No, that's a bait-and-switch often used to marginalize those of us whose kids have gone to school with the poor and brown. You're not crazy, she's just dishonest.

Indeed, you are not crazy.

Yes, the Upper West Side used to be sketchier, and yes, there are some poor housing projects in there. But it's got a fracking Ivy League school smack in the middle of it, and the wealthiest liberals in the damned city live there. What the hell is she trying to prove?

And indeed, her definition is the one more likely to be discriminatory, despite her tone towards you, because hers is determined entirely by characteristics not inherent to the literal meaning of the phrase.

Indeed, if you applied her definition to Chicago, you would actually be describing neighborhoods almost exclusively in the outer city, which exposes the silliness of it.

Voucher discussions always seem bizarre to me. Those in favor seem to think the every problem in public education can be easily explained by the existence of some elaborate archipelago of poorly managed schools which, if they could only be razed and the students shunted elsewhere, would herald the dawning of a new era of enlightenment in our nation's classrooms. Where are these new schools? How would they be better than the old ones?

Best I can tell, it's just a sneaky way of arguing against public education overall.

I am wholesale opposed to vouchers, but that's because I don't see supporting the overall society's efforts to create an educated populace and create equal opportunity as optional. If one doesn't want Precious to go to school with people "just not like us," great, send 'em somewhere else, but one is still obligated to the overall good work society is trying to perform by providing basic education. I will never have a child attend a school but I do not want a buttsex voucher to get me out of paying taxes; I prefer to contribute so I'll have someone spry and literate to administer my medications sixty years from now.

At any rate, she was dismissive and her attempt to redefine is just stupid. It's very schmibertarian: I want what I want and I'll move these goal posts wherever they have to go to make that happen!

What is she talking about? She's conflating "inner city" and "ghetto." For god's sake, Washington Heights is about as urban as you can get in the U.S.

Let me be the first of many to note that there's no sense in arguing with Galt.

3: To be fair, if you moved to the city in the 90s or later, you're probably underestimating how much sketchier the northern part of the Upper West Side was not too long ago.

What she's trying to prove is that I'm a self-congratulating liberal hypocrite who's all over myself because my children go to a school that isn't uniformly lily-white; from her superior urban cred, she's informing me that a couple of non-white faces doesn't make a school an inner city school. Which, sure, they don't, but Washington Heights is a freaking inner city neighborhood, and my kids' school is about half fresh off the boat from the DR, and the other half isn't all that high income either.

One of my fond comics memories is of a reference to the "inner jail", which, from context, was obviously where all the black convicts lived. I've also heard "urban inner cities" on NPR. So I conclude that "inner", in a "city" context, has just plain come to mean "colored".

10: I was told as much when I went to work in a Galtian "inner" [outer] city, and was told to maybe stop using the phrase for that very reason. Which is why I think its hilarious that Galt doesn't realize her definition is the more loaded.

* it's

9: Maybe she's never ridden the A all the way north?

8: Eh, LB reads Galt, FL trawls the other flame-war sites...we all have our weaknesses.

More substantively: Inner city and ghetto are very commonly conflated. Nothing took me aback as much as reading Australian fiction in which "inner city" was (I eventually figured out) a class marker, meaning "rich and upscale" neighborhood.

And the thing about the voucher debate is that it so often hinges on really idiosyncratic definitions: "You don't want poor, disadvantaged, non-white students with dedicated, well-educated parents to be able to go anywhere other than their neighborhood school! Racist!"

I do not want a buttsex voucher

Wait, they have buttsex vouchers? Like if I'm getting subpar buttsex, I can go elsewhere for it at the government's expense? Maybe I don't hate America after all.

Yes, I know that the upper upper West Side used to be a lot sketchier. And there are still a couple of tough, sad pockets; watching The Wire helped me identify a couple of corner crews, which was very exciting. But there are more variables than race to that neighborhood.

Yeah, I just didn't want to pull the unfair but very easy move of laughing at her for deriving urban street cred from growing up on the Upper West Side -- that's a ridiculous claim now, but not recently. (I, myself, have no particular toughness cred from a childhood in Stuyvesant Town, unless I truthfully but misleadingly claim that it was a project. But even that neighborhood was much poorer when I was a kid -- downtown Manhattan didn't used to be uniformly rich the way it is now.)

Compared with even a generation ago, we appear to be moving toward a European pattern, where the central cities—the largest cities— are becoming enclaves of the rich, too expensive for the non-rich to live. Many Chicago neighborhoods, poor a very short time ago, are fast becoming unaffordable. And it's easy to find dismal, poor, run-down suburbs.

I am against all voucher systems on principle, too, for basically the same reasons as 6. I can't see them as anything but "Leave The Rest of the Children Behind!" programs.

Yeah, barring interesting real estate luck, an apartment big enough for a couple of kids in Manhattan south of 125th is really astonishingly unaffordable.

MattF, I agree that voucher discussions tend to be maddening, but there are a few genuine liberals, very smart and informed about this kind of thing, who think some kinds of voucher programs can improve things.

18: Chicago's a particularly interesting model, imho, because the lines of gentrification, radiating from the center, are so easy to observe -- seeing the [not-so-] slow creep of townhomes taking over Cabrini Green, for instance, block by block, pushing the poor relentlessly outward.

19: I'd say that about all actual systems I've seen advocated in the US, but a decent voucher system isn't inconceivable. Assuming standards (certified teachers required, a reasonable normal curriculum), a system like the one in Sweden -- vouchers pay the full cost of tuition and no additional payments are permitted, and schools are obliged to accept students on a first-come-first-served basis -- might work okay. But no one's advocating anything like that.

I wonder if this has anything to do with cars. When cars were introduced, they were mainly a luxury item, so the rich moved to suburbs so they could own cars. Now that cars are ubiquitous, the rich are moving back into cities, because cars have moved industry out into the suburbs and exurbs, and prime space has become a status symbol.

Speaking of cars, I live about 20 min from downtown Austin, and I hesitate to date someone going to UT, because they are carless and live downtown, and it's so hard for me to find parking down there, and taking the bus take over twice as long. (Like, 50 minutes as opposed to 20.) Am I just being a wuss about cities?

Addendum: I would totally support vouchers if it were to let kids of low-income parents go to schools that would otherwise be unavailable to them. Somehow, I suspect, the response to this from the usual voucher-advocate suspects would be a great deal of wailing and barred windows.

My experience has also been that vouchers are code for tax-supported religious schools and my only verbal response is a flat "fuck that noise."

Maybe I don't hate America after all.

