the more advanced path. It wasn't until the year before highschool, when a bureaucratic mixup ended up with me skipping a year of math (pre-algebra, which was a full year in my district - jumped straight into algebra), that I realized what I was missing. Then in highschool, the accelerated program only accepted freshman and lasted all four years, so I decided to go for it. Ended up just on the edge of being accepted, but didn't get in because of affirmative action.
Oh, and that group of friends I didn't want to leave way back in elementary school? I drifted away from them barely a year later. I've regretted not just going for the more advanced path ever since.
My story is similar to yours. We didn't have an accelerated program, per se, but my parents offered me a choice to skip a grade mid-elementary school. I said I wanted to stay with my friends. (Though I didn't have any close friends, so maybe I just didn't want to stand out but couldn't articulate that yet.)
Eventually, I began to do math at an accelerated pace, and it was wonderful to be with a group of older students closer to my ability level then.
I was identified in middle primary school and had to change school to attend another school that had a class for gifted children. I proceeded to take the top grades at that class. I finished primary school close to my 12th birthday, years ahead in basically every category. There was no option to continue in any program for high school so I was sent to the local high school, an impoverished school where the majority of the effort goes to controlling poor behaviour as opposed to education. The solution of the school was to just let me stay in a normal class doing not a great deal of learning for a few years.
I spent some very unhappy years between ~15 and 24. I wish I'd had the chance for a different youth.
> n impoverished school where the majority of the effort goes to controlling poor behaviour
I think this is the real issue, irrespective of 'gifted' status. I failed the 11+ in the UK but spent my entire teenage years bored out of my mind and in fear for my physical safety. At 16 I switched to a school where classes were less chaotic and thrived. I graduated with a high 2:1 from
Cambridge, so although I'm not 'gifted' in any precocious sense, and probably wouldn't have been picked up by these programmes, I was capable of some kind of academic achievement.
The focus on one end of the bell curve who visibly suffer more than others in the middle obscures the real problem: public schools are underfunded and understaffed. There's a reason why private education provides class sizes of 10-15: At that level teachers are _able_ to respond to the individual needs of all children.
Hiving off <5% into special classes for gifted might be good for those children, but it is socially regressive and ignores the problem for those who remain in sink schools.
Similar story to me. Academically fairly gifted from an early age, testing high IQ later (I know, I know) and was recommended to be placed in an advanced school.
My parents were modest and didn't pursue this, nevertheless, everything was easy until it wasn't. The part I never learned properly was effort=reward. I was also diagnosed with ADHD and was on ritalin for several years.
Later school years were bad for me because it involved a lot of rote learning. I did not have the discipline to do this and my grades slipped back to mediocre. University was better and I did very well again. I've done moderately well in my career, top few % of earners but I am unable to break higher because I'm constantly distracted and struggling to complete mundane work tasks which prevents me from getting to the top where my ego says I belong.
I take full acknowledgement of issues, I know it is my own doing. I don't know if it is too late for me to change but I'm slowly (because even here I lack the focus) trying to learn technique to change my entire approach. I've recently started looking at the power of habit forming as a means to improve discipline. I think I could benefit from a very tightly structured day where one thing naturally leads to another. Otherwise I tend to drift in and out of tasks and end of up the web, like now.
Rote learning and memorization is the kind of thing everyone loves to hate, but it can be important in many fields and people should get good at it. These days we also have spaced-repetition (SRS) software that helps a lot with memorization of many kinds, making it almost game-like.
Similar experience for me (apart from the social distancing - never an issue for me) - being told how clever I was by parents, relatives, teachers, class-mates etc from ages 5 or 6 up to early-/mid-teens. It soaks into you and you end up becoming a bit arrogant about things.
For me I had a rude-awakening during my late teens when we did our first "real" exams and I assumed that what with me being so clever, these exams that everyone had to do must be pretty simple. After all, if non-clever people had to sit the same standard exams as someone clever like me, then they must be a walk in a park, right? No need to study or revise! Everyone has been telling me I am so smart for as long as I can remember, so no need to put any effort in - my natural smarts will carry me through! Hurrah!
...the outcome was predictable - I got pretty middling grades of mostly "B"s.
For some I accept that "straight Bs" would be a great outcome, but it was more or less the first time in my life where I had to face up to the fact that I wasn't guaranteed academic success, celebration and congratulations for being so smart from everyone. Instead everyone - myself included - was slightly disappointed in my performance.
