At every age, there's a high attrition of students participating in competitive sports, until only a tiny elite remains. Is that what we want for reading and math?
yes, because the alternative is to have kids who can't actually read being dragged along and dragging down kids who can read. What's wrong with a tiny elite remaining if it's based on actually being able to do the work?
The biggest red flag here for me is not that the tiny elite remain, it's that life circumstances will dictate that the majority of the tiny elite will continue to come from privileged families who have the time and resources to give their kids a leg up. BUT pushing kids into places where they objectively cannot compete intellectually or physically under the auspices of fairness is the devil's work. We need constant work at creating equality and to lower barriers to social services, not "fairness" and pretending everyone is already equal.
When I was 8, in the first grade, I hummed in class. I read comic books, I napped, I generally fucked about, around, and several other prepositions. I did this to such an extent that the teacher wanted to shunt me into the shame places you want to shunt these kids into. Fortunately my mother caught wind of this and, knowing what level my intellect was at when it was allowed a little freedom and presented with a challenge, raised actual holy hell at that little Catholic school outside Pittsburgh. Thank God she did, because I ended up being tested and started along the gifted track. My brother in law, otoh, is just as smart as me and just as defiantly internal as me. He didn't have an advocate. For him, school was 12 years of no resources, no opportunities, no goals, and memorizing a copy of The Lion King on VHS. Now I make a tidy living as a software engineer and I'm pretty decent at it. He lives at home with his mom because he never graduated high school, so he stays in all day and hand-hacks NES roms literally bit by bit. He's a shitload better than me at a very valuable thing and no one can take advantage of that, not him, not some employer, not society in general, because he was disposed of by a school system that wanted to get him out of the way of all the future contributors.
This idea that school is a place where kids compete with one another, the weak are weeded out and the strong are rewarded with additional resources is a disgusting perversion of an institution we used to recognize as providing a baseline for everyone. And it simply doesn't work.
> yes, because the alternative is to have kids who can't actually read being dragged along and dragging down kids who can read.
Failing to teach kids how to read is a failure of the school system, not the kid.
Dropping kids because the school system failed them is just yet another failure of a school system, and one which is at best a self-serving failure: a way to mask the extent of which the system is broken by blaming the victims of said system.
As an exercise, invest a few minutes thinking on why most communities do not experience this failure rate.
this, absolutely. when the person you're replying to asked "What's wrong with their being a tiny elite" they seem to be purposely ignoring the fact that what we're measuring is competence in basic skills. A school isn't supposed to take in 100 kids and turn out 99 droupouts and one nuclear physicist. A school is supposed to take in 100 kids and turn out 100 kids who can read, write, do math and understand how their society works well enough to participate in it meaningfully.
And if the kid can't do that at a 3rd grade level at the end of 3rd grade, isn't it much better to have them repeat 3rd grade than to push then into 4th grade and hope something changes?
> And if the kid can't do that at a 3rd grade level at the end of 3rd grade, isn't it much better to have them repeat 3rd grade than to push then into 4th grade and hope something changes?
That's besides the point, and orthogonal to the discussion. If after 3 years a school system failed to teach kids how to read, that represents a failure of the school system. If a school system feels the need to hold kids back so early in hopes that subjecting them yet again to the same school system that already failed them will somehow improve outcomes, this means the same school system is not investing in fixing the real problem.
This is like buying bad tires. If a tire blows up, you can argue all you want that changing the tire is much better than keeping a flat tire on. But the root cause is that the tire blows up, isn't it? Changing a bad tire with yet another bad tire won't fix the problem, will it? The tire you just added will easily blow up again, and everyone else buying those tires will go through the same problem.
I repeat, advocating for holding kids back and even rejecting underperforming kids from the school system is a Hallmark of a deeply broken, unsalvageable system. The only purpose of these approaches is to falsify the actual quality of the work performed by the school system, and generating fraudulent statistics of success at the expense of throwing kids under the bus.
That's how it used to work. But people noticed that some groups got held back at higher rates than others, and there were accusations of isms, and so most schools decided it would be better for everyone involved to stop doing that. Also, holding a kid back came to be seen as cruel since the other kids would make fun of him, which was probably true.
For the same reason, they mostly got rid of "tracks," where an age group would be divided into different classrooms according to test scores and previous grades rather than random chance, so the 'A' fourth grade room could go at a different pace from the 'B' fourth grade room. All that's left of that is gifted programs, which people somehow accept even though they're just the mirror image of holding kids back.
There's really not a good answer, because like it or not, learning ability varies, so if you put 25 kids in the same classroom for no reason other than their being the same age and living in the same neighborhood, some are going to struggle and fail and some are going to cruise and be bored.