They have them, but you have to have kids to qualify; this proves that the system is inherently broken and no amount of nanny-state socialism will ever fix it.

Face it, LB, Galt is down with the street and you ain't. That bitch is one mean MFing ho (or whatever it is that the young coloreds are saying these days).

I have kids! I want my government-sponsored buttsex!

Am I just being a wuss about cities?

Most likely the coed at UT is thinking that it would be such a pain to date someone who lives in the suburbs because it would mean spending 50 minutes on the bus. Symmetry!

Do you really want buttsex with a faceless bureaucrat? Actually, don't answer that.

Arggh! There's now someone in her comments telling me that: "Lizardbreath, everyone who has any knowledge of Washington Heights is rejecting your categorization." If you want to be technical, my kids school is about 200yds north of Washington Heights, in Inwood, but honestly, doesn't living in the neighborhood make me anyone?

Do you really want buttsex with a faceless bureaucrat?

You're missing the point, LB. It's a voucher system. The butt sex providers will have to accommodate me on a first come, first serve basis. I won't be limited to faceless bureaucratic buttsex anymore; I can go to the church-run buttsex centers, or wherever I want!

The purpose of vouchers is to break the power of the teacher's unions, not as an anti- labour move but because they reliably support Democrats. If we are going to redesign public education, let's take advantage of new technologies instead of putting a band aid on the Ninteenth Century warehouse model.

Left a comment over there. Was even polite.
---
pdf, you are either a wuss, or you like being single.

---
On the voucher issue, I'm not sure how it's supposed to work. It sounds great -- poor kid gets to go to a private school. But private schools only work as well as they do because they're allowed to be selective about students. So, I see lots of new schools popping up for the also-rans who couldn't get into the current schools even with the vouchers. They won't be as good or prestigious. But I see really nothing at all for the regular or special needs student, except to stay in a school that now has no money at all because everyone has vouchers.

8: Could we have a thread limited to comments about Galt's sex life and physical appearance? We might get national coverage if we did.

8-->30.

35: That's not Galt, it's a commenter. But I take your point generally.

28: No doubt. But I imagine a large percentage of the dating pool here (especially in my low-twenties age range) is UT students, so I'm afraid I might have to deal with this problem.

The butt sex providers will have to accommodate me on a first come, first serve basis.

I'd try to gin up an "invisible reach-around of the market" joke here but I'm too busy Beavis-giggling.

Dude, suck it up and take the bus, or develop mad parking skilz. There have to be places to park once you know where to look.

[Damn near everybody on this thread]—>30

39 to 38, obviously.

LB, it's starting to sound like "inner city" means "blighted hellhole that only those people go to or live in." In other words, it's starting to sound like that's a conversation that isn't going anywhere productive.

33: I don't know about that Cala. A few private schools are all about building a good curriculum for academically strong students. Plenty of them are about building a curriculum to help academically mediocre but financially gifted students do better on college entrances. Some schools successfully mix these two, I'm sure. I don't know how it plays out in the voucher discussion, mostly, but I'm pretty sure the private school doing better because it has better students is a special case, and doesn't have much impact on broader policy.

Well, yeah. Which really makes you wonder what sort of voucher driven schools are going to spring up to serve the residents of the blighted hellholes.

33. Exactly. Young Urban is not going to go to Harvard-Westlake or St. Bernards or Spence. (I don't don't know from Chicago, sue me). He or she will be going to Voucher Prep (motto: we'll fill out the paperwork for you!) The school will be marginally better than PS 123, because of self selection, i.e. parents that care. I shudder to think at those not included for whatever reason.

This thread didn't neeed to be this long. All she's saying is "Oops, by 'inner city' I didn't mean the inner part of the city, I meant the ghetto. And any sort of school in the ghetto where kids are coerced to attend with no other options is doomed."

I'd try to gin up an "invisible reach-around of the market" joke

Ah yes, the "invisible handjob."

43: I think the 'better students' issue isn't so much that they skim off an elite, but that they weed out the most troubled, say, third of the population -- a kid with weak English, or a behavior problem, or a learning disability gets turfed out of a private school, while public schools don't have that option. It's easier to teach if you don't have to deal with the most difficult students.

47: People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a daisy chain, or a game of soggy biscuit. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

"invisible handjob."

See, this is why libertarianism ultimately fails. The rich get all the buttsex they can buy, while the rest of us have to be contented with invisible handjobs and trickledown something or other.

46: But what she was resting on her description of inner city schools was a claim that vouchers were absolutely necessary -- that public schools for the poor were so bad that any change whatsoever would be an improvement. And at that point, it becomes relevant that not all schools that serve poor children are benighted hellholes.

The reason the voucher issue gets no traction (I'm agnostic, would support them if they aren't allowed to cherry-pick or beat the shit out of the kids, generally are held to the same standards the public schools are (all dealbreakers for the wingnuts of course)) is because the unreconstructed base of the GOP couldn't care less about them. They are more or less happy with the schools in their small towns and exurbs, and couldn't care less about the inner city schools one way of the other.

In short: the voucher issue was crafted to appeal to people who resent integration, but white flight took care of that already.

I think that a lot of the voucher thing is about tacit re-segregation on mostly-religious grounds, plus direct parental control of education.

Many of the school problems we hear about (especially students trapped in failing neighborhood schools) can be solved or alleviated with open enrollment within the state education system. Some form of this is in place in Minnesota, California, and about a dozen other states (none Eastern, and only Oklahoma and Arkansas remotely Southern).

There's not a lot of noise about open-enrollment. Partly because it doesn't help religious schools and doesn't hurt unions, but also because we don't want "those kids" in "failing schools" to be able to move into our "neighborhood schools". We want them to be able to go to their own non-union and prferably religious voucher schools.

I would like to point out that the UWS back in the 1970s was a pit. Did you ever see the move "Panic in Needle Park"? That was a movie about smack addicts on the UWS. Saying that the UWS was a good neighborhood back then because it was near Columbia (which was entirely walled in) is like saying that Washington Heights is a good neighborhood because it's so near the cloisters.

Jane is doing what she often does in arguments. She is making a statement, defining terms as she sees fit and then, when it turns out she has miss defined them, arguing that your definition is wrong. As someone who went to an "inner-city" elementary school and an "inner-city" high school (and yes, both were good. The elementary school inpart because it was the first school to have a Latino principal and the entire latino community rallied around the school. The High School was a NYC specialized HS) I can honestly say I got a better education at both of those places than I did in any of the private schools I attended.

I am against vouchers for a variety of reasons, the main one being how they ruin diversity of all kinds. If you have vouchers you end up with total stratfication. Why not just allow students school choice, which I think makes a great deal more sense.