Lesson learnt.
Now I have my own kids and wondering what to do if they are smart. I heard someone say something along the lines of "never tell your kids they are smart - instead congratulate them on how well/how hard they worked on something".
Same thing regarding kids. I like to split it and attribute their success to effort and a bit of inherent awesomeness. I think it's good to build self-worth while also sending the message that you have to make the effort to get good results. Failures are simply due to not putting in enough practice right?
Hmmm I like the idea of "awesomeness" - really positive thing to say, but also whimsical and flimsy enough to not really carry any actual concrete meaning with regards to academic skills etc. Nice.
I've had quite similar experience - but with math, not reading.
Also add ,the only person in my life whom i hate, absolutely inept math teacher in primary school. She managed to strip my ability to do calculations in head, and quite literally failed me for being too good at mental calculations as i must've been cheating.. despite solving it at blackboard standing next to her.
It is sad to hear of the isolation of gifted kids. It seems to be the rule, not the exception.
I was fortunate, my elementary was a magnet that did all kinds of experimental learning. I had to bus all the way across town (small town) to go there, but for my parents it was worth it.
Some experiments were elementary went to 6th grade, we learned french, and 2nd and 3rd grade were combined for awhile montessori style. However, even at the magnet, in 5th grade three of us were far enough ahead that they gave us an algebra book (9th grade) and had us self teach. But at least there were 3 of us, and Im still friends with them 40 years later.
For high school I went to a university affiliated magnet high school which ran 5 years starting at 7th and was created to serve the children of professors at the university. I didnt want to attend but my parents essentially coerced me.
I was reasonably challenged the whole time and it was a safe place to be a nerd. The school let you start taking community college and university classes when you were ready. The classes werent designated as AP classes, but they still prepared students for the AP. My sophomore high school chemistry textbook ended up being my university chemistry textbook.
I would say the school worked. Around half the class of 40 are professors. My kids are not really gifted so I wont push them in that direction, but where I live now has a very good set of magnet middle/high schools.
I agree that the pacing is slow in public schools. Kids probably only get 2-3 hours of actual learning each day. Our kids go to a spanish immersion private school that also teaches chinese. They typically are a year ahead of public school. For example my first grader started multiplication and fractions by the end of the year. However with us all being home due to covid we have moved him even faster than the accelerated curriculum and are pretty much done with the second grade curriculum this summer. I would not even classify him as gifted so more kids can probably go faster than the typical public school curriculum.
Ultimately in bigger cities the options exist via private schools, charter schools, and magnet schools but a lot depends on the parents' motivation and knowledge. I think for all the bad rap public schools get, they do a decent job of teaching the bulk of kids.
Former prodigy who was accelerated. Agreed with the social struggles. It is its own unique hell. As a teen in University, the academic stimulation thankfully offset the pain of social distancing. I was so sheltered, I thought I must have been one of the smartest persons in the world until grad school (it is really sad when I think about it now). What a wake up call/shock that was. I think I would be very hesitant accelerating my own kids.
I wholeheartedly agree, and came out so disillusioned with the public education system that I'm struggling to decide what the right answer will be for my children.
I understand that many kids are not this way, but I was the type that read physics textbooks while in elementary school. We had a mentorship program that paired kids with someone from two grades above (e.g. 1st graders with 3rd graders). My reading level was always higher than my mentors' and it made me furious (and probably insufferable).
I feel like my entire time in school was spent getting it out of the way so I could study things that genuinely interested me. I would love for my children to not feel that same constraint, but instead feel free to go deeper at their own pace.
Do you have children yet? My son is 6 so I am right in the middle of this process. My wife does not share my point of view (different culture, different educational attainment) which makes it even more difficult. If I could clone myself I would just homeschool, but that’s not possible so it increasingly feels like I have no choice but to be an accomplice in the crime of sucking the creativity and curiosity out of my son by sending him to public schools.
home schooling comes in many forms. Some are groups of people that get together and rotate duties. Some are groups that hire specialist teachers.
There are charter schools, magnet schools, and academically focused private schools. Ultimately though if your child is too gifted you will need private tutors. You dont need the tutors all day and you can supplement with other more cost effective methods as above.
