Selective schools
Via Whirled View, I found this post about schooling in England. The author is moderately snide about the plight of the "London liberal lefty with a kid rising five." What struck me the most is how much of it could have been written about the US:
"The young and liberal move into funky, down at heel areas, become parents, and then start looking round at the local schools. There’s no way their kids are going to contribute to the local, funky, down at heel ambience…"
Nick Cohen’s solution, in the Guardian, is to bring back grammar schools — state funded, but selective schools. (Or rather, he argues that these schools will help bright students whose parents can neither afford fee-based schools (what the English call puiblic, and Americans call private) nor houses in areas with good free schools. It’s Blood and Treasure who says that argument is self-serving.)
The US doesn’t have "grammar schools" — but it does have "gifted and talented" programs in public schools, as well as a handful of selective public high schools, mostly with math and science focuses, such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York, Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, and Montgomery Blair in Maryland. And I suspect the arguments about them are very similar to the arguments about grammar schools in the UK.
I have very mixed feelings about such programs. I know that they are often a way for middle-class parents to get more resources — better teachers, smaller classes, enrichment activities — for their kids while sending them to public schools. In Unequal Childhoods, Annette Lareau writes about the ways that middle-class parents is their skills to get their kids into such programs — advocating with principals, having children privately re-tested, etc. At the same time, I attended one of those selective high schools, and after reading A Tribe Apart, I have no doubt that a significant chunk of my classmates would have dropped out and/or wound up institutionalized if they had attended a typical American high school.
The Washington Post magazine had a cover story this weekend about two young women who attended Montgomery Blair who were finalists in the Intel Talent Search. They say that they didn’t care that girls were in the minority in their science classes. But there’s a huge difference between being one of eight girls in a class and being the only one, or one of two. One of the things that selective schools like that do is make it normal to like math, normal to work really hard, normal to get really good grades,
August 1st, 2005 at 11:43 pm
I’m a product of the magnet school system as well, and I’m one of those people who would have dropped out in a regular high school. Going to a magnet school meant that I got training in music and acting that my parents never could have afforded. My school experience has had a huge impact on my life to this day. I only wish my parents had encouraged my little brother to attend one as well.
August 2nd, 2005 at 9:28 am
How far back does the concept of standard public schooling for every child go? I remember reading somewhere that, in the U.S. at least, it was only in the 1950s that we started really requiring all kids to go to high school. Before that, those who were not going into a bookish profession or to college simply stopped school at 8th grade, perhaps. And so high schools became automatic gifted programs.
My question becomes, then, have we ever seen a model where all kids can attend the same schools and be well served?
August 3rd, 2005 at 6:38 am
During my eduction, my state had a rather peculiar method of selective education; the only selective period was two years just before high school (ages 10 and 11). They were by far the most enjoyable years of my schooling. But I did fine without the experience of selective high school.
Not everyone does though. I think that selective schooling does benefit more students than just those who might otherwise have dropped out. My father offers the contrast of his experience (selective high school) with his primary school friend who always did better than him at primary school but went on to the local non selective school. My father went on to get a PhD in Physics after being in the top 0.5% of his graduating high school year in the country. His friend got an above average mark at the end of high school and went to teachers college.
I think my father is probably one of the few people who thinks she was capable of a lot more than that.
On the other side, my teacher friend hates selective schools, because it takes all the good students out of his classes, which makes it much harder to teach the rest of the students, as good students tend to drag up the rest to a higher level than otherwise.
August 3rd, 2005 at 3:34 pm
I’m a product of one of those magnet schools you mentioned too, and while I don’t know that my friends and I would have dropped out of a standard school, we would probably have been pretty miserable. As you said, the important thing was that it was ok & normal to LIKE classes, like learning, think ideas were worth spending time on, and so forth. Why that’s abnormal in most schools, I have no idea.
It was by no means a guarantee of success in later life. Three of my best friends were crippled by some variation of depression or bipolar disorder and never quite finished their degrees or made a good living (so far). But I can say that I seemed to have a head start over most of the people I met in college and law school – I already thought the way the schools were trying to guide us to.
Jen, there are endless debates about how well the bog-standard public schools used to be — the attrition rate used to be pretty high as a matter of course, so it’s hard to make comparisons. But there’s a famous 8th grade social studies test from 1895 or so floating around the web, which most of today’s college students would have a hard time with. I think the schools actually were a lot better once.