I think that a lot of the voucher thing is about tacit re-segregation on mostly-religious grounds, plus direct parental control of education.

Correct. Didn't Utah recently pass laws that will make it extremely easy to create voucher schools, thus leading by the year 2040 to the complete disappearance of public schools and replacement by schools run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints?

You know, CDBG-eligibility would be a decent proxy for "inner-city". It's no doubt true that, since inner city was developed as a euphemism for "black" (and, a bit later, brown) neighborhood, its geographic descriptive value is minimal. But then, Galt's preferred def (no middle class) also eliminates any healthy black or Latino neighb. Which brings us back to ghetto. But, as we've seen, those who wish to can even define away "ghetto" if they need to.

I enjoyed that blogging-chefs thing, but to me it gave way too much credibility to Galt by equating her with Spencer. I mean, one of these people is the smartest young writers on Iraq we have, and the other likes to pretend that she has personal, insider knowledge on every topic she pulls out of her ass. I can't wait to read about the 5 years Megan spent teaching in a school that was actually on fire.

How much of urban parking is being familiar with the area, and how much just general parking skill?

53: That's true; I'd love to see first come-first served signup for all schools in the state. If you can get there, you can attend. Perhaps giving poorer children bumping rights.

54: True about the UWS (well, not all of it. The 70s and low 80s were pretty nice a long way back, but north of that was, as I said above, sketchy as anything.) Where'd you go to high school? You may be a classmate.

43, 48: That's right. It's not that the students are all smarter in private schools; it's just that private school doesn't have to accept, and thus spend the resources on, the problem kids, because they can always go to the public school. (This is especially important for relatively inexpensive parochial schools.)

46: Her entire argument goes like this: Public schools in the inner city are so awful nothing we can do could make them any worse. LB says: hey, wait a minute, my kids go to school in an inner city public school and it's pretty good. Galt: but that's not really an inner city school because you're rich. LB: but it's in a low-income, heavily immigrant area, and it's a success. Galt: It's not in the inner city because it's a success, you racist, thinking your school is in the inner city because it's in the center of the city and has several of the markers of what we mean by inner city but succesful schools.

57: 70/30. You mostly need to know where the spaces hide, but there is mystic urban parking-fu that I don't have. (Secret tip -- be willing to walk a couple of blocks further than you initially want to.)

43: But I'm not sure that's universally true. I really don't have much to base it on though, being far more familiar with schools in Canada than in the US (but not completely ignorant). Howerver, I knew some kids growing up that were complete disasters, but went to an expensive private school. They didn't get weeded out --- the school had the resources to deal with them and somewhat isolate them. So they weren't a disruption, so much. Granted, these kids had typically upper class problems (destructive tendencies (property and self), sense of entitlement, fancy drug addictions) which might be more amenable to counciling etc. than some issues.

59.2: Therefore her argument can now be summarized as "Some schools are awful. These schools are a subset of those that contain nothing but very poor children."

I think I'd summarized it as "Failing ghetto schools are failing ghetto schools."

I'd append 63 by: Anyone proposing a modification of the system that claims to address this, while actually providing a mechanism to avoid really having to do just that, is a complete asshole.

57, 60: I think LB is about right on the split - for me the biggest thing is understanding what spaces really get ticketed. In Pittsburgh, for instance, you can park anywhere but in front of a hydrant or in a handicapped space on a Sunday - and it gets more neighb-specific, too. But you also need to learn to spot a space a block or two away, get to it quickly, and claim it effectively. I have no idea how Austinians (?) drive, but most cities have universally-understood folkways on this matter.

The sad part will be when you break up with someone because there's no good parking near her apt.

I was about to leave a comment on that Jane Galt thread, but I couldn't do it. The whole thing is literally too stupid for words.

In Pittsburgh, if you can't parallel park, you're hosed.

61: I think the phenomenon you're describing - let's call it GWBism - is half the raison d'etre of elite private schools: provide entitled little shits with a safe environment in which to act out without harming their future prospects.

I went to a bland suburban NJ HS, but one of the big light bulbs that knocked me into greater racial understanding was to realize that the (really minor) shit I got away with would effectively end the future of a black kid at a city school - even a middle class black kid at a pretty good scool.

61: True, and private schools can be very helpful to kids with certain kinds of problems, particularly those that can be helped by more personal attention (I have a cousin who's doing much better academically now that he goes to private school). The key point, though, is that private schools don't have to accept anyone, so if a kid has problems the school doesn't want to deal with they just don't take him. Public schools, however, have to take everyone, so if there's a kid with serious problems they have to figure out what to do, and there are a disproportionate number of those kids in public school precisely because private schools don't take them.

You aren't crazy. McCardle should acknowledge -- and I would be shocked if she did not -- that there are schools in the midst of large cities that function well, and that change could make worse. Perhaps your childrens' school is one such.

So McCardle should have dropped the extreme statement rather than trying to define your school out of existence. But focusing on her hyperbole dodges, I think, the more important point she is making. Many urban public schools are in dire, dire condition. And these are schools where no upper-middle class professionals send their kids. Not one, not two, none. It is hard to understand how vouchers will hurt the children in these schools. It is likewise hard to understand how depriving the families of these children educational choice strikes a blow for social equality.

It is hard to understand how vouchers will hurt the children in these schools.

I can think of some ways.

Two points:

My understanding is that parents of poor minority children in e.g. Milwaukee and Cleveland strongly favored the voucher programs there, this makes me somewhat uneasy in opposition.

My mother was mostly raised in Washington Heights and my grandmother still lives there (and being a dutiful grandson I visit her sometimes). I vouch (on those bases) for its inner-citiness. If Galt wants to make some argument about how its median income is surprisingly high and it therefore doesn't qualify as inner-city (I have no reason to believe this is the case, but perhaps she can adduce evidence for it), she's free to do so. Until then she hasn't come close to meeting her burden in this argument.

It is similarly hard to figure out how vouchers will make those children's lives better, and they may injure children in currently functional schools.

As I said in the post, I'm not opposed to vouchers in principle, but pragmatically -- the actual programs I see advocated seem to mostly be vouchers that would not cover the full tuition at actually existing private schools. This sounds to me like a recipe for creating fly-by-night nightmares that will 'educate' children for the voucher and no more, where the genuinely poor children go, while parents who can pay send their kids to more expensive schools (many of which will also have to be new -- there aren't currently existing private school seats for the kids in failing public schools.)

I just don't see how that makes anything better.

And further to 70: Thanks for the 'not crazy' affirmation.

