As children get older, their absolute mental ages and academic preparation diverge (as my children in middle school have noticed). Maybe the standard deviation of mental age is about 1 year at age 6 and 2 years by age 12. A consequence of this is that by middle school, children have diverged greatly in what they know and what they can do, and the dominant middle school philosophy of having "balanced teams" means that there is a wide range of abilities within classes. It would be be better to have leveling of most academic classes, as used to be done when we had "junior high schools", but having selective admissions to middle school is better than nothing.

Brooklyn Parents Have Mixed Feelings on School Admissions Proposal
Integration advocates want to scrap middle schools’ use of academic criteria to select students
By Leslie Brody
Wall Street Journal
July 11, 2018 8:19 p.m. ET

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As New York City parents debate how to give all students fair access to good public schools, integration advocates in Brooklyn want to scrap middle schools’ use of academic criteria to select students.

Some supporters of the proposal for District 15 from its Diversity Plan Working Group are optimistic they will prevail, partly because New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza has questioned the rationale for accepting students by ability. Other parents are wary, saying they want their hard-working children to have the chance to earn their way into desirable schools.

District 15, which includes low-income immigrant neighborhoods such as Sunset Park and more-affluent areas like Park Slope, is one of the first in the city trying to change its admission system to better integrate all of its middle schools. Its Diversity Group, which includes parents and city Department of Education officials, has tried to drum up support by hosting workshops and seeking community input.

The group’s new draft recommendations to the department—which will be finalized in coming weeks—call for the elimination of screening for admission to the district’s 11 middle schools, which serve about 6,000 students. Applicants for sixth-grade would rank their favorites. The department would try to give them their top picks, and offer seats by lottery to oversubscribed choices, after each school gives priority for 52% of its slots to students who are poor, homeless or English-language learners.

Michele Greenberg, a District 15 parent, calls this process more fair than the current selective system, which she said discriminates against students with few resources. “Children shouldn’t be rejected because they don’t somehow fit,” she said.

Department officials said they will decide on the recommendations this summer. If approved, the plan would mark a huge change from today’s method. Now, students rank the schools they want to attend, and schools rank students they want to enroll, based on varying criteria such as course grades, test scores, behavior, attendance, punctuality and auditions. The department makes matches.

Many parents complain this complex process brings massive anxiety, and often leaves disappointed children in tears.

Even so, a survey released by the working group found that 58% of 879 respondents considered it appropriate for middle schools to screen for admission this way. That included 62% of 321 respondents from Park Slope, where Mayor Bill de Blasio lives, and 42% of 162 respondents from Sunset Park.

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