My city even has a school for girls that are preparing to compete in non academic subjects and that want to practice for half the day. Academics are only half day and then they do whatever their passion is for the rest of the day.
I had the great pleasure of visiting a school based on that model and it allowed a lot of flexibility for students. In my instance there were 4+ hours of "Free-work" blocks everyday, where we could work on whatever we wanted, we just had to make sure we finished certain (personalised) workloads by the end of the week. Pacing and what we wanted to do with our time if we finished early was up to us as a student and we could work on more advanced topics. Students were also encouraged to ask older members of the mixed age class if we got stuck, which made most students quite good at explaining topics to each other while giving older or more advanced students something to do if they didn't want to advance further in their own studies.
Sudbury schools are even better. Unfortunately there are very few such schools in the world so you just have to get lucky and live near one, or start your own.
Have you considered this is a problem that's pretty specific to you and what while your experience might suck. It also sucks for kids who can't read well, period.
I think while schooling is far from ideal, most kids aren't reading physics books in elementary school. Many kids are struggling to cope on several different fronts.
I think everyone in this discussion recognizes that and in no way has tried to suggest anything different. Here we are talking about the unusual children and their (different from most others AND each other) needs.
I've long wondered why education isn't just a bunch of different ladders that people can crawl at their own pace.
For instance my kid is starting to read about stuff they normally only introduce in high school, but there's no way he will ever be examined on it until then (he's turning 8 in a few weeks). If someone wants to learn something, luckily these says we have the likes of Khan Academy and other internet resources. When I was a kid, you wouldn't even know that physics was a thing until quite late in your education, and you'd need quite the motivator to go to a library to see what exactly it was.
Why not make it so that every kid who wanted to learn something could start crawling that ladder at their own pace? Kids who want to learn math can spend more time on that and advance, kids who want to write poetry can learn about that, and so on.
What is the rationale for keeping everyone together, other than timetabling issues? I'm sure you can develop soft skills without having to do it with people who happen to be in the same ability level. Everyone knew a kid who was extraordinary at sports, but that didn't seem to stop them being friends with everyone. Likewise any other skill.
I was quite fortunate to have a math teacher who gave me extra classes, out me on the math team, and pushed me up a year. Without that I might have gotten bored.
> I've long wondered why education isn't just a bunch of different ladders that people can crawl at their own pace.
Just a guess: as far as I understood US parents are very good at lobbying schools administration, and a lot of them would hate to see that some kids are smarter or more advanced than theirs.
Now regarding your ladder idea, in some cantons in Switzerland and some Bundesländer in Germany the school system is split in 3 lanes:
- a "gymnasium" lane that prepares you for university, mostly focused on theory and go further into technical topics
- a "general" lane that prepares you for white collar apprenticeships, more general knowledge courses
- a "labour" lane that prepares you for blue collar apprenticeships, provide more practical courses and learning support
Lane names don't really matter as they are different from place to place, but that's the general idea. Also apprenticeships opportunities are not locked based on the lane you went to, that's just the general idea. And you have multiple ways to move from one lane to another at any point during your school life if you don't fit for some reasons, with some conditions (for example you need quite good grades to move from "general" to "gymnasium").
The difference I've seen between the Swiss and German approach is how early kids are split. In my swiss canton that was after our 6th grade, so roughly at around 13 year old. In Germany that's around 10 year old.
PS: keep in mind that both Switzerland and Germany have high level of autonomy for cantons/Bundesländers, so things can be drastically different from place to place.
This is not quite what I had in mind, though. I lived in Switzerland as well, and it seems more like a traditional education system where everyone in the academic stream still needs to learn a broad range of subjects at the same pace as each other. Also having a single cutoff time at roughly age 12 seems quite harsh to me.
I'm more thinking that you could learn English at an age-average pace while being ahead in math and physics, if that's what you wanted. Or vice versa. Qualifications would simply be a number of progressions that people could advance at their own leisure, perhaps with some sort of minimum so that you don't totally neglect certain core subjects.
Yep, I understand. I'm not aware of school systems going as far as what you describe. That's an interesting concept, though I'm not sure how practical that would be.