Hooray for LB for adeptly using "begs the question" in her initial exchange with Jane Galt. For those times when its use is ear-piercingly inapt, carry these (pdf; worth it).

Oh, that's awesome, Wrongshore.

75: Thanks for the encouragement, Wrongshore. Oh, wait. Nevermind.

69: Oh, I agree. I was just responding to the oversimplification that private schools increased preformance (insomuch as you can measure it) is due to a better pool of students. I think it's more complicated than that. I also think that real problem cases, whether due to behavioural/criminal/developmental issues are less likely to show up as a problem on indivudually based statistsics, as they are a drain on already stretched resources.

In addition to the poor black families supporting vouchers, there are also the people who don't think the government should be in the business of providing education, and more generally don't think that it's the government's job to do for people what they can't do for themselves. Not that this has anything to do with Jane Galt or her commenters.

"Inner city" schools have problems because kids bring in serious baggage from home. I think this is the biggest problem these schools face (OK, sorry, the second biggest: clearly the biggest is that the teachers working at these schools belong to a union). Peer group effects are probably pretty significant and this is why you see lots of segregation -- rich people move away from poor people, smart kids get separated from not so smart kids, etc. Vouchers can help children move into better situations but of course it's hard to imagine the worst-off kids necessarily doing better. Once we get vouchers I'm sure the libertarians will get working on this problem right away.

70: Can't you accomplish that by just letting kids in public schools register at other public schools besides the one in their district?

Ok, LB (who, let the word go forth from this time and place, is not crazy) it seems like you're willing to the following points. There are schools, maybe many schools, that no upper-middle class people send their kids to and which are really bad. Further, while it is of course possible for the students enrolled in these schools to get worse educations, it is in fact unlikely under most actually proposed voucher plans (e.g., ones that offer some regulation of voucher schools). Do you in fact grant this?

If so, it seems like an argument for experimentation. Contra that we have: 1) the claim that vouchers, although unlikely to harm children in the worst schools, will in fact harm children in better schools, 2) a concern that insufficient voucher payments + 'topping up' will lead to a two-tiered system. I am unsur what mechanism will result in #1. How would the availability of vouchers for poor families in the Bronx undermine the education available at your good public school? Is this a funding concern or do you imagine some other mechanism? If the latter, would you object to a system that tried to ensure that the public school system only lost the true 'variable cost' when a student vouvhered out?

As for the concern that genuinely poor kids will go to bad voucher schools, while rich families will "top-up" and send their kids to expensive schools. I suppose I wonder how this is worse than the the current system wherein rich families buy houses in good school districts and poor families are stuck with no choice whatsoever. But then, I am operating from a very strong prior that more choice = better outcomes...

Can't you accomplish that by just letting kids in public schools register at other public schools besides the one in their district?

That sounds like a great start. Likewise, allowing more entry by charter schoools is a great start. And these could be excellent public reforms. The question is: what is the point of ensuring that education of poor and lower middle-class children is exclusively provided by the public system? Is it because we believe it improves educational outcomes for the poor, or because we believe it achieves goals unrelated to outcome? The former does not seem plausible. The latter does, in fact, but there will undoubtably be disagreement on what those goals should be.

Further, while it is of course possible for the students enrolled in these schools to get worse educations, it is in fact unlikely under most actually proposed voucher plans (e.g., ones that offer some regulation of voucher schools).

Actually, I don't -- I haven't seen plans that reassure me as to the establishment of minimum quality for the startup schools that would be necessary to make vouchers work on any non-experimental scale at all. This is a pragmatic detail, not a matter of principle, but it's not something I'm comfortable handwaving my way past at all.

Part of my problem with the idea that schools are a good venue for letting the market sort out who's effective is that barriers to change are high -- any decent parent is going to resist changing their child's school on a whim -- and school quality is fairly opaque from outside, and absolutely opaque for a school without a track record.

If what we're worried about is the poorest children, with the poorest parents, they are also the parents least likely to be informed and skillful choosers between their educational options -- I don't see what keeps them from getting taken by schools with no capacity or intent to educate. I want failing schools fixed (I'd be fine with free choice among public schools) I just don't see vouchers as an obvious route to that.

83

What is your definition of a "failing school"?

A school where a substantial portion of the students emerge with educational deficits that will hamper them in later life.

85

So all we have to do is spread the failing students out so they are less noticeable and the problem is solved?

Your point, as I understand it, is that poor students come into schools doomed and leave doomed --'failing' schools merely appear so because their student bodies are made up of collections of these pre-doomed students. I disagree with you about this as a matter of fact: I believe many students in 'failing' schools would do better in better schools. I'm just not clear that vouchers will get them there.

It is hard to understand how vouchers will hurt the children in these schools. It is likewise hard to understand how depriving the families of these children educational choice strikes a blow for social equality.

I don't know what you call this -- "the argument from disaster"?

Suppose I go to Thailand like Kristoff and buy a 12-year-old girl who's being sold into sex slavery. What could I do to her that would be worse than the alternative? So really, whatever I do is OK, right. [Thank you! Note that I didn't mention Hitler at all.]

The worst schools are being used by people with nationwide education agendas to justify completely transforming our educational system. In cases like this you can always say "This certainly won't make things any worse, and it might make them better."

To continue: As Cala notes in 80, kids in failling ghetto schools could be allowed to transfer to any school in the city. In fact, all parents anywhere could be allowed to transfer to any school in the city. (I suggested this above).

This is not a popular solution, though, because the promoters of voucher schools know that non-ghetto parents do NOT want "kids from failing urban schools" coming to the school their kid goes to. They want new school established to put the ghetto kids in.

How would the availability of vouchers for poor families in the Bronx undermine the education available at your good public school?

Nobody believes that the people promoting vouchers plan for their program to be limited to failing urban schools. Their goal is for all parents eventually to be able to use public money to send their kids to church schools.

I could say that I think that nationwide open enrollment should be the start , and once we see how well it works, we could think of additional reforms. But if I said that, even though it makes sense to me, it would just be a sly dodge, because I'm confident that most advocates of vouchers want more segregation, not less. If their kids are still in the public schools, they don't want a bunch of kids from failing urban schools showing up at their "neighborhood school".

I wouldn't immediately grant the first part of 81, either. I can imagine several ways things could get worse, mostly do with resources.

87

My point is your definition of a failing school says far more about the composition of the student body than about the quality of the school. Any definition of "better schools" that just looks at outcomes without adjusting for the quality of the students is ridiculous.

92: Not quite, student body composition does make things difficult, but it doesn't stop there. Any definition of `quality of students' that doesn't adjust for environment & the school resources etc. is even more ridiculous.

