The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds and legitimately don't have a strong predictive capacity on student success that couldn't already be explained the parental background and early childhood care.

In my case, I never placed in gifted academic programs in elementary and middle, but by HS was able to take 14 AP classes (and auto shop - always liked tinkering since elementary school; which was a major reason why I never placed well in gifted programs) and end up at HYS. Most of my peers there similarly didn't attended gifted programs or high schools - amongst the non-legacies the biggest predictor of success was SAT scores and GPA.

While giving and funding academic and gifted tracks within schools should be allowed, "gifted" students should not be segregated from "normal" students. There's no reason a high school can't both offer as many AP classes as possible ALONG with vocational classes.

Edit: can't reply

> Why should gifted schools need more money than normal schools

It's not that they need more funding. The issue is gifted programs tend to overlap with upper income families [0] - the same kinds of families that are overrepresented in School Boards and PTAs [1]

I'm not saying go all "San Francisco 2.0", but recognize that gifted only schools does lead to a moral perception that other students are not as deserving for funding or are "bad students".

[0] - https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2019/09/30/socioeconomic-status-...

[1] - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584188180...

> the highest-ability schools receive a decrement in funding

But are overrepresented in urban areas where human capital is significantly higher than rural areas within Romania [2]. Students in rural and small town schools are less liked to be as healthy or a affluent as students in cities or major urban centers, and this does have a tangible downstream effect on education as a whole.

[2] - https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/abs/2021/06...

> If you look at SF...

Note how I said << I'm not saying go all "San Francisco 2.0" >>

There is a happy middle ground between being an exclusionary system like Romania's or a delusional bussed system like San Francisco.

Giving the example of a city with a population the size of Cincinnati is clearly a facile argument, as it is obviously not representative of the rest of California, let alone the US.

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IncreasePosts 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Why should gifted schools need more money than normal schools? I would imagine "problematic children schools" would need the most funds because you would need the lowest teacher:student ratio to maintain order

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cyberax 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds

No, they don't. If you look at SF, the high-performing Lowell High gets a bit _less_ funding than the average for the district. Stuyvesant in NYC is right at the average spending.

I studied in a magnet school with other gifted kids, including a future Olympiad winner. Our school barely had heating in winter. It's really the _other_ kids that make all the difference.

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jmspring 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That is a lot to read. I’m no longer in my 40s. Grade school - in San Jose - gifted and talented classes were classes at the school not a separate school.

Sadly education has evolved where schools teach to the norm rather than acknowledging people have different strengths and weaknesses.

It does not require separate schools, it needs funding and more importantly, someone good at math needs to be able to work with others good at math.

The educational curriculum in the US for grade school has been standardized to the mediocre and any attempt to encourage gifted is considered a problem.

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alephnerd 5 days ago | parent [-]

I agree with you!

Give students the ability to test out of classes and/or dual enroll in community colleges, BUT make sure they are all still in the same school meeting and greeting and bumping into each other.

Dumbing down curricula is a bad move, and preventing students from being able to test out or take classes earlier is also a bad move. But segregating students into different schools based on academic ability is equally as bad.

> Grade school - in San Jose - gifted and talented classes were classes at the school not a separate school

Yep. This is a model I agree with, and am a product of as well being a fellow Bay Area native

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jmspring 5 days ago | parent [-]

The funny thing, I went to five schools, 3 different districts across Bay Area cities. All had accommodations for different levels. High school, I ended up at UCSC my freshman year with enough credits from transfer in (from high school school) and my first quarter as a junior. Most were community college courses friends and I were interested in separate from school.

My step daughter, I hear her curriculum and shake my head (my BS was in computer engineering and computational chemistry), I could not help with the bs “common core” forced on her.

Thankfully she settled into the ability to have college courses in her last year.

It’s ridiculous how much of a push there is “standardizing” the skills of individuals. When their strengths should be encouraged.

	▲	alephnerd 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Not to be that guy, but in my parent's old country - someone like your daughter would not have been given a chance to even get a bachelors degree. And we're from a country with the same tracked educational system as Romania. I agree that "common core" is bulls** (I'm part of that generation as well, but my Asian parents made me take Kumon and taught me personally, but I was also lucky/blessed that my mother was a teacher in the old country), but the motivation wasn't wrong. And this is what pains me about American educational reform. It has become ideological, instead of outcome driven. Personally, our outcomes should be 1. Building a talented workforce (we need more October Skys) 2. Giving space for creativity (we need more Darias) 3. Building physical fitness (we need more Currahee Hill montages, as an ex-ROTC [found out I'd lose my OCI if I commissioned]) And this requires giving students autonomy to explore their limits mentally and physically. If peeps don't want to learn, nbd, but why should we limit access to students who want to but didn't initially build the fundamentals. We also need to decouple emotion from education - no major or degree is better or worse than others. We should treat a HS grad, an AA/AS grad, a BA/BS/BE grad, andn a grad school grad the same. Let's be a "Great Society" [0] again. [0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KuuEFTgodc8

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akoboldfrying 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds

The article points out that the opposite is the case in Romania: the highest-ability schools receive a decrement in funding.

	▲	5 days ago \| parent [-]
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