Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education A Progressive Assault on Selective High Schools

Depends on the population of the community of what you can make available. NYC has a large population so there a few highly selective high schools, Sty has a class size of about 800. That is a large high school. And that is all top scorers. Then you have Bronx Sci and Brooklyn Tech and Nest. And the smaller Lehman math and science. They don't need or want to mix it up. They want to provide for the students that want and need a HG accelerated program with a lot of AP classes etc. There is also arts high schools and design high schools and whatever. And it is easy for colleges to find students with a great education. If you are Rhode Island school of design, then I am sure you look at the design high schools. I don't know. Toronto, a very large city and they do have what you might be talking about. They have 3 programs, at different schools, that take 60 kids each into a math and science program,accelerate them. And they are on track for AP math and sciences. Now other kids in those schools can also do the AP courses, but do not get accelerated math and sciences in the first 2 years. Unless they do it themselves online. You get a mixed bag in that kind of high school. But you also get cliques. Those 60 kids stick together, and think of themselves as in the TOPS or MAST program. I am not sure that is so good. DD is in a private academic, that used to be free, accelerated from 7th grade in maths and sciences. But all the kids got in and got accelerated. They are not separated from a different group in the same school. They all got into the school after 2 rounds of testing. Just like those specialty high schools in NYC. And isn't the Chicago math and science high school, the same? Which one is better? To be part of a specialty program in a broadly differentiated high school or where everyone has to test to a certain level to get in? Sort of like colleges. If MIT had a broad mix of students, would it be MIT?

Thanks for the time you took to provide details of the education landscape in your part of the world. The Toronto schools, from what you describe, still have separate systems - they are just geographically co-located whereas my ideal would be schools which can cater for everyone, with different subject streams, such that a student might perhaps be in the top class in some subjects (where acceleration should be available) but in the middle or even bottom classes in others (since many are not gifted in every area). This should be re-evaluated annually as some students may suddenly take off in a subject if they find the passion & motivation for that subject. Our local school has adopted many of these features over recent years and they seem to be paying off. I am very happy with our school now, but have been drawn into conversations by parents of students in other schools within our area and they remain frustrated with the lack of opportunities at their school, as I used to be when my eldest first started at ours.

I think that the problem with your proposition is that often, HG kids would be bored and staring out the window and the teacher doesn't think of them as gifted. And MG kids tend to be identified by teachers. If you are talking about some type of yearly testing, that is expensive. I think in most high schools, if a student is motivated, they can accelerate. I had skipped in grade school, when they had standard skipping in grade 4. And in high school I could choose my subjects and skip another year. In a regular high school. In grade school, that cannot happen with a lack of resources that most schools experience. You need better school systems in poverty areas, to enhance opportunities. And covid has really destroyed some kids education in those areas, where parents don't have resources to help them. Very sad.

No, I'm not suggesting annual testing in high school. I meant an annual performance review, so later bloomers also have opportunities, instead of locking the majority of students into either selective in or nonselective schools at age 11 or 12.

in north america, it is 14. Most eighth graders are 13. Unless you skip or get red shirted, then you could be 15 entering high school. But then an annual review in elementary school would be done with the teacher and be subjective and how do you get around the fact that so many bored HG kids could perform poorly?

There is a whole thing going on with online high school that because they needed to hire a bunch of teachers to do it, there are easy As being online. How do you evaluate for college entrance when there are a bunch of inflated grades due to substitute teachers not caring. I know that covid is an aberation but it affects 2 years of kids applying to universities.

Over here, there’s no middle school in the public system (a small number of private schools use the term but they are K-12 so it’s more of an administrative division). Consequently, the average age of kids entering high school is twelve & a half. The selective high school exam is held in Yr 6, so students are 11-12 y.o. when they sit the paper. I suppose that’s different to the US.

There’s no good solution that I can see. I personally think the school system here needs a major overhaul with a multi-Billion dollar coaching industry, but a lot of people seem to accept the status quo (including the poor kids who commute four hrs a day because SHS catchment areas don’t have boundaries, so many families rank their preferences based on school outcomes & not where they live).

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/b...trance-exam/ar-AAL4OAZ?ocid=winp1taskbar

Recent Boston Globe article (I found a free link, not behind the paywall) regarding Boston Public Schools' exam schools, that proposes replacing the ISEE with MAP scores.

Lovely, thanks! And I appreciate you resuscitating a related thread, aeh.

True AND False. It depends. There is a level of teaching-to-the-test which approaches providing students with an advance copy of the test and the expected answers. Selectively making that available to groups of students may elevate their test scores, and does NOT give an accurate picture of a student's accumulated knowledge, or ability to make connections and apply knowledge to new circumstances being encountered for the first time.

Very true, indigo. Almost everything is vulnerable to a certain amount of manipulation by the motivated stakeholder--some less legal than others, some merely ethically questionable.

I speculate that the author's interest in NWEA MAP instead of ISEE is related to this point, since, unlike ISEE, there is not exactly a thriving test-prep industry around MAP, and the adaptive nature of the test (including a fairly deep pool of equivalenced test items) ought, in theory, to make it a bit more challenging to game.

In addition, since in many places it is routinely administered district-wide, 1-3 times annually, it may be viewed as possibly more accessible to a wider range of the school population. It even comes in Spanish.

In no way am I proposing it as a be-all, end-all, (especially since MAP was originally designed for lower-stakes progress monitoring, rather than high-stakes access to services) but I think it's valuable that something like this is in the conversation regarding access/selection to advanced learning opportunities, especially as, with reference to the quote, nationally-normed testing (or even psychometrically sound state-wide testing) is one of the few objective measures that cannot be heavily bent by the personal biases of teacher, parent or administrator (assuming ethical administration and scoring).