In some of these issues, there actually isn't a way to make an apples & apples comparison. The best (most objective) position you can then take is to assume that all else being equal, students from everywhere are about the same. Then you not that all things are not equal, and attempt to address the parts that you can (by equalizing, or counteracting, or whatever is practiclle).

I suppose it would be rude at this point to ask what exactly is our goal in public education? Prepare everyone for college, or just the brightest? Make sure everyone can read a menu and make correct change, or understand that being an informed citizen means learining even boring stuff like history. I fear we have a wide distribution of goals, so no one policy "fits".

94

My policy would be simple, spend the same amount on every student and do the best you can for them with that money.

As Cala notes in 80, kids in failling ghetto schools could be allowed to transfer to any school in the city.

We already have this. It's part of NCLB.

Yes, and it's not a full solution to the problem, either, for several reasons. One is the simple fact that transporting a kid to and from a school that's not near where you live takes time and money, and usually requires a reliable working car.

Which is why we're going to need a second car before PK starts school next year. Good thing we can afford it, huh?

Yeah, but only if the school is certified as failing.

What I actually meant to say was that every student in every school should be allowed to attend any school he and his parents choose, which is actually the case in several states.

98. How does that work? Are the kids bussed or do the parents provide the transport. And how geographically distant are the students allowed to go? Is there a funds transfer to the receiving school?

98: presumably there must be some lottery to deal with the situation of 1000 students wanting to go to a school that only has room for 500... yes?

Maybe they should just make PTA fundraisers illegal...

Round here, we've had some damn trouble with charter schools--there's been a type of "school choice" program which has somehow encouraged a lot of charters, mostly of the "failing black children need more discipline, goddamn it' variety. In my neighborhood alone, I've seen four charter schools started in the last five years. Three have failed; one is relatively new. We also had a big scandal about a failed "for profit" school nearby.

Most of these places have insufficient funds and lousy buildings. (That's another thing, how are all these "new" schools going to raise money for buildings?) They operate out of storefronts and disused light-industrial spaces. They are based on stupid new pedagogical methods, can't afford to pay much, don't retain teachers, don't have a lot of administrative infrastructure, etc. It's really hard to start a good-sized charter school.

Now, this wouldn't matter much if they were just like any other business, but what happens is kids start one year in one school, and then it collapses, so they get part of a year of decent instruction and part of a year of collapse. Then it's off to somewhere else for another year. This isn't good for kids.

It isn't good for teachers, either, since they don't get much of a chance to practice with the students and get used to the system.

Some things really require lots of money, long term planning and a good quality infrastructure to work well--they can't function on republican/libertarian platitudes, cheapjack funding and air.

Way back in 70, the state of play in the Cleveland school system has accurately been described. The problem seems to be two-fold: children in failing schools are disproportionately likely to have parents who are uninterested in or incapable of navigating the bureaucratic waters to get their children into better schools, and cities with failing schools are disproportionately likely to have governments incapable of efficiently regulating schools outside (or, to be fair, even inside) the public school system. The Republican-dominated state legislature put together a charter school law that was a textbook example of how not to put together a charter school law, the city failed to shut down egregious offenders, and you ended up with clusterfucks like this.

102: Cleveland, meet Minneapolis, huh?

I actually like Cleveland quite a lot.

New Mexico had a brief and unsuccessful experiment with vouchers a few years ago. It was a totally absurd thing to do, actually, given that the state constitution specifically forbids giving public money to private schools.

Cleveland likes you too, Frowner. It just has a funny way of showing it. Don't make any sudden movements, okay?

San Francisco has an open enrollment school system that uses a complicated lottery system for the schools that a lot of people want. A lot of poorer parents just pick the local school while well off parents work hard to game the system (not always successfully though).

Here is a positive reason article about it:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/33293.html

Open enrollment isn't a cureall. I mostly mention it because it's possible (and actual), a pretty good thing in its small way, and unattractive to resegregationists, religionists, and union busters.

unattractive to resegregationists, religionists, and union busters.

Given that antagonizing those three groups is an unqualified good, I'm all for it.

I think that a lot of the voucher thing is about tacit re-segregation on mostly-religious grounds, plus direct parental control of education.

Yes, this. While I'm willing to buy that there are pro-voucher parents who have a spreadsheet somewhere telling them this really is the best thing for Precious my experience has been that 90% of the pro-voucher people care a lot more about three things unrelated to the curriculum: class, color and congregation.

TLL raises The Big Question about what is the real purpose of schools and public education. I bet if you ask ten teachers you'd get eleven answers. I could express how I value it in a lot of ways but I'd be the first to admit that one of those values I think it helps introduce and enforce is that society is a big ol' diverse mash-up of people and having to sit next to them in class might be pretty good practice for working next to them in twenty years.

In the UK, we've had a range of policies aimed at "increasing choice" in schools since the Thatcher 80s, including various charterlike entities, but stopping short of vouchers.

Upshot: where there is an effective choice of schools (i.e. in major urban centres), a small subset of them have a good reputation and good test results, and are therefore permanently oversubscribed. Matching this to a zero sum, we have a further subset of schools with a bad reputation that shed kids towards the first group, thus ending up with both a difficult intake and one that is shrinking, hence progressively less funding.

You can theoretically send your kids to any state school, but when the school has more applications than chairs, they are obliged to prefer kids from their catchment area. Result: rich people buy houses around good-reputation schools, thus getting their kids in at the expense of everyone else.

Some areas are now experimenting with allocating school places at random.

Result: rich people buy houses around good-reputation schools, thus getting their kids in at the expense of everyone else.

Happens in Chicago too, as in Lincoln Park, where my son has been going to school. Many people have told the principal explicitly they've done exactly that to have their children go to his school.

You can theoretically send your kids to any state school, but when the school has more applications than chairs, they are obliged to prefer kids from their catchment area. Result: rich people buy houses around good-reputation schools, thus getting their kids in at the expense of everyone else.

Yeah, this is the problem -- I'd favor first-come first-served, or a system giving disadvantaged kids (low income? bad local school?) bumping rights. A problem with any kind of school choice program that's anything other than transparently simple and unmanipulable is that wealthier people will manipulate it. There's a lot you can do in NYC to get your kid in the public school you want, but it all involves a whole lot of specific knowledge and wheedling/manipulation skills -- the result is that it increases rather than decreasing stratification.

