? Do you mean that eliminating honours courses, streaming for “gifted” students, etc., is the “back door effort to try and monetize education”? Or that all the “anti-woke” lamentation about such initiatives is the “back door effort to try and monetize education”?
Because if you meant the former, I don’t see how that works. Public school officials definitely don’t want high-achieving students from financially prosperous families to abandon the public school system in favor of private academies.
You’re right, public school officials DON’T want this.
But the deep pockets that fund elections, like the idea of the ‘education for profit‘ model. They think it’s a profitable market to expand into. At least, that was his theory. I haven’t done it justice, I’m certain, but that seemed the gist of it.
They’re not wrong, at least up to a point, but AFAICT those “deep pockets” are not controlling school system curriculum choices? At least in the US, I’m not sure what happens in Canadian school systems like the one referenced in the OP.
I’m waiting for school sports to be eliminated because they’re pointless and wasteful.
Agreed.
ETA: this was a reply to Smapti. *checks forum* Fuck discourse for taking off the “reply” indicator.
Fuck Jennifer Katz:
She dismissed the concerns of parents who say their gifted children struggle to fit in.
“That’s a stereotype,” she said. “I don’t buy that. That is a part of racism and systemic racism. It’s a part of ‘I don’t want my kids in class with those kids.’ And that’s nonsense.”
She said some specialized programs such as advanced placement are “almost always” made up of “middle- and upper-class kids whose parents have had them tutored for who knows how many years. And so you’re really streaming kids by socio-economic status.”
The latter is what’s a stereotype. Smart kids not fitting in has nothing to do with racism; what a bizarre excuse for dismissing bullying and ostracism.
It was just too predictable that practitioners of ‘equity’ are focused on removing or changing the advanced parts of the curriculum, and on changing specialised schools that produce excellent results. Fixing the parts that are failing is hard, while removing advanced programs can help eliminate the appearance of inequality (while likely increasing it in practice, as wealthy parents remove their kids from the system). It’s always far easier to destroy than to build.
If that meant us athletically ungifted students could concentrate on ‘sports for fun and fitness’ rather than struggling to learn skills and compete in something we’ll never be any good at, it sounds like a great idea.
Won’t someone think of the poor NCAA, the universities and the sports industry? If you go and make school PE all fun and stuff, it is just going to be that much harder for these groups to know who to exploit!
Our school had a gym class for kids who weren’t so great at fitness and sports. And yes, I was in that class. We used to joke about being in “retard gym”. (Yes, I know)
When I was in elementary school, at certain intervals you were tested on basic skills like cartwheels and I do not remember what else, and graded+grouped “A”, “B”, or “C”. Notable is that this was already happening before formal training in proper gymnastics, basketball, etc.
LOL. I definitely would have been in r*tard gym. At my school, in years 10 and 11 you could choose to do GCSE PE and get a qualification, or else do something called ‘Leisure PE’, which basically was sports for fun and fitness. It was a big improvement on regular PE. As well as more traditional fitness, we got to do fun stuff like bowling and roller skating, instead of standing around being useless while the competent kids played hockey/basketball/whatever. The kids who choose to do GCSE PE were probably glad to get rid of the deadweight, too.
Am I missing something here, or is this kind of a “Harrison Bergeron”-esque application of the concept of equity?
I mean, I always understood the point of equity was to bring people UP to a point where you could actually have equality, not to hold or pull others back, which is what this whole Vancouver thing seems to be about.
With limited resources, as all education departments have, how are you going to achieve that if you are diverting part of your resources to elites?
Nobody’s getting “held back” never mind “pulled back”, they’re just not getting extra privileges. And despite those who argue that kids are going to end up on Skid Row if they don’t get their honours classes, nobody actually offers any evidence for that. Whereas mixed ability classrooms have been shown to benefit everyone in other places.
Ya know the “*” doesn’t hide the word you’re using.
I mean, use the word or don’t, but that “*” shit is lame.
Bringing people up is hard and requires more resources. Holding kids back can actually save you money! Instead of providing honours classes, you can use the smarter kids as unpaid teachers for the rest. It’s win-win. 
Well, the OP has posted similar stories from places all across the country. Many districts are already trying similar things.