A set of random thoughts:
- I would expect that would require more teachers which is already a scarce resource in a lot of places
- Also, you mention mostly individual learning and progression, but I would also expect part of school to be about group learning, with topics such as languages that becomes more of an issue if you have part of the students ahead in English, some ahead in French, while other at average level for everything
- I guess that would make school classes a more fluid concept, where you are with your advanced math friends for 2 hours, then with kids from the average English course for 2 hours. So you don't have a common group of kids spending their school time together. I'm wondering what social environment that would be, e.g would that result in more or less bullying? More or less social cohesion? More or less difficult to build friendships? If you come from a disadvantageous background, won't you have more difficulties to mix with the ones who can access more advanced courses thanks to their parents? Of course they are open questions.
> I guess that would make school classes a more fluid concept, where you are with your advanced math friends for 2 hours, then with kids from the average English course for 2 hours. So you don't have a common group of kids spending their school time together.
This is typical of the current American education system, at least from middle school or junior high onward, where you tend to have roughly six different classes per day with different students in each class. Although math is the only class where they will typically move advanced students ahead. You definitely lose the social cohesion that is present in elementary/primary school where you spend the whole day with the same group of kids.
When I grew up (in Malaysia) our high schools were like that: split into two general streams - arts/humanities streams and STEM streams.
The problem was there is a glamour to the STEM streams and so parents pushed kids towards that. If you got into the arts stream you were looked down upon
Yeah, we have similar issues with each lane becoming a way to judge people. And as a student you feel that you’re failing if you’re not in the one considered “the good one” by parents. I don’t know if that can be avoided.
The problem with that its in large part class based - come from a working class background or have learning disabilities you get pigeonholed into the lower tracks - with less resources.
Jumping tracks is hard and before the EU intervened almost impossible.
Yes, that's definitely an issue. I had 3-4 different version of the system I described during my school time as my swiss canton was struggling to find the correct balance, each time you could see kids finding themselves stuck because of a lack of parental resources or other reasons. Moving from one stream to another is possible, though of course that varies from place to place, but that definitely requires a strong investment from the student in both time and effort if they want to switch to a stream with more opportunities.
That's fair, but I don't think that's a critic against streams. Even without stream kids still face the same issue. Kids with available and educated parents always have an advantage compared to others.
there is a lot of social nastiness in school. Kids may be prodigies academically, but likely they are simply not equipped to handle older kids emotionally or even physically.
The truly gifted are rare enough that the system probably would be mostly like it is today. Public schools are essentially factory production lines. You can get what you are looking for but not in the mass production factory.
My daughter is going into 7th grade in private school. There are several kids who are 3 years younger than her in her class. The small class sizes and flexibility of a private school makes it possible.
My daughter was in an excellent public school in 3rd grade with a lot of asians. There were kids doing long division in kinder. The school's solution was to create 5 tracks in each grade and each track was only around 4 weeks. The kids took a test at the beginning of the track and got placed in the appropriate level for their ability in just that subject area. The good thing was that kids didnt get permanently tracked, they could move up or down depending on their level in a particular area.
There were five 3rd grade classes and when they split for the tracks each teacher took one level.
This wouldnt really help the exceptionally gifted that would need to be more than a few grade levels ahead. But I think the topics that I was aware of were probably 2 levels ahead of grade level.
> What is the rationale for keeping everyone together, other than timetabling issues?
That's exactly the issue, together with too many children per teacher. Unless you can adequately replace a teacher with digital learning solutions (still very sparse; even worse in non-english speaking countries), any increase in "own pace" would result in an increase of teacher-student time.
Or just normalize school funding at a national level and get rid of the racist classism our predecessors built into law. Good schools should stand out for their teachers not how much tax the residents pay.
The curriculum in New South Wales, Australia, is changing to be like this.
Students of a certain grade (and thus their teachers) are currently assessed on if they have a certain competency or not. This means a student coming into Year 7 (first year of high school) is expected to know all pre-requisites and is taught only the new content. Depending on which primary school they attended, and their own learning, this can be very hit-and-miss.
Now the intent is facilitate teaching students what they need to learn, but this becomes a lot harder to measure (and to measure the teachers).
A program called "Maths Pathways" is being used in some schools, that isn't tied directly to the new curriculum but is very similar in intent.
It's a computer based program which is self-paced and focuses on progression through the different ideas rather than teaching everyone the same thing this week.
Putting aside stupid cultural bullshit logistics are a non-trivial issue. If you or your parents get involved with Medicare you get to see that it is a mess of different subtley different options. The information overhead isn't free.