Eh. The rich kids are going to be favored either way with school choice. Either their parents will take advantage of catchment rules and buy property in the school district that's strong. (This really doesn't make them evil, by the way. Any of you parents *not* consider the quality of the schools you'd be sending your child to?) If we get rid of the catchment laws, though, the good local school in a poorer area is going to be flooded with applicants, meaning that the kids who live right next to a good school have to go somewhere else to a lesser school.

The question is which system is more easily gameable. I'm inclined to think it's probably easier to game an open-but-not-random system than a system than to buy a house near a good school. Plus, I think there's something to be said for the school having something to do with the community that surrounds it. Open-with-preference-for-local-kids keeps it from being segregated, but also keeps the school tied to the town.

I haven't read any of this thread, but I'm totally comfortable with income stratification, test-score stratification, etc. At a minimum, I'd like to know precisely how bad things are, and go on from there. Right now, LB's kids disguise some small part of the problem, it seems to me.

(This really doesn't make them evil, by the way. Any of you parents *not* consider the quality of the schools you'd be sending your child to?)

Of course it doesn't make them evil, the point is that the non-evil things they do to protect their own children have negative externalities. Because wanting to do something doesn't make you a bad person doesn't make it a harmless thing to do.

I think it's traditional to mention ponies at this point, not to mention the "Decent Left" justification for war with Iraq...

Another issue here is something similar to the "adverse selection death spiral" encountered by some US health insurers. Namely, the sicker your members, the more it costs to run, but you can't put up the contributions because they can't afford it, so you keep them down to draw in more customers, which means you're the only insurer who'll take the sick people, and so on.

More selection just means, at bottom, that a school that starts off badly will lose the "nice middle-class kids", will see test results fall and less capitation money, will have a surplus of places...which turn out to be the only spare places for the kids squeezed out of the others by the fleeing NMCKs..hence you get permanent deterioration. Given that the freedom to move between schools isn't evenly distributed, you will have some population of able, poor kids in the shitty school who can't move away and have to suffer.

Now, if you assume constant returns to schooling, it's a wash, a zero-sum game. But if you assume that diminishing returns apply, as they usually do, well. Marginally improving Tarquin's school in Leafy Vale is going to be less, perhaps far less, significant for him than improving Stacy's in Asbo Towers by the same amount, so that would suggest the whole thing is a net loss to society.

But if you assume that diminishing returns apply, as they usually do, well.

I would think that education would be an area where the case is exactly opposite the one you've described. We're more or less willing to concede that intellectual performers at the very, very high end of the spectrum are much more valuable than similar performers at the high end of the spectrum. I'm not sure why the case would be different for the creation of such performers.

I think that's a separate issue -- the very small population of brilliant children isn't particularly well served by even the schools we think of as good. Better services for the highly gifted is probably a good and socially useful thing, but it's not an obvious tradeoff from equalizing schools across socioeconomic lines.

I think that's a separate issue -- the very small population of brilliant children isn't particularly well served by even the schools we think of as good.

I'm not sure the benefit is limited to brilliant children. The truth, I think, is that there's something like a series of antes with education: you have to be this smart/well-educated/etc. to get the benefits of this level of education. And it's hard not to believe, when you read about some of these schools, that we're educating them just enough to show some increases in funding- or voter-approval-related scores, but not enough to meet the relevant ante. And my suspicion is that we end up diminishing the available ante for smart poor kids by grouping them with problem kids. I wish there was something like a magnet program that was more or less restricted to the less fortunate. Right now, I have a really hard time believing that we're not screwing a small, but not that small, group of students for the purpose of feeling better about ourselves.

A former gifted child speaks (of course, all Unfoggers are former gifted children): It would have done me a damn sight more good to learn how to interact with the normals than to sparkle with the fancy smart people. I don't really buy this "let's have extra fancy education for everyone who tests off the charts so that they'll grow up and cure cancer", partly because I've grown up and turned into a good secretary.

Also, as I recall from when I got my teaching certificate, you get better results for all when you teach everyone the enriched "gifted" curriculum.

Most curriculum is really boring. It's boring for the smart, it's boring for the dumb. Most kids can't read very well, and the ones that can often coast through without learning to read in complex ways.

The Europeans seem to teach more rigorous stuff even in regular schools--at least, even the average Europeans I've met had a better education than I did in the fancy program at my good school. I'd sure like to see what curriculum improvements would bring about before making any serious "save the smart kids so they'll save us, who cares about the dumb ones" moves.

115: It was just that some of the comments were taking on the form of "It would have worked, too, except for those meddling rich people." Okay then, but you go to school with the parents you have, you know? And one of the things people do is try to move to areas with good local schools.

It was just that some of the comments were taking on the form of "It would have worked, too, except for those meddling rich people." Okay then, but you go to school with the parents you have, you know?

Sure -- not being evil doesn't mean that they aren't the problem. If schools aren't going to be identical across the board, the big problem is how to keep the better-informed and better-connected parents from sucking up all the spaces in the good schools. You don't have to judge them, but you do have to stop them.

120: I think that's right -- in those schools where basic literacy isn't a problem, I think our system is weirdly low on content. There's room for an awful lot more to be taught to the A, B, and C students, and I don't think that sort of increased rigor puts coping significantly further out of reach for the students who aren't coping now. (It doesn't solve anything for the students who aren't coping now, but it doesn't put much further out of reach.)

any serious "save the smart kids so they'll save us, who cares about the dumb ones" moves.

I don't think we need to "save the smart kids so they'll save us." I think we need to save them because right now they're being fucked. As for "who cares about the dumb ones," we don't appear to care about them right now. It's just that they have more company. I guess that's egalitarian: if we can't make things better for everyone, don't make things better for anyone.

120: The idea that a European high school degree was the equivalent of a US college degree had currency back in the fifties. I went to a public school system ranked just under the Exeters and Andovers, where about 98% of the kids went on to college, and where the place was leavened by the children of UN personnel, and was totally bored. My pre-signed pads of library passes saved some portion of my sanity.

They're part of the problem, but what sort of workable system are you imagining that eliminates the influence of income on education altogether? I think if you just make the school placements random, EmmaJacob's parents decide it's better to pull them to the private schools than take the risk that they end up at P.S. Burning Tower.

123: Oh, puh-leaz. (Well, actually, I don't mean it that sarcastically) How exactly do the smart kids suffer worse than the dumb ones, except for being bullied? (That's assuming that "smart" and "dumb" are relatively fixed....which I doubt a lot.)

Right now, I contend that no one learns anything much at school between about second grade and late in high school. Or rather, you learn to sit still, you learn a lot of harmful behaviors of one kind and another, and you learn to be bored. I think that's just as true if you're "gifted" as if you're "average". Smart kids have it, if anything, better because they can race through the work and then do their own thing. I probably spent about half my day--back then--reading and writing whatever I wanted while still pulling high grades. Would that I could do this now!

