This is a separate education policy debate. One that I think is fairly lopsided. But the current professed policy of Virginia Dept of Education is not this. It is probably not worth having this debate if you are the only one that is willing to explicitly take this stand, although I suspect many harbor similar sentiments.
Oh OK, so just your opinion. You linked a cite and made a statement so I thought maybe I was missing something.
If they would have gained significantly more with a more advanced curriculum then it’s a lose for the more advanced kids even if its a win for the less advanced kids. So it’s really sacrificing the development of the more advanced kids for the benefit of the less advanced kids. This is not a good tradeoff for society.
Commerce? WTF are you talking about? The benefit the slower kids are getting is no better than what they would get if there were more teachers in the classroom.
I suspect we do in fact have very different ideas about what schooling is supposed to achieve. but in this case, this school is supposed to achieve a very specific goal which aligns with my view of what it is supposed to achieve. What you are proposing is somewhat anti-intellectual.
It’s as natural a right to have some choice in the manner and pace of one’s education as it is to have access to education in the first place.
It seems to me very slightly strange to imagine that individuals freely choosing the pace of their education, outside the coercion of their Betters to abrogate their right to a quicker pace if they so desire, somehow forms a “hierarchy”. Certainly some will end up much more knowledgable than others. But that will always be true.
And it is EXTREMELY strange to complain about such a “internal hierarchy” of individuals freely choosing their own pace of education, simultaneously while you advocate the coercive control of a set of decision-makers – quite literally hierarchs – to strip away the power of individuals to choose how they are “allowed” to be educated, since in your estimation these individuals don’t actually have any “natural right” to resist the power of the hierarchs to make decisions for them, against their own will, about their own education.
There has been an anti-intellectual push along these lines for decades, this sentiment existed in the 1080’s when i was in high school. There are various rationales for this. Some of it is the racial disparity in who gets tracked to different levels. Some of it comes down to sparing the feelings of the kids that don’t get into the highest track. Very little of it is really based on what is best for the advanced students’ academic development.
Some people have a mindset that those who are more capable will do just fine. It’s a one sided view of helping everyone.
This “crusade” precedes CRT. CRT had not really infected the education establishment in the 1980s but this sentiment existed. It is partly anti-intellectual and partly anti-elitist populism.
To some extent, this is populism masquerading as social justice and socialism.
Sure, but that is kind of missing the forest for the acorn. My point is no different without that word than with it. If inserting that word reveals some obsession I have with commerce then I guess I don’t see it, it seems to be bringing in an anti-capitalist side argument where no capitalist argument was presented to begin with.
Remember that there are several fundamentally different worldviews as to what the purpose of an educational system is. I’ll sum up some of the more popular ideologies:
Traditionalist/conservative - purpose of education is to transmit desired social-religious values, to train for obedience to hierarchy, to prepare for the job market, and to form idealized young adults through sports and dating; heavy emphasis on basic skills and discipline; reliance on proven methods that “work well enough” (phonics, times tables, memorization) and wariness of any kind of experimentation that may either jeopardize existing achievements or promises better results; often guided by people who romanticize their achievements in primary school but do not understand the needs of top achievers in scientific and artistic fields; very little accommodation for students who are outside of the normal range (e.g. thinking that special education is pointless and any disorder that wasn’t on the books in 1950 is fake, and that most gifted education is extravagant and tends to produce pointy-headed intellectuals who become the wrong kind of voters).
Enlightenment liberal- Education to enhance broad intellectualism of all people; centered on student as a secular humanist person; end goal of education is to be educated (i.e. knowledge and wisdom are goods in themselves and do not require further justification); embraces differences in capabilities and learning pace but not necessarily in bigger picture; heavy valuation of “well-roundedness” e.g. a top physics student should still be exposed to music and history; may sometimes lose sight of practical needs in favor of too much idealism about the value of humanistic topics (e.g. shuffling people who are not going to college and could derive great economic benefit for training in a skilled trade into literature classes in 12th grade).
Educational industry/teachers union apparatus- Purpose of education system is to provide employment for teachers and administrators; student interests secondary at best; any kind of measurement or accountability is bad; everyone should start pre-K at age 4, graduate high school, go to community college for two years, transfer to get a BA, then go to grad school, ideally generating government-subsidized revenue into the educational apparatus for at least 26 years per every person born in the U.S. Schools are centers where people who have received educational credentials are rewarded with jobs and may choose to address whatever social problems they wish while they are there. Whether people who have been in school for 14 years know how to read or do basic math is not a primary concern as long as the people who stamp the diplomas get paid and can’t be fired.
Progressive/leftist/CRT- Schools should serve the function of removing “inequality” however defined; denial of differences in intellectual capacity across individuals; schools as centers for social experimentation and pioneering larger ideological projects such as race balancing; any hint of “competition” or excellence is a threat to equality and must be stamped out; both practical and intellectual skills generally replaced with training in grievance studies and struggle sessions where teachers yell at 8-year-olds for being racist. Whether people who have been in school for 14 years know how to read or do basic math is not a primary concern as long as everyone is ignorant equally.
If you are working from the liberal position and trying to communicate with someone in the leftist position, you need to remember that you share almost no premises about what a school is for.
The conservative, union, and progressive positions sometimes find an unholy alliance on these things. There are always people who don’t like acknowledging that others may be smarter than them, but adding “and no one is allowed to disagree or you’re a racist!” and a whole apparatus designed to justify that gives it a lot more power.
In terms of math education, the TJ students and the people who are struggling with algebra in the 11th grade are not, in any sense, “peers.” They never will be, and encouraging people who could be leading scientists to waste their time teaching remedial math is a criminal social policy. Denying that these sorts of differences exist requires a 24/7 fistfight with reality.
