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Comment by jacknews | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you should segregate schools. Just classrooms. That gives students in 'bad' classes something to aspire to, and keeps them on the map rather than being written-off to a 'poor school', and parents should realise that, though their kid is in the 'bad' class, they are getting appropriate help, not just being discarded.

In some ways, the 'best' teachers should be assigned to the 'bad' kids, certainly those with the best command of a class. The 'good' kids don't need that so much.

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These kids are still going to be on the bus, at recess, or at school functions. Not sure if you were ever bullied, but all three of those are prime locations due to lack of adult supervision.

I mean bullying is a thing worldwide to some extent, but I think America needs to fix it's high school culture. If not it's entire, aggressive culture.

Bullying is worldwide but to the same frequency and intensity?

IIRC bullying is much worse in East Asia (Korea/Japan/China)

I think you still need something to incentivise the best teachers to voluntarily sign up for the lowest performing classes. Obviously its way more prestigious to be the teacher with all the ivy league destined students than the teacher whose students are just trying to get set up for a community college or a blue collar apprenticeship. [This is not to say the latter cohort is less intelligent, capable, or important-- just less prestigious.]

I see teaching these kids as a specialization in itself, so the incentive is to be a great 'turnaround' teacher, plus the pay should reflect that it is a difficult specialization.

The right answer is probably to pay the teachers of the problem kids more or adjust student teacher ratios- For example, with no behavior problems a single math teacher could probably handle instructing and grading 50 students, as this is the model in college calc.

For what it's worth, in New York City the Gifted & Talented classes are often larger for this reason. A 2nd grade G&T classroom where I was a student teacher had 30 students, for example; standard classes at the same school had ~20 students per class.

I think you do want the "good" kids to be taught by the best teachers. That way they'll have better chances to succeed and you won't have so many good teachers get burnt out. I think people should just normalize sort of giving up on the "bad" kids and send them to the delinquents school or military school or whatever. The whole idea of having the best teachers teach the "bad" kids is completely wasteful of limited resources.

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