It seems like an area where urban areas could do better in general via supporting specialization yet in practice they often wind up infamously mixed in quality in ways totally seperate from specializations. Digitization has been attempted but hasn't had the best of luck.
While we can certainly do better solving it would be non-trivial even if we in the societal sense gave it appropriate resources in funding, oversight, and intellectual effort.
That's also why you practically never hear about anyone being left behind a grade. From the start of kindergarten to the end of high school, the everyone I knew who started in my grade finished in it. I can't remember a single exception. In what other areas do the fastest and slowest do 13 years of work at nearly the exact same pace?
The only difference allowed seems to be in AP classes, which are pretty limited in availability. If you imagine AP classes and stuff like that making maybe 2 years of difference in what you're actually taught, that's still putting everyone within 15% of each other.
It's sort of a "least bad" option. As in harms the least number of people.
Schools are already struggling to handle incoming class sizes, they don't have the bandwidth to increase any throughput by holding older students back. To do so would be to the detriment of those incoming students and the teachers. (There's a good short scene in the Wire that sums it up but I can't find it).
The problem isn't really that students don't get held back, it's that there is no capacity in the system to handle cases where someone should be held back. Almost across the board.
I went to an affluent public school in the suburbs of a major city, and their solution wasn't to hold kids back. It was to differentiate enough between accelerated and decelerated programs to where they could essentially shovel the poor performing kids into a bucket where they wouldn't bother too many teachers or other students.
I don't know the ethics of that. A lot of those kids I knew wound up dead from opiates, in jail, or still at home.
> everyone I knew who started in my grade finished in it
Couldn't be further from the truth in Germany at least.
While in my school days (primary, middle, high) this carried a huge stigma, nowadays there are some regions (think "states") that have a system where primary school "takes as long as it takes" for every child. Basically,
for i in range(3):
school_year(kid)
if kid.is_ready():
break
I went to school in Germany met exactly one person who had to repeat a year. School in Germany is different in every state, you can't really generalize, but I don't think many children have to repeat a year
I know several kids of friends of mine in Berlin and Vienna who repeat or have repeated classes. And these were not dumb kids, if anything I'd have guessed they are at or above average intelligence.
Never hearing of a single person being let back sounds more like you grew up in a school district where the parents were wealthy or powerful enough to cause a big enough fuss that their kids were never left back. The practice seems less common but even if you're isolated in a gifted track of a school you'll still come across the kids who aren't in most programs.
Counterpoint: the general level of maturity of an individual, and in particular their emotional maturity and their social maturity, do not strongly correlate with their intellectual maturity. Someone may be advanced enough to graduate at 18 with a bachelor's degree in a technically challenging field, but lack enough self-discipline, sense of responsibilities, or basic social graces and knowledge of social codes to realize their full potential. They might also feel alienated from their older peers.
By moving through the education system at the same speed as their normal peers, they have more time to construct their personalities and learn what they really want to do later in life.
People should not be deliberately handicapped. Forcing someone to waste years of their life is bad. School is so unlike every other social institution that it is (close to) useless as preparation for anything else. Outside school people actually care whether you do your work, and if your don’t do it there are real consequences, but the standards are completely different, depending on the workplace. Outside school if you’re surrounded by assholes you can just leave unless you’re in prison. Outside school the chances of physical violence being overlooked or covered up by the authorities nominally in charge of your welfare are much smaller. Outside school there are no contexts so rigidly age segregated.
People become responsible when responsibility is thrust on them. They do better, faster with real support. School doesn’t do that. It infantilises people. Nothing you do in school matters of itself. You can choose to do projects or research that people care about but that’s completely optional.
> Forcing someone to waste years of their life is bad.
Taking the time to develop one's personality alongside one's peers, to share the same experiences and to make bonds with them is totally not a waste of time.
> Outside school people actually care whether you do your work, and if your don’t do it there are real consequences
Not sure what schools you attended. I had good teachers, who cared if I did my work. And if I didn't I would get a bad grade. Bad grades are real consequences that can negatively affect your future.
> Outside school if you’re surrounded by assholes you can just leave unless you’re in prison.
