Would that be their local public school?
@StPaulDad 's suggestions is a good one. The issue is how to set the academic bar. Will it be purely an objective (test and grades based) or will it have subjective elements, including background and circumstances of the students? If the bar is set too low, it is meaningless. If it is set too high, I am afraid we will see the disparity in demographics.
I grew up in a public school system that routinely sent 10± out of 200+ in the graduating class to T10 schools. The bulk of the students going to college went to the state university which is a decent one overall and up there in engineering. There was no separate magnet school systems. You went to your neighborhood elementary or middle school with 1 HS for the district. The population was relatively diverse encompassing suburbs and rural areas, although there was probably an over representation of families where one or both parents had at least college degrees. IMO, one of the factors helping students stay engaged was the district tracked students from kindergarten. We were always in a class where the students were at equivalent levels and teachers could teach at a pace and level that fit pretty much the whole class. Since there were not separate schools, moving kids between groups was easy each year, and in some cases during the year. The tracking became subject level in middle school and continued through HS, although at that point students had the ability to choose certain classes voluntarily. After middle school, students were also offered the option to attend the county vocational school, where they still earned an HS degree with state requirements, but had the opportunity to learn a trade (including secretarial and accounting/bookkeeping) and participate in a coop program. I guess some time in the intervening years, along with the proliferation of participation awards, tracking has become an educational bogeyman for certain educators. Seems common sense to me. Put kids with equivalent abilities in the same class and reassess this routinely and periodically. Address issues with underperformance separately, whether it is related to nutrition, access to resources, supplemental education, etc⊠Do this individually vs taking a 1 size fits all approach. Approaches that create a pre-determined demographic outcome solve no problems other than giving politicians and certain bureaucrats a false victory to crow about.
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The Atlantic magazine did a good piece on Lowell one year after the change to a lottery system. A very dedicated English teacher had a mix of 9th grade kids, some of whom were almost college ready and others who read at the 3rd grade level. Class discussions ranged from thoughtful philosophical questions from some students to the meaning of basic vocabulary from others. Hard to fix 6 grades levels behind in reading in the course of a few weeks. Not sure it worked for anyone in the class.
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Not necessarily. The special schools in question theoretically exist to offer courses and rigor not be available to the more vs advanced students in the regular schools (perhaps because the number of such advanced students is too small at the regular schools). So a reasonable set of baseline criteria to go to the special school would be:
- Sufficient level of academic strength.
- Progression history indicating likelihood of exhausting courses or rigor at the regular school but finding the needed courses and rigor at the special school.
Ideally, the special school should be sized to accommodate the number of students that fit the criteria above, so that it is open admission for those who meet the criteria above.
However, it appears that, in actual practice, special schools like TJHSST and Lowell are undersized, so admission is highly competitive, leaving out many students who meet the criteria above. This also leads students and parents to see it as a prestige prize, much the way students and parents on these forums often seek to apply to all Ivy League colleges without really noticing any of their individual characteristics besides prestige.
The Lowell lottery situation is a combination of a mistake by the district in not setting baseline criteria that ensure that only well prepared students enter, combined with poorly prepared students and their parents seeking the prestige prize, rather than wanting to go there because it is an academic fit.
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Could you provide a citation to the Atlantic article about âLowell one year after the change to a lottery system?â
Or are you referring to the March 7, 2022 New Yorker article which mostly focuses on the first semester after the plan was implemented (and also the first semester of in-person learning since the new 9th graders were in 7th grade)?
In the New Yorker article, a long time History and Economics teacher mentions that early in the first semester she discovered that one student who she thought was slacking off was only reading at a 3rd grade level, and that she got the student tutoring to address the issue. The article follows the challenges faced, the teaching techniques implemented and the subsequent transformation of the students themselves.
For example, the same teacher indicated that âkids who had started the semester doing F work, or none at all, were now turning in writing assignments in the B range.â She was excited about the transformation of previously low performing students now interested in taking AP classes, and expressed âaweâ about what she referred to as the transformation of the freshman class into what she referred to as âLowell.â From the article:
âIn the past, we would ask, you know, Are these kids âLowellâ?â She paused in what looked to me like awe. âThey are Lowell. These are Lowell students. And, to me, that says that anybody can be a Lowell student.â It just required good support and attentive work from clever teachers. And time.
