I guess it depends on what you mean by “largely.” MIT is a “superstar” science program attracting and enrolling “superstar” students from around the world. About 30% of its students (including graduate students) are international. This includes students without citizenship or permanent resident status who are educated at US schools.
Fair enough! It’s those pesky limited resources that are the problem here. Like I said upthread, it would be ideal to have tailor-made opportunities according to each kid. But I am willing to take resources from the highest achievers to distribute to lower achievers. The superstars will need to find their failure opportunities elsewhere 
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MIT deliberately keeps international undergrads to 11%, a number consistent with its peers. Note its grad programs, in contrast, are over 42% international students
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I suppose the failed education system (for them) is something they should learn from — that the world is not fair, and they will be handed lemons.
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We could of course ask that students find their opportunities to socialize in mixed ability groups in the hundreds of extracurriculars offering that, rather than insisting they do so in core academic courses.
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Yes! My kids have so many advantages. We have often told them the only way they could be more privileged is if we were quite wealthy. The world is not fair, indeed. They have been born with silver spoons in their mouths. A few lemons seem more than fair.
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Extracurriculars can help, I think, but they can vary in how much they promote risk-taking and embracing failures. Music was good for my kids, for example, because any young musician is inevitably going to experience mistakes and failures during the learning process, and at first they were in friendly groups where this continual learning process was normalized. But then they reached a certain level of competency and started to mix with kids on the “top music competition” track, where there seems to be a lot of toxic perfectionism.
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Because they are need blind, and are mentally prepared to fully support all 11%, and they likely expect a substantial portion of this cohort needing support.
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You are conflating wealth and being academically interested enough to want a challenging curriculum.
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Still not “largely international students” and not at all surprising given the huge population of qualified applicants from around the World.
I think this approach to resource shifting is why parents need the right to move their students to the school of their choice.
Let’s not forget that we are talking high school here. The public school system has had 8 years to get the kids ready for high school. But now we need to shift resources because they have failed?
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That’s fine as long as it’s true that everyone has an actual choice, and it’s not just taking resources away from the one school that some kids can actually attend (because there aren’t resources to drive the kids to school, or the only other options are privates where the voucher from a public school is not enough to cover it) or the private/charter schools won’t accept handicapped kids or so on.
The problem is that there are high barriers to entry for creating schools, making robust competition unrealistic.
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I can understand why you say that. I see those 2 things as not only highly correlated, but causal (wealth → academics) in the US. But I don’t want to descend into debate about it because A) it’s against TOS, and B) we won’t get anywhere.
The public school system is effectively a monopoly, and therefore it behaves as such, with poor outcomes . You can’t complain about the outcomes after deciding that these people need monopoly status and you give it to them.
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What failure we are talking about here? How have the two districts in question “failed?” Are we really going to keep pretending these are failed schools because they want to eliminate 9th/10th Honors English?
More generally . . . what constitutes a failed school? If, for example, a public high school doesn’t not offer math beyond BC Calc, is that a failed education system?
One might expect that a school could bring the vast majority of its gen ed students to perform at grade level on state tests. We could debate the number-80% ? 75% ?
I am amazed that what you took away from my post is that kids who have a horrible experience in school 180 days each year can “have their needs met” during a few days in a summer gathering that is sponsored by a generous donor.
Remember, these kids are also deserving of an education, and they aren’t getting it. Not only that, but these kids have a true hunger for learning. To my son, learning was basically as important as breathing, and that was true even during vacations. And lest you think he might have been some social misfit, the was also elected school president (we were extremely fortunate to be in a school where the smart kids were celebrated, rather than ostracized).
If a very smart kid is in a rural community with a limited number of students, than I can accept that there is no way to accommodate the learning needs of that kid in a local public school. But in a more urban area, you have the density to be able to put these kids together and give them intellectual peers.
On what basis do you say that?
I have already described the group of very smart kids that did not do well in high school. But let’s consider the smart kids that were not challenged in high school but managed to get good grades. But it’s likely they never developed the essential skills of perseverance or even how to study, because they were able to glide by in high school on pure talent. If they end up at a demanding college like say Columbia or MIT that requires both talent and hard work, they could very well flounder there.
In any reasonably large school, you can have different levels of classes according to talent. For the very strongest kids, you can have public magnet schools.
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The accountability comes from the ballot box. It isn’t a private entity only responsible to itself.
In economics you have natural monopolies where it doesn’t make sense to have competition because of the inelastic demand and the high barriers to entry making competition cost prohibitive. Think water utilities – where everyone needs water, but it would be cost prohibitive to expect multiple companies to dig up the roads to lay their own pipes down and so on. So you have regulation on a monopoly to ensure a basic standard is met and costs stay reasonable.
Schools are similar. Making sure everyone has access to education is a public necessity, you cannot have a functioning capitalist meritocracy without it. So, we have public schools to provide that. The goal is that every single child has the ability to get a quality education regardless of their ability to pay.
The problem with school choice comes when it takes resources away from the public option leaving it in even worse shape without guaranteeing that every single child served by that public school has an actual choice. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case – some parents can’t get transportation to affordable other choices, some areas are only served by religious schools that forbid children of parents they don’t approve of, some areas have charter schools that don’t take disabled children…and so on.
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If you need to shift high school funds from one group to another that tells me k-8 education has not taught everyone what they need to know. If they had been successful then all the kids would be at the same level and everyone would be in the class. The simple truth some kids need more. Some need more work to catch up. Some need more work to challenge them.
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In practice there is not accountability. If there were accountability, you wouldn’t have so many kids not meeting grade level norms, and school leaderships not getting fired at the same time.
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