122: It's even worse than that (the low content). Actuall understanding is being traded off for checkbox items that often absorb material that used to be considered college level. For example, high schoolers used to spend more time on algebra and mathematical problem solving. Now they spend much of that on calculus. But even the better high school level calculus curriculums aren't that good, and the students don't understand much anyway. So now you get students that are often worse off than before the shift in curriculum, since they don't understand calculus but they also don't understand the foundational stuff. And the universities are forced to redo all the calculus material anyway. This really isn't an improvement at all.

126: Well, I don't know if `suffer' is the right word. But I got so fed up with all of it I left after 10th grade. I think I would generally considered to be one of the `smart kids'. I guess I had less capacity for boredom under constraints than you did ...

125: Good private schools are pretty expensive, and public schools can be influenced and improved by engaged parents with the capacity to make trouble. The hope would be that you'd get a significant population of parents who now huddle together in a few enclaves spread out among more schools, and that they decide that the marginal cost of getting their kids a decent education by making a fuss about conditions in the schools they're in is lower than by writing checks to private schools. It might not work perfectly, but it might do some good.

oh, 128 shoudn't be taken as an endorsement of the idea that concentrating resources on `gifted' kids is the right thing to do.

128: But you see, I wasn't bored. All I really wanted to do was read books and think about them, idly or systemically as the mood struck me. And the work was either so easy that it didn't matter or wrestle-able into an interesting format (I liked writing papers in French class, for example, because I could write as I please as long as my French was good enough.

I maintain, though, that a major intensification of the curriculum would help everyone a lot, and at that point we'd be able to make better decisions about tracking. Even when I was student teaching junior high in an average school, I was struck by how much smarter most of the kids were than the curriculum would suggest.

126: As I said, I haven't read the thread, so perhaps we're talking about different sets of kids. But I don't know how one can look at statistics like this and not think that we're failing some subset of the kids who could be doing much better.

132: Yeah, but we're discussing the wrong subset. Education is cumulative. The steps that give you the most benefit of the whole process are literacy and numeracy - compare the extra benefit the gifted kids will get from an extra hour of physics to the extra benefit the poor kids will get from being functionally literate. Diminishing returns hold. After all, the kids who will be selected for the rocket scientist stream are also the ones who are likely to learn independently - will it really help them to be chained to school for longer when they could be installing Linux on a motorbike engine management system or, well, dancing? If they are so smart, shouldn't they be trusted to make use of their time?

But if your education is drastically *worse*, you don't have a chance to learn independently, because you don't have the skills or the cultural imperatives to do so, never mind the empowerment.

It's my opinion that gifted-and-talented programs are just another handout to the elite, and probably a very inefficient one. The entire academic-intellectual complex is designed to get the smart kids and aim more resources at them anyway, on a scale from primary school to post-doctoral research.

I think the point on which we disagree is this: I think that most kids are badly served by most schools, and that a better, richer, more rigorous curriculum would improve things substantially for everyone. Only at that point would it make sense--to me--to design any specialized programs. This country has spent a lot of time on pull-out programs, and on inclusion, and on testing and on enrichment all with the aim of serving various groups and often by contradictory means.

But then, what exactly do I mean by "richer" and "more rigorous"? That's more than I can figure out this minute, but it seems to be a particularly knotty problem with my position.

On the whole, I think, I don't like schools much.

I learned hardly anything at school--I think I took about five classes in high school where I actually gained a reasonable amount of knowledge.

Diminishing returns hold. After all, the kids who will be selected for the rocket scientist stream are also the ones who are likely to learn independently - will it really help them to be chained to school for longer when they could be installing Linux on a motorbike engine management system or, well, dancing?

I agree entirely. But I think that within the set of really poorly performing kids, there are likely to be kids that are significantly more able than the greater whole. They might not be academic superstars--perhaps rocket science is well beyond them--but, jeebus, the space between a 400 on the SATs math and "rocket science" is gigantic, and I think there are likely to be benefits to any increase in scores for anyone in that population, particularly for the best performers among them. Insofar as we think of education as a means of bringing people up the social ladder, we ought to be doing more to help those people best able, within that population, to get up to actually get up.

On the whole, I think, I don't like schools much.

I learned hardly anything at school--I think I took about five classes in high school where I actually gained a reasonable amount of knowledge.

Shit, yeah.

The thing is, I think the kids in that population need two things -- solid literacy, which lets you move ahead at your own pace, and a social sense that there's going to be a return from academic accomplishment. And both of those come (IMO) from economically integrated schools.

135: Well, in that case, we should be aiming at egalitarianism, not selection, because it's precisely the pool of really bad schools selection creates that is the problem.

And both of those come (IMO) from economically integrated schools.

Yeah, this is where we disagree, I think. I'm more of a "Talented Tenth" guy, perhaps.

A further point is whether the people who join the gifted-and-talented stream really are the gifted and talented, as opposed to dullard boxtickers with pushy parents. Most of the smartest people I've ever met wouldn't have gone near such a thing, precisely because it would be full of conformist dullards.

I mean, have you ever *seen* Jon Postel?

Alex is right, of course.

This has been argued here before of course.

And to reiterate, fuck the Talented Tenth -- they can generally look after themselves* ...

* given the sort of basic literacy/chance to move at their own pace and/or amuse themselves provisos already mentioned by LB ...

It would have done me a damn sight more good to learn how to interact with the normals than to sparkle with the fancy smart people.

Yup. My folks kept me out of gifted, and I am thankful for it.

My folks kept me out of gifted

Sure, "your folks" kept you out...

The idea that I deserved any special treatment for being smart would never have occurred to my parents (as far as I know) and it certainly wasn't an issue at school.

Don't want to be unnecessarily catty but there does tend to be a fair bit of 'poor little smart kid' self-pity floating about. Fuck that, frankly.

I highly recommend summer programs as places that attract the genuinely gifted (and not just the people with pushy parents).

Can't say much about school, since I didn't go to school.

deserved any special treatment for being smart

I think we've gone over this before, but it isn't special treatment, it's just a class that moves faster. There's no reason to throttle kids down to the speed of slower learners.

The place where differences btw are most painful is middle school/junior high. My daughter went all the way through at our local, where we were big Machers; it was painful and the teaching/curriculum wasn't good. Our son we got into a very selective magnet for 6-8. I'm glad of it, and he's seen a bit more of the world, but he'll be back to a very good but more diverse HS next year.

re: 47

In the real world, it usually DOES work out as special treatment, as we all know. It equals smaller class sizes, more one one one time with teachers, more resources, more interesting activities.

