What really ought to be done is to replicate whatever instructional models are being used at that school and other successful schools, and promote excellence in teaching instead of tenure. Then these sorts of issues would never arise.
Well...it's possible that the difference is that the kids who got in under the old model might have been smarter. I agree with you about the tenure point, but replicating a model won't change the fact that only a small number of people have highish or better IQs. IMO, we'd do better to ensure that free school breakfasts and lunches have high nutritional content (substitute fresh fish, fruits and raw or steamed vegetables for pink slime hamburgers and french fries, for example, and get rid of soda in school).
In the short term, I'm not so worried about the plight of intellectual giants from wealthy families as I am about promoting more educational opportunity across the board....
I'm surprised to see this; this idea underlies the philosophy that gifted kids are elitist products of pushy parents, and that the school system doesn't need to focus any resources on them as a result. Gently poking here: perhaps your son's school feels the same way?
Do disadvantaged students also have the right to a full spectrum of educational opportunities, or do only the intellectual elite with proven academic achievements have the right to seek entry to the better-run schools? ...I'd be interested to learn the extent to which the TJ environment winds up improving the outlook for the kids taking the remedial classes.
What you wrote is something of a myth.
Most people know that our school system spends billions and billions of dollars on disadvantaged students and next to nothing on high achievers. This is the first part of the myth: speaking from the perspective of educational resources and budgeting, the kids at the biggest disadvantage are the gifted ones.
It's less well-known that very little changes in spite of all that money being spent. I've seen this through seeing the results of education grants that get funded and in my own experience.
For example, I ran a program that devoted a lot of its funding to a project to get disadvantaged students ready for college. The people in charge of that project were talented and enthusiastic and worked hard. But in three years, exactly ONE out of a hundred or more made the jump to freshman-level college-level courses. This was a huge deal and this guy was touted as proof that "the program worked." IMO, it was great for him, but there must be a better way overall. We probably spent $300,000 or more getting one kid ready for freshman-level courses. This project really opened my eyes to the low effectiveness of this approach and the fact that it allows us to feel good while cheating our brightest students. Now I see this kind of (failed) romantic idealism all over the place.
The tension for me is that I have these thoughts, while at the same time disliking over-inclusive GATE programs which may dumb down the content to the point that the programs may not serve the actually gifted children well....I find this situation different [because] it's an entire school, and I don't see how including some children who need remedial classes drags down the quality of the non-remedial classes or the school as a whole.
I see "inclusiveness" of this type as dragging the school down because almost a third of the student body doesn't belong there. I predict that people will start to complain that those AP courses that intimidate the gifted students aren't "accessible" to the remedial students. Standards will have to go down to accommodate them. After all, it's not fair to give so much to privileged kids, is it?
This was precisely the argument used at a high school in Berkeley two or three years ago when they cancelled early morning science labs for AP students. Apparently they weren't fair to some of the disadvantaged students.
As you point out, there are kids who deserved to go to that school and can't because their slots were taken by remedial-level students in the name of
diversity. Why do our schools take the position that it's okay to definitely harm gifted kids on the off chance that we might help some other students? And why do we let them do it?