The main thing typically being left out is that the entire point is to keep the “smart” kids in the same physical class with the “dumb” kids. They may be learning different things (hopefully), and possibly in different ways (technology helps) but you would no longer have the “good” math class and the “bad” math class, at least in grades up through 10th.
Now if a student is significantly ahead, then they just move up to the next grade level. And at the very late grades you typically would still have AP courses for college prep for those students on the college path, particularly for STEM degrees.
The issue trying to be addressed is the fact that in many places the streaming is indeed just a proxy for SES (and the linked factor of racial background). And once you get streamed in 7th or 8th grade it can be a self-fullfying prophecy that you won’t ever be good at math. It’s a “separate but equal” situation for the kids in the “dumb” track - they are missing the part of the educational process where you are challenged by your peers.
Whether this will succeed or not will depend largely on parent buy-in (obviously it will fail if every good math student gets moved to a private school, although even that has some monetary benefit to the public school) and the ability of teachers to learn how to differentiate the education experience across a wide range of ability levels.
@DemonTree 's comment about using “smart” kids to teach the rest is a great example of how not to do it, but sadly does happen far too often.
I think this can actually work, but needs to be tied to a more aggressive system of moving kids up grade levels where warranted.
This is a reasonable suggestion on the face of it, but there are several problems with it. Firstly not all kids are advanced in all subjects, or by the same amount, so someone who would benefit from advanced maths classes may not be ready for advanced English, or vice-versa. And there is the question of emotional maturity, which by no means always matches intellectual skills, and can cause problems when kids are advanced to higher grades.
I would say the same is even more true for smart kids in mixed ability classrooms. They are challenged neither by the work they are doing nor by their peers, and as a consequence often don’t learn to work hard. I was so bored in high school I pretty much gave up on maths, and it had been my favourite subject at primary school, and was again in sixth form where it finally became challenging. But it’s much harder to learn good working habits at that late age if you’ve never needed them before.
I’d say a big issue is finding a balance between keeping options open, and not wasting kids’ time on something they will never use. Everyone needs to know a certain amount of maths, but for most it might be better to concentrate on things with practical application to their future lives, rather than learning calculus. But we want to avoid making the determination too early, before kids have gained experience and discovered what they want to do.
You only move up in grade level for the classes that you’re good at. So, if you’re good at math, you may take trig a year early.
Plus, there still seem to be AP classes, so I don’t understand what the problem is at all. Is it that instead of three levels (regular, accelerated, and AP) now there are only two?
I don’t consider “being given appropriate instruction for your aptitude level” to be an “extra privilege” in terms of what the public education system should be providing, but rather its fundamental purpose and in fact a legally codified right of the student in many places.
Then again, I’m not a shitty teacher who has devoted his life to destroying excellence out of jealousy like you are. (Guess if every thread that questions leftist educational dogma is gonna be moved to the Pit I might as well make the most of it).
Agreed. My son is actually skipping first grade this year, and social-emotional maturity was a large part of it. It helps that he is older for his cohort. The research we did leading up to that decision quoted studies that concluded that roughly 10% of elementary-level students would likely benefit from whole-grade acceleration. Instead less than 1% actually do it. Largely for the reasons you list, but also because schools are very hesitant to support it except for the most obvious cases - it’s an obvious case where making a change is riskier, and schools are like any bureaucracy - highly risk-averse.
As @RitterSport mentioned, many schools (ours included) also do subject acceleration at the primary level. So you can be pulled out for math or ELA and moved up a grade just for that subject. But you are still placed with a heterogeneous mix of kids at the higher level, not just the “gifted” ones.
I think I would argue that is a failing of the teacher and school, not necessarily the classroom environment. There is no reason, particularly with the technology available, that a math teacher can’t challenge a gifted math student in the same subject they are teaching to the class as a whole. Change the numbers, add steps, move on to more theoretical areas (proving concepts, for example), giving independent projects.
This is absolutely right, and I think one of the main drivers of these changes. I have told the story before of how my age group was basically locked in at 7th grade and nobody really moved up or down after that. I was placed in a “non-honors” English class, which would have basically precluded me from taking AP English 5 years later unless my parent threw a fit to get me moved. It’s not hard to imagine which SES cohorts are more likely to have parents that throw that fit to advocate for their child.