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Joined: Dec 1969
Posts: 272
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The subject of race may be sensitive to some of the members of this forum. Please be respectful. I have deleted any of the posts or quotes that reference race in this thread. I am sorry to have to do that. Please keep things clean and friendly. Thank you.
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Joined: Aug 2010
Posts: 3,428
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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.
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Joined: Jun 2012
Posts: 144
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Its a bit of a digression but as I remember "Algebra for All" at least in California was deemed a failure and mostly abandoned.
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Joined: Feb 2013
Posts: 1,228
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Magnet schools have been set up as part of school desegregation agreements (as in St. Louis) more broadly I understand them to be any public school with a specialized curriculum that attracts students from an entire school district. So "gifted magnet" makes perfect sense to me. Like many words, the usage in some circles of the word "magnet" may have changed from its historical meaning, which is a school that meets certain quotas, and brings certain students into the public school system who would otherwise not participate. But it's really not an issue of what the word "magnet" means and who gets to define it. The real point is that I was using words the way I needed to to describe my local conditions and personal experiences, where in fact "magnet" definitely has its historical meaning as a primarily quota-driven entity whereas "gifted" means top (approx) 3% according to standard tests like WISC and WJ. The problem is that ultramarina made an absolutely false claim that I had made some expression of "opposition" to "gifted magnets".
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Joined: Feb 2013
Posts: 1,228
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Its a bit of a digression but as I remember "Algebra for All" at least in California was deemed a failure and mostly abandoned. That's hardly surprising. Classes that are too hard are just as inneffective as classes that are too easy. So if "Algebra for All" is no good should we have "Algebra for Some" or "Algebra for None"? ETA: In case anyone isn't following the logic, "Algebra for All" and "Algebra for None" are both anti-tracking positions, while "Algebra for Some" is pro-tracking.
Last edited by 22B; 11/06/14 12:09 PM.
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Joined: Feb 2013
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Sure, there are many complex issues, but the benefits of ability grouping, in terms of optimizing learning, are so huge, that this is what should be done, and there are no grounds for not doing so. Ability grouping is by a huge margin the single most effective way to optimize learning. Nothing else comes close. There is really no alternative. These are very sweeping statements. If we want to demand backup, where is yours that this is true? What is there to prove? The only question is, do differences in ability actually exist? Well, of course they do. There's really nothing else to prove. Ability-difference deniers such as http://www.ascd.org/publications/bo...-Is-and-How-to-Start-Dismantling-It.aspxuse phrases such as "so-called "ability"" (their quotes around "ability"). Natural differences in ability are huge. Students at the 25th percentile should not be in the same class as students at the 75th percentile. The differences in ability are too large to provide suitable education to both ends of that range.
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Joined: Aug 2010
Posts: 3,428
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The problem is that ultramarina made an absolutely false claim that I had made some expression of "opposition" to "gifted magnets". I'm sorry if I misrepresented you. I recall you saying that you did not want your children to be "score pawns" and that you regarded school within-school set-ups (I use this term to avoid the apparently problematic "gifted magnet" term, but I consider them the same--they are not "gifted programs," because we have gifted programs, ie pull-outs, in all schools here, as is common) as a ploy to manipulate statistics. I interpreted this as opposition to gifted magnet schools (and all magnet schools, I assume). You also said the choice to put gifted programs in lower-performing schools was unfortunate. What am I not getting? If this is incorrect, please feel free to clarify.
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Joined: Aug 2010
Posts: 3,428
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Ability grouping is by a huge margin the single most effective way to optimize learning. Nothing else comes close. You don't think this statement needs back-up? "Single most effective" sounds like a claim looking for statistical confirmation to me. Sure, it may be appealing to some or all of us as a seemingly intuitive idea. Many ideas are seemingly intuitive, but that doesn't mean they are correct.
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Joined: Aug 2010
Posts: 3,428
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Joined: Jun 2012
Posts: 144
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Sure, there are many complex issues, but the benefits of ability grouping, in terms of optimizing learning, are so huge, that this is what should be done, and there are no grounds for not doing so. Ability grouping is by a huge margin the single most effective way to optimize learning. Nothing else comes close. There is really no alternative. These are very sweeping statements. If we want to demand backup, where is yours that this is true? What is there to prove? The only question is, do differences in ability actually exist? Well, of course they do. There's really nothing else to prove. Ability-difference deniers such as http://www.ascd.org/publications/bo...-Is-and-How-to-Start-Dismantling-It.aspxuse phrases such as "so-called "ability"" (their quotes around "ability"). Natural differences in ability are huge. Students at the 25th percentile should not be in the same class as students at the 75th percentile. The differences in ability are too large to provide suitable education to both ends of that range. While this may seem self-evident, I'm not immediately convinced. The variation in the middle of the bell curve is much smaller than at the edges. The entire cohort in the 25th-75th percentile range may still be substantially at the same point in the curriculum and capable of being taught in a single class effectively. This is the fundamental assumption about how group education works. Most students are similar and you don't need to finely categorize them. Short of a 1-on-1 tutoring situation you're never going to perfectly match the teaching to the student but the tradeoffs are acceptable in the middle (and that's most of the distribution curve rather than just a narrow subsection). Also my point is not that you chose the wrong arbitrary numbers but that there is probably little value in over-separating and the number of students that this should apply to are fairly small. I suspect real data would show much farther out points on the curve to be where students become so fundamentally different that you no longer have much overlap in what instruction they need. And even in the case of the bottom groups there are other models that may be more effective than segregating them out. For instance, I've seen some articles floating around where instead you layer tutoring or an entire companion supporting class on and you can achieve better outcomes than providing solely a remedial track.
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