Not sure if this is the article to which you refer, but if it is, then IMO it far from the indictment that you suggest. If not, do you have a link to article to which you refer?
Here is a link to the New Yorker article so people can read it for themselves.
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Whatâs the âsufficient level of academic strengthâ? How is it, as well as the âprogression historyâ of students, going to be determined from regular schools with disparate standards? Magnet schools are, by definition, selective, so how do you make their admissions uncompetitive? Leaving resource issues aside, if these schools are upsized to accommodate everyone, wouldnât they run into the same issues regular schools run into (i.e. separating out students who are bored and donât feel challenged)?
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Did it not occur to you that grades in the San Francisco school system are suspect? A high school student reading at the 3rd grade level? Apparently his grades were sufficient to qualify for the lottery, so plenty of teachers along the way certified that he was at or close enough to grade level to promote.
If you think a 6 year reading deficit can be rectified with some tutoring over a few weeks to bring a student to level, I am certain we have nothing to discuss.
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Selective does not necessarily mean competitive. A school with fixed standards that admits all, but only those, who meet the fixed standards has non-competitive selective admission.
It is not necessarily true that competitive selection that would be required for a school smaller than its demand will necessarily produce the cutoff between students who are likely to benefit from the school versus those who will not.
But then it seems like competition for the prestige prize is the point for some people.
Before we get to that, will you confirm that we are talking about the same article?
If so, then people can read the article for themselves and draw their own conclusions about the significance of that single anecdote and whether it undercuts the successes discussed therein.
The link is a few posts above. Is this the article to which you referred?
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Resources dictate that any school has to have a limit on how big a class it can admit each year. In any given year, students who meet that fixed standards, whatever they are, can exceed that limit.
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Somehow, the majority of K-12 schools in the US manage to have fixed standards (including the basic âkid is school age and lives in the attendance areaâ standard) and are sized appropriately.
These regular schools are legally bound to accommodate everyone in their school districts. Weâve seen them doing it in a variety of ways (raising property taxes to build more schools or larger schools and hire more teachers, creating larger classes, even putting students/classes in trailers, etc.) All of them would be either difficult to accomplish for or defeat the purpose of magnet schools.
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Unless districts are allocating more resources per student to those that meet the standard, I donât think this is true.
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More resources per pupil are required at magnet schools.
Fascinating how we devote more resources to kids who need less resources to succeed. As the teacher in the New Yorker article noted about Lowell . . .
âAt Lowell, students entered in the ninety-seventh percentile and left in the ninety-seventh percentile. The heavy lifting seemed to be done not in the classroom but in admissions.â
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The biggest resource deficit is the number of qualified teachers who can teach the more advanced courses. Thatâs why many school districts choose to establish magnet schools in the first place: to best utilize this limited resource they have. Putting these teachers in regular schools would have accomplished less because of the mismatch at many of these schools.
Each school district faces a choice: leaving the education of its brightest to a few elite private schools which many of them canât afford, or keeping them challenged in the public system. Many school districts chose the latter.
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Accomplish âlessâ of what? Surely kids at the non-magnet schools could also benefit from better, more qualified teachers. So what exactly is this supposed âmismatch?â
Why is that that the only kids considered in this âchoiceâ are the supposed âbrightestâ kids, which is usually synonymous with the SES advantaged kids? Seems like allocating public resources should give at lead a bit of consideration to better educating those most in need of a better education.
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Thereâre different levels of qualification. For example, why put a math teacher capable of teaching rigorous geometry in a school where no one would take, or even care about, such a class?
No, they arenât synonymous. Many âbrightestâ kids are far from wealthy and they canât afford elite private schools. If the goal of the society is to make all students do better than they would otherwise, the needs of these students should be taken care of as well. Moreover, innovations often come from this segment of the society, so itâs in the societyâs own interest to challenge these students to do better.
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Since high school math teachers were probably math majors (+ teaching credential) in college, why would being able to teach highly rigorous and advanced math be that uncommon among high school math teachers?
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We canât seem to attract enough higher caliber teachers to teach advanced topics in many public high schools in this country, unfortunately.
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