So many workers work jobs that they don't like but can't afford not to. Unless you're ready to face unemployment, and possibly the loss of your home and homelessness, you can't always so easily leave your job. I know that this is HN, where everyone makes 6 figures in the tech industry and could leave their job in the morning and find a new one after lunch, but the reality isn't so rosy for the vast majority of workers.
People can develop their personality just fine outside a prison-like school environment. We need to rebuild our local communities, so that these shared experiences and bonds can occur freely among people of all ages.
When I was a teenager, I felt much less alienated from adults than I did from high school students, who lived in a weird, artificial, often hostile social bubble with rules unlike anywhere else:
It doesn't have to be done with accelerated individuals not experiencing that school environment - just expand existing dual-credit systems and make it possible to spend your four high school years doing dual credit for the entire common core curriculum in your normal high school environment. That alone would probably make a huge difference. Not sure what the equivalent for trades would look like, I don't know enough about the academic process for those. But my high school had an auto shop, so it would be doable in at least one place for at least one trade.
Academic progression does not necessarily have to be tied in lockstep with social development.
Does any of that matter if they move through the system faster if they ultimately, as the abstract suggests, don't suffer psychologically by age 50? Whether they're "socialized" seems unrelated to whether they find personal happiness.
What do you think 8-year olds constantly being surrounded by only other 8-year olds does for maturity? And that this insane pattern is held for 18 years?
One could also argue that emotionally mature(er) students have their emotional growth stunted by being forced to study and socialize with the less mature students.
Did you read the abstract? I’ll quote here: “Concerns about long-term social/emotional effects of acceleration for high-potential students appear to be unwarranted, as has been demonstrated for short-term effects.”
The general finding in the gifted research community is that grouping academically gifted students with their intellectual peers instead of their age peers is overall a better experience. Yes, there will be some issues with asynchronous development, but forcing students to spend their days with students who are not able to work on their level also leaves scars.
There’s no remedial maturity classes. If your smart but immature it might take nearly a lifetime of being hit over the head before you realize why being a jerk isn’t productive.
Many smart people don’t learn cause they can still get by in western society.
The traditional approach to that problem is to join Navy boot camp. That sort of environment will no doubt teach you "maturity" extremely quickly - and 18 is just about the right age, too.
It’s an economics and policy issue. K-12 schools are measured on bringing kids up to grade level. They aren’t measured on getting kids ahead once they’ve met minimum standards. Based on how we measure and invent them, it’s more efficient to invest in pulling kids up from the bottom. (This isn’t an unworthy social goal, just adds work to parents of gifted kids)
consider it from an alternative perspective — sending a 14 year old to grad school to get their PhD by 20 is putting them in a 60-hour-a-week high pressure job that causes mental breakdowns in many adults.
i don’t doubt that academic acceleration has many advantages for smart kids but i do not think “getting” to give up your teenage years for a few extra years of high pressure work is one of them.
I propose that a 20 year old phd will have many options open to them, including taking an easy job and spending their own time on an interesting hobby. If a person can be educated with the information and methods to succeed, they should be better able to interact with the world. Slowing down a person with the potential to finish formal education so that they can spend more time being spoonfed isn't going to improve their chances.
Also, if one chooses a grinding slog of a job, it's better to be a 20-year-old phd. Presumably, they're getting paid well, and they can start on their early retirement fund from better positions vis a vis a generic 20 year old.
> There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality
"It's harder to manage" is an argument against it. The gold standard is mastery learning (everyone learning at their own pace, separately for every subject; and true mastery is expected before you move on to something that builds on previous learning), which includes acceleration as a special case but also allows proper "deceleration" for those who need some thorough catch up.
I’ve always felt like the answer to this is many smaller schools that are more peer oriented, rather than large community schools.
Combined with large community wide after school / sports programs.
This is actually similar to the home school model now where home school students can participate in sports. Home school groups are figuring this out too.
I always assumed home schooling was just being taught by your parents but seeing how some of these groups work to form small schools of about 20 people is impressive.
You can start with supporting charter schools. They're public schools that are allowed to push out of typical restrictions and teach children in new ways. Overall, they're an excellent investment and the data shows that they work. They face many strong and sad political challenges. There's a recent book called Charter Schools and their Enemies that is a good read about the story of them.
This is just not an adequate summary of the decidedly mixed record of charter schools.