One of the states the USA is in is the state of having literally hundreds of high schools and colleges that are better than the best school in Finland. We are still the world’s destination for producing and developing the top 1% of the 1% in every academic discipline. I think this is a good thing and I also think that destroying it will do nothing to solve the issue of where the bottom 20% stand.
“Promoting community” by crippling the best and brightest and making them use their time in school to tutor the slow-witted instead of learning to their own capacity is an evil, anti-human ideology. To use everyone’s favorite analogy, it’s like solving the issue of “equality v. equity” in regards to shoes by cutting off everyone’s feet. You’re standing on a field of bloody stumps proclaiming yourself a hero for solving the shoe problem, and anyone not blinded by ideology can see it.
Not everyone lives in an anti-intellectual culture where the pursuit of knowledge is something to be mocked and discouraged. But some people do, and their preponderance at ordinary schools is a great reason why TJ-like magnet programs are necessary.
??? Is Janten laki not one of the FIRST aspects of Finnish culture that anyone notices? I don’t think you even comprehend what is missing here.
Joao Hamalainen, 17, studies in one of Helsinki’s elite upper secondary school, the Helsinki Normal Lyceum (Most students enter with a Grade Point Average of 9.0 upon 10).
“Most” students are a 9 on a 10-point scale? Great, that means they’re roughly comparable to the average student at the sort of generally excellent schools in Northern Virginia that people who fail the TJ admissions test go to. Is that really the closest thing to “elite” in Finland?
Try “all students are at least a 99 out of 100” and you’ll get a better idea of the sort of need that these programs are designed to serve, and the sort of leading mind that “equity” focused systems like Finland’s are incapable of doing anything but destroying.
You can make an argument for and against tracking. But this is not why Finland does so well. We know this because lots of countries don’t track and they don’t have this sort of result. What makes Finland stand out is how selective they are about choosing their teachers (teaching schools there are among the most selective), how they pay their teachers (there is a much smaller pay gap between teachers and other professions like doctors and lawyers than there is in most countries) and the qualifications they require of their teachers (you need a master’s degree not just a 2 year teaching qualification).
If you want to compare finland (population 5 million) with virginia (population 8 million).
Virginia compares favorably to finland (states like mississippi pull down the average in usa noticably). There are about a dozen countries that are comparable to virginia and the majority of them use tracking of some sort.
Global warming needs the smartest scientists we can produce.
We cannot friendship our way out of global warming. Conservation is just a delay tactic until we can science our way out of it (carbon capture, clean energy, etc.).
Global hunger and poverty needs the smartest scientists we can produce.
We cannot friendship our way out of global hunger and poverty. International food aid is just a delay tactic until we can science our way out of it (improve infant mortality rates and reduce abject poverty globally).
Coronavirus vaccine needed the smartest scientists to produce.
We cannot friendship our way out of this pandemic. Social distancing and pandemic protocols are just a delay tactic until we science our way out of it (develop and distribute a vaccine).
I can go on and on and on about the benefits of science.
That seems a little silly.
It wasn’t.
As did I. What else should I have done? Take trigonometry again?
So I could take calculus and learn something new or help someone else understand geometry?
The education system I was in did not have even those things. For anyone who cares about personal experience, note that @damuriajashi went to a selective school and wants other kids to have the same opportunity, whereas I had an education close to what @MrDibble prefers, and I do not wish it on anyone else.
I didn’t have any option. The way it works in reality is you cover the material at 1/3 speed and just waste the rest of your time. Maths had been my favourite subject, and I didn’t start to like it again until sixth form. If I could have joined a more advanced class I’d have done it in a heartbeat.
The only thing I would say about this is that not everyone who enters the sciences stays in them for a number of reasons. And if an adult decides they’re done with industry or the rat race that is trying to make a living in academia and decides to teach at a high school or lower level, great. Hell, they can probably make beer money in college tutoring other college students too. Some might even see such tutoring outside of school hours while still in high school as a form of charitable service and a college application builder. But that’s different from forcing high school students to teach other high school students at the cost of advancement in their own studies.
My friends and I taught ourselves calculus in the high school library at a faster pace than the regular class, until the Powers That Be put an end to that and dumped us back with the others. That’s when I got frustrated and mentally checked out.
This is part of the problem
When you measure which kids test in the top quartile or quintile. The results are not so racially lopsided. It isn’t until you start looking at the top 1% that you see the large disparities.
Right, of course people should be able to go into teaching if they want to. But it’s not suitable for everybody and the uncomfortable fact is that there are many more people capable of teaching basic math than there are people capable of doing cutting-edge math research, so the social good is served by steering the latter group to where it is needed.
On a similar note- Personally, I was someone who was able to ace calculus in high school but learned, as part of the experience, that pursuing math further than that would not be a good match for my capabilities. Being exposed to some of the other people in the calculus class who went on to do serious STEM work at top universities and seeing that I wasn’t on their level and never would be - and, likewise, seeing how far past these geniuses in their own field I was at the humanities - was very important in helping me decide on my educational and career path. I also know that I am not a good teacher and even though I can still do everything in the Algebra II textbook today after decades outside of formal STEM education, putting me with a class of remedial eleventh-graders would be a miserable and unproductive experience for both me and them. Forcing me to “teach” with all those barriers plus the emotional immaturity of a 16 year old, as a substitute for the calculus class, would have been a trainwreck and I can’t imagine any better outcomes with the average high school calculus student today. It’s an awful idea even aside from the highly absurd notion that competence at math is the opposite of “friendship.”