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.
Of course, but some of the remedial students might also have depressed achievement because of lack of opportunity before getting in.
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).
The criteria for entry to TJ under the old regime didn't include intelligence scores, as I understand it, but achievement.
While it's fine to set schools up to serve high-achieving children, an exclusive focus on high achievers who have been given every opportunity before entry, while excluding children who show promise but may need some remediation to rectify years of poor schooling due to their parents' low income, perpetuates injustice and inequality in the school system.
The first op-ed piece, so eager to return to the old ways, even notes that a lot of Chinese wealthy parents seek ways to move to the area so their children can get in. This isn't just innate ability of the children at work.
I'm surprised to see this; this idea underlies the philosophy that gifted kids are elitist products of pushy parents
Nah. It's just a realization that being given lots of advantages from birth can have an effect on achievement. I'm also thinking that schools like TJ are simply doing things better than inner-city Title I schools, and could probably benefit lots of the children from poorer schools who happen not to be well served. Wealthy intellectual giants surely deserve a fair shake, but so does everyone.
What you wrote is something of a myth.
Is it? Sure, plenty of money may be wasted on inefficient attempts to improve test scores due to NCLB, but that doesn't mean that there are no better methods. Maybe schools like TJ are simply superb, and even children with low achievement would benefit from it.
I'm guessing that there are some pretty terrible math teachers sucking up paychecks in Title I districts. I live in a Title I district (for math) where a person I consider to be incompetent has been hired as the district math consultant. His first move was to take a good number of weeks, IIRC about two months, at the start of every school year to have the chilren focus on math drills to memorize math facts better, taking away from the time devoted to conceptual math instruction. Do you think a highly gifted child would perform to his utmost abilities under this program?
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.
I'll take your word for it, but that doesn't mean they were doing the best job possible, or that the students in that program were just like the remedial TJ students either. I'm guessing that relaxing the entry criteria at TJ a bit has resulted in entry for some students who need extra instruction with the goal of hopefully filling gaps not afflicting the average TJ student, not that those new admittees are poor prospects for getting into college at all. And honestly, I think I could take lots of disadvantaged but motivated children and get them ready college, given three years, in the absence of severe developmental problems. I don't have a shred of proof, though I've tutored before with good results.
I see "inclusiveness" of this type as dragging the school down because almost a third of the student body doesn't belong there.
They certainly didn't belong there under the old admission criteria, but now they're there; and I think that whether they belong depends not on whether some other excluded child could have gotten benefit there, but whether they can. That's what I'm mainly curious about: how much TJ is benefitting the new admittees.
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?
Some of those children who "deserve" to go there apparently deserve it only because their wealthy parents moved to the area just for that purpose. This is economic advantage directly resulting in educational advantage, and it's unfair. Measures should be taken to increase fairness. This new admission policy is an attempt to do that, to spread the impact of a wonderful working school with proven results a little bit to other ethnic and economic groups, in the hopes that it will work. I don't see it as harmful to devote a percentage of the admissions at such a hugely successful school to this experiment, especially since those wealthy giants aren't going to be exactly disadvantaged elsewhere, and so many of them are excluded already.