My kid, now 14, goes to a Los Angeles USD public school that offers specialized magnet programs for gifted and, separately, highly gifted, kids. The highly gifted program is quite accelerated and could accommodate some of the special needs you see evidence of in the comments here. (They are with their peers, not put into classes with older kids.)
On the other hand, the charter movement in LA, purports to solve the school choice problem, had a lot of encouragement from the political establishment (both R and D over probably 20 years). But — a lot of people in LA view the charter experiment as generally a failure and a distraction from actually improving the schools we have.
This overview (https://laist.com/2018/07/22/do_not_publish_-_ref_rodriguez_...) provides a good run-down of the sorry end of the "pro-charter" majority that prevailed in the LAUSD board.
The pro-charter board president was directing public funds to a private charter organization he was separately paid by. He had support of Reed Hastings, the Gates Foundation, and a host of well-meaning billionaires (and some not so well-meaning).
More generally, the whole concept of charters and a market in elementary education has fundamental flaws. Starting with the fact that there are no good ways for parents to really judge the effectiveness or quality of instruction.
You claimed that "the data shows they work" and I was pushing back against that because it is false. Charters failed in LAUSD, the second-largest school system in the US.
It was honestly tried here, with the backing of several successive mayors, and donations from several rich foundations and billionaires. It turned out the profit motive wasn't as helpful in this setting as abstract speculation had supposed. Speaking personally, I used to defend charters but I changed my mind after this record of failure.
During the 1980s and 1990s and into the early years of the twenty-first century — as a writer, professor, assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, and member of prestigious conservative think tanks, such as the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Koret task force at the Hoover Institution — Diane Ravitch was a leading advocate of conservative ideas for fixing America’s education system, including charter schools, standards, accountability, and high-stakes standardized testing. But about 2006-07, she began to realize that these policies were not working. She began to criticize them, and to criticize the federal “No child left behind” law, with the publication of the book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, she became one of the most outspoken critics of ideas she once championed.
I'll read yours if you read mine! I think Charter Schools and their Enemies may contain some stuff on CA schools but I haven't gotten that far yet. It starts out talking about NYC schools. It literally contains tables of data. I know that neither of us can come to a well-rounded conclusion without putting in a good faith effort to listen to arguments from both sides. It would be nice to be able to come back after doing so and continue the discussion.
Like I said, I have already studied this question to my satisfaction.
Also, in general, I have lost patience with much good-faith argument regarding neoconservative initiatives. In retrospect, I think most of the money and power behind the charter schools initiative became focused on dismantling public schools, and (like Diane Ravitch) I regret ever arguing for the benefits of charters.
That's a bummer. You mentioned California specifically and one of the things discussed in the book is how charter schools in California specifically were neutered in important ways to basically remove their advantages; to remove what allowed charter schools to perform better anyway; to make them indistinguishable and therefore pointless. So it's no surprise any review of the performance of these specific schools would not be compelling.
But deeper than that I think you've adopted an awfully defeatist and close-minded opinion. You don't have to keep yourself updated or read new things, but you must also then admit that your understanding is not sufficient, and that your opinion may be uneducated. No matter how much you read of any topic, there is always more to learn and new perspectives to be shared. Especially with such a new, live topic.
I don't mean this meanly but it's certainly your loss. I hope you come around to open-mindedness again someday!
> Overall, they're an excellent investment and the data shows that they work.
Searching, I'm finding mixed results. It seems like some studies show that they have worked in specific situations, whereas others show that they have not worked on other specific situations. I wasn't able to find a comprehensive survey that drew overall conclusions. Are you aware of one?
I'm also finding little research on the impact of a charter school on students of the public schools which they would otherwise have attended.
Yes, these are exactly the topics the book addresses. A lot of it focuses explicitly on the difference in results between charter and non-charter schools in the same building, with the same demographics and student pool. If you're thinking of a "what about x," it is probably considered.
The first one or two chapters is sort of dry due to pretty much just listing statistics, but it subsequently gets more interesting.
It really shouldn't be. This is an excellent opportunity to hear a well-reasoned argument for charter schools. If they do help, wouldn't you want to know, and wouldn't you want to be able to argue for it?
Edit: Further, the only connection I can find between these two is support before her confirmation [0][1], based on the grounds that she is for school choice. Which is no surprise he agrees with considering the learnings of the book.
