Great post. Thanks for taking the time to describe and define this. This concept of a gifted magnet is similar to my understanding as well, although a magnet might also attract students from outside a district.
Taking time to define words and their usage, developing a common vocabulary for purposes of a discussion at hand builds a solid foundation for mutual understanding.
I also described GT magnets and how ours works earlier in the thread.
I wasn't aware of this, but research on the flaws of tracking has led to the "algebra for all in 8th grade" push. There seems to be a great desire for citations in this thread. Very well:
Some findings are of note regarding minority and low-SES students. For
example, after universal acceleration in heterogeneously grouped classes,
the percentage of minority students who met the mathematics commencement
requirement (passing the Sequential Mathematics I regents examination)
before they entered high school tripled, from 23% to 75%. Also, higher
percentages of African American, Latino, and low-SES students passed the
exam in eighth-grade detracked classes than in tracked eighth- and ninth-grade
classes before universal acceleration. Moreover, two thirds of African American,
Latino, and low-SES students in the post-universal-acceleration cohorts
successfully completed Sequential Mathematics III, the first advanced mathematics
course identified in the literature as being associated with success in
college (Adelman, 1999).
and, regarding high acheievers:
Because we used stanine scores to identify high achievers, we
were not able to control for fine within-group differences. Therefore, we were
not able to determine whether heterogeneous grouping affected the scores of
particular subgroups (e.g., the top 2%). However, we can conclude that the
scores of students in the district at the stanine level of 8 or 9 were not affected
by heterogeneous grouping...The second measure of posttreatment achievement consisted of scores on
advanced placement exams in calculus (AB and BC). In this case, we found
that universal acceleration was associated with increased achievement among
(a) all students who took the exam and (b) high achievers who took the
exam. As can be seen in Table 6, the scores of members of the post-universal acceleration
cohorts were significantly higher (p < .01) than those of members
of the pre-universal-acceleration cohorts. Because the regression coefficient
was .32 and the standard deviation was .99, the effect size associated with universal
acceleration was an increase of one third of a point on a 5-point scale.
I'm no mathematician myself, but in my brief scan I don't find this research to be some sort of agenda-driven hocus pocus. It's of interest, and worth considering, IMO.
This is the paper, but full text is likely not available to those without academic journal access:
http://aer.sagepub.com/content/43/1/137.1BTW--does antitracking research conform with my personal confirmation bias? NOt really. But as an open-minded person I feel it's necessary to look at what the research shows.
