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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

> There's no gifted program or tracking/segregating by ability anymore. I guess those are bad for "equity".

The CA Dept of Education used to require GATE programs. In 2014, they made them optional, so schools stopped offering them. What's shocking to me is that this happened even in districts where there are lots of high-performing kids, with families that care about advanced learning. When we moved to Menlo Park, we were surprised that our highly-rated school doesn't have any programs for kids who are advanced in learning. They just talk about how all their lessons have a "low floor and high ceiling" which sounds nice in theory but doesn't work very well in practice (at least when you have a mix of kids who range from 1-2 grades below grade level to 2-3 grades above grade level).

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I don't understand why there would need to be separate advanced learning programs in schools.

In fact, every school already has an advanced learning program. It's called the next grade!

Not only are there social benefits from having mixed age groups of children (younger ones learn by observing the older ones), but they could also each learn at their own level. There's absolutely no reason for age-separated schooling.

> It's called the next grade!

Eh, there are a lot of different things you learn in school. For example, I was doing algebra at home with my mom (which I would ultimately do in school in 6th grade) in 2nd grade when I was still having trouble putting spaces in between my words with my handwriting. LikeIwouldwriteallmyhandwrittenwordslikethis. It was a big struggle for me to start adding spaces between words. and don't even start on my spelling. I was not ready to skip a grade level in every subject. But yes, I needed advanced math.

When I was in 4th grade (and maybe other grades too, I don't really remember), a friend and I were sent off to a 5th grade class specifically for math. I don't know how practical this is in general; I was lucky to get a lot of accommodations when I had teachers that were willing or able to do so, and this was also the 90s, which presumably changes things in all sorts of ways I can't even imagine. But it did work back then.

Ha, when i was too far ahead (around 11yo), I got put in a separate room with two girls with a similar "problem", no teacher.

Nice girls, very innocent. Eventually the rest of the class started catching up with our math progress and by the end of the school year we were let out of the cage.

It was a fond memory, I am not bitter about it, still remember some of the gags.

I dont think i lost that much, my math interest was more of a natural force rather than whatever i did in a repetetive schoolbook. And maybe I gained some social skills instead?

Just a little funny way of dealing with it

> Nice girls, very innocent.

Haha, that came out a bit different that i meant to. I meant that we were all very innocent, just like 3 well behaved 11 year old kids.

> Ha, when i was too far ahead (around 11yo), I got put in a separate room with two girls with a similar "problem", no teacher.

I had the same experience in 1st-2nd grade (in foreign language class, not math). Three of us were deemed too advanced for the grade so the teacher sent us out to the playground unsupervised with instructions to speak in the foreign language and correct each other.

I don't remember us speaking in that language too much but we played lots of games and it was fun.

> I was not ready to skip a grade level in every subject.

It's possible to go to a higher grade just on some subjects though. In our (my child's) elementary, kids could go up a grade on math only if that suited them better. They stay in their grade but during math hour go to the classroom of a higher grade.

It worked reasonably well but there's some limits since it is only an elementary school so beyond a certain point there are no higher grades available on campus.

Exactly.

When you stop thinking in age-related grades, and start thinking in individual subjects, you realize how stupid the current system is.

People are differently skilled/talented in different subjects, why group them by age, instead of subject-specific ability?!

No, an advanced learning program is not called the next grade. There are two problems with putting kids in higher grades:

1. Outside of academics, the younger children are not at the same level of emotional, mental, and physical development. This prevents the two age groups from building substantive social connections.

2. There is a Donny Dumbass in every grade. So even if you go to the next grade up, there is still a Donny Dumbass taking all of the teacher’s attention.

I have first hand experience with this. My school had two advanced levels. The most advanced was all kids from the same grade. The intermediate level was taking the normal class with the grade above. I took the intermediate class. I sat in the back and the girl next to me offered me mushrooms. I had not yet reached the point in my development where I would have regular exposure to drug users, so this was a shock for me. This girl also wasn’t the most enlightened study partner.

We've heard good things about MP public schools so that's disappointing! Did you guys end up going to private?

We’re still in the district, and have finally pushed hard enough that they let our kid take a diagnostic test and move ahead independently. But that literally took 3 years to accomplish, during which time zero math learning happened at school.

To clarify, this is the Las Lomitas district, which is west Menlo Park, not MPCSD, which covers downtown and the rest of MP.

If you want a magnet program, go to Redwood City — it has one. Even the privates are generally not great on math acceleration. I hear Menlo School doesn’t allow early acceleration either, and they’re one of the more academic private schools.

Feel free to email me (contact in profile) if you want more details.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

Excellent story about the government not allowing anyone to be too smart or beautiful.

Example. If you’re smart, you wear head phones that emit random loud noises so you can’t form thoughts for long.

https://twitter.com/noUpside/status/1627038661115256843

  SFUSD became Harrison Bergeron Unified. It’s a cautionary tale, not a model. Push back.

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