Before joining the Trump administration, [DeVos]...had a strong hand in the spread of for-profit charter schools in her home state of Michigan, which saw a dramatic drop in average school performances after her pet policies were enacted. As secretary of education, she's consistently sidelined student civil rights and worked to make debt relief harder than ever.
in response to a question about whether guns belonged in schools, she referred to a school in Wyoming and said, “I would imagine that there is probably a gun in the schools to protect from potential grizzlies.”
DeVos was confirmed by the Senate — but only, for the first time in U.S. history, after a vice president had to vote to break a tie.
My initial concerns with DeVos were twofold: first, she had never spent a single day in an American public school and second, that the primary reason she was appointed was the millions of dollars she contributed to Trump’s campaign.
It seemed very unlikely that out of roughly 150 million eligible Americans, the very best choice was someone who had zero experience with the public school system.
After she began her work, the thing that I particularly disliked was her support of Indiana charter schools to both receive federal taxpayer funding while at the same time being allowed to ban a student for being gay (or their parents being gay).
She tried to defund the Special Olympics. Her brother, Erik Prince, founded Blackwater, the security contractor repeatedly accused of murder and other crimes in Iraq. She had no experience in education prior to her appointment. Her stated goal is to defund public education, and her own department, in favor of using public money to support private "faith-based" schools. She's taking advantage of the pandemic to try and steer stimulus money intended for public schools into the hands of wealthy private schools. Even by the low low standards of the Trump administration, she a notably horrible public servant, defiling the department she's supposed to be leading. There is an endless supply of well-sourced stories trashing her, but here's one more or less at random: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/betsy-devos-s...
Her actions and policies aren't well-publicized, but they're not good.
As a simple example: in 2017, DeVos and Trump proposed "cutting $1.2 billion for after-school programs that serve 1.6 million children, most of whom are poor, and $2.1 billion for teacher training and class-size reduction" [1]. These cuts also affected efforts such as mentoring, recruitment, and retention [2].
In 2018, she proposed regulations that "require full hearings, cross examination of sexual assault victims, and raise the standard of evidence to hold a student accused of sexual assault accountable" [3], which experts have said "would allow schools and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to ignore much of the sexual harassment that occurs in schools" [3].
I don't even know how to summarize this whole mess, so I'm just going to use the subtitle of the article: "The administration wants to keep schools safe by ditching rules meant to prevent racial bias in school discipline" [4].
More recently, she "illegally delayed an Obama-era rule that required states to address racial disparities in special education programs" [5].
In the US spending per student on K-12 education has tripled since 1970. Achievement has been flat[1]. There’s no shortage of money. Practically unlimited education funding has limited effects on results[2]. It’s structural change that’s needed, like acceleration for all.
It looks like the referenced figures are already inflation adjusted and per-capita, so it really is 3x as expensive to educate students today then in 1970.
But what is that money spent on? Are there more teachers per student? Because intuitively that's what you need to provide more individualized teaching. Here in Germany a lot of money is spent on using more computers in the classroom. Blackboards are replaced with computers, students get tablets. The number of students per teacher on the other hand is unchanged or growing.
A lot of that increase went towards Special Ed and administration overhead. It's hard to do a raw student/teacher ratio because today you have special Ed teachers with a handful of students. That didn't really exist 40-50 years ago.
Pensions are another huge problem. Those big promises handed out in the 70s-80s are now coming due. There's districts spending double digits percentages of their budget paying retired teachers.
So lots of money going in but bills are riding faster.
But the general point is still correct. Inner city schools generally have the highest budgets per pupil in their state. Ultimately spending is not very correlated with performance.
Of course, in a perfectly allocated system it wouldn't be correlated at all. Money would flow to where it was needed most until every school generated equal outcomes
And why do you assume that this is the sort of problem that can be solved with funding? Maybe we'd be better off with average classes of 60 plus putting students with others matching their skill levels, or some other orthogonal move.
If I'm remembering correctly, school performance by state is basically uncorrelated with spending.
I'm pretty sure outcomes are inversely correlated with class size. That's why people pay for individual tuition. Smaller class sizes necessarily cost more per student. It's not a huge leap to conclude that more money per student spent on reducing class sizes will improve outcomes across the board.
What happens, though, is that money is spent on small group or individual lessons for the special ed kids while any kid who's capable of doing so is left to fend for themselves.