Separate but equal it isn't.

I can only speak to my own experience, but it certainly didn't equal smaller class sizes or more one on one time with teachers.

Our gifted program in elementary school meant that once a week I didn't have to go to reading class and got to play logic games on the computer. It wasn't really a lot of one-on-one time. In middle school, that stops completely and they just track the kids into different difficulties of coursework.

150 is largely in accord with my experience. My AP classes (which were weirdly and unfortunately folded into the gifted program, meaning that you were not eligible to take them (!) unless you met the IQ and other testing requirements for gifted classes) were a bit of an exception, though.

This came up before, I believe, and there was quite a wide range of different 'gifted' programs. Some involving little in the way of additional resources and time and some involving quite a lot ...

Most 'streaming' that I've seen here tends to result in smaller classes and more teacher time for the brighter kids -- not by design but if you have a 'top' class for some subject there generally tends to be fewer people in that class than in the 'middle' class -- but clearly that doesn't happen everywhere.

At my school you weren't locked into your track, either. It was more of a guideline, but if you were pushy, you could get into the harder courses.

Some of the courses were smaller. AP Chemistry had the reputation for being the toughest course in the school (it was), and it only had about twelve students. But that's about the only one that was noticeably smaller. English, math, history, the class sizes were comparable.

I don't really understand the sentiment in 120 and 143. Since I've left my hometown I've lived in university environments in smart smart cities. Even if I left academia and got a job, it would be a job with the extremely smart in Mountain View or Manhattan. No one I interact with now or will in the future in an important way is a "normal." All the "normals" are still in small town Pennsyltucky hanging out in the parking lot at the 24 hour Sheetz and wishing they were still in highschool. The few genuinely gifted people I knew growing up didn't learn much from interaction with the "normals" they learned a lot more about life when they got to college and smart people were allowed to be normal.

Gifted streaming also often ends up with better teachers, because all the teachers want to teach the gifted kids, since it means they can do more interesting material.

146 - did you go to one of those summer programs?

157: Yeah, went to two different ones during highschool/middleschool, taught at one of those during college, and teach at yet a different one during the summers now. The one I went to in middleschool was large and had lots of subjects, the other two were math-only.

Mountain View or Manhattan? That seems like an odd pair to choose between.

re: 156

In our high school the English department dealt with that problem by giving the top English class and the bottom English class to the same teacher, each year. With the particular teacher alternating (between the two or three acknowledged 'best' teachers) each year.

159: There aren't so many places that hire Math Ph.D.'s with little actual training in something else to high-paying jobs with not-totally-obscene hours. I wouldn't *live* in Mountain View, of course.

158 - I ask bc I went to one in Western North Carolina and loved the people so very much that I always harbor a secret fantasy of bumping into them as adults.

Sorry heebie-geebie, I can't fulfill that fantasy of yours.

Maybe I dreamt the whole thing.

I moved around a great deal, and so experienced four or five different gifted programs, ranging from a parent teaching three-digit number addition during a kindergarten recess to a full-day program at another school with mini-courses in Spanish and medieval history. At the time, I thought those gifted programs were my lifeblood, since it was the only place I didn't get beaten up. Now, I wonder if it wouldn't have been a helluva lot easier to have gone to a regular elementary school, but one that discouraged beating kids up and offered more interesting material all around.

Such places exist. I used to nanny for a family in Ohio whose kid was a super-smarty, but with Asperger's--an exaggerated version of my finesselessness in grade school--and I could see the other kids aching to bust his lip, but no one did. The school's "theme" was valuing difference, or whatever, and you could see it really worked, even on the playground. They might not want him playing kickball with them, but everyone kinda rolled their eyes and said he could play. He was certainly getting more out of "regular" school than I did.

Yeah, gifted classes were also a port-in-a-storm for me. Especially in middle school. Wow, does middle school suck.

Heebie-geebie, which program in western NC did you go to? Perhaps we've met.

It would have done me a damn sight more good to learn how to interact with the normals than to sparkle with the fancy smart people

Perhaps our experiences were wholly different, but this doesn't accord with mine at all. GT for me meant 50 minutes a day of math class and 50 minutes a day of English class. The rest of my classes were with everybody else, and the rest of my time was spent in church, sports, band, and playing with the kids in my neighborhood. I had entirely more interaction with "the normals" than with the other kids in my English and math classes.

The Apostropher, always fulfilling the fantasies that I can't.

167 - The Cullowhee Experience

(gotta go teach. Postpone the tearful reunion for 1 1/2 hrs.)

Nope. I was at App State's Summer Science Program. Any other fantasies I might fulfill?

church, sports, band, and playing with the kids in my neighborhood

And many hours stocking groceries at the local Kroger.

167: Well, although I spent a lot of time in regular track classes up until high school, the underlying philosophy of all classrooms was that there were the smarty-smart-smartpants people, and the regular people, and the slow people, and that the job of the teacher was to dole out appropriate material to each already-decided-upon category. And in fact, since the smarty-smarts were the only ones with significant pull-out stuff, there was a perception that they were different, that being "smart" was their "role", etc. Looking back, I really think that I got picked on much more about the time that the gifted and talented stuff started, because that created a perception on everyone's parts that I (and the other people in the program) weren't just the Friendly Neighborhood Oddballs but were menacingly special, possibly resentably destined for Great Things, and certainly given more field trips.

172: We were not, however, given any meaningful grammar instruction.

"because that created a perception on everyone's parts that I (and the other people in the program) weren't just the Friendly Neighborhood Oddballs but were menacingly special, possibly resentably destined for Great Things"

You really believe that?

Yeah, my AG/GT program meant that three of my seven classes a day were faster-paced but in all the others I was on the standard state curriculum. I did not feel terribly singled out. The AP classes were much smaller but that's because they had more rigorous placement testing and prereqs. Not everyone in the AP classes were students in the AG classes, though. Anyone who could place into AP could take AP. (The qualifications for getting into AG/GT were different and somehow more rigid while still lower in some way I never quite understood.)

As an FYI, the AG/GT program in my schools tended to be understaffed and the classes tended to be larger than the other classes I was in. Needless to say, all classes were far too large.

174: Well, I believe we got more field trips. And I believe that in my school there was some resentment about the gifted and talented stuff.

Are you reading it as "believe that people were destined for great things"? In that case, no, of course I don't believe that. I do believe that in a competitive suburban school where there was a lot of parental wrangling, the gifted and talented program did not contribute to inter-child amity, and I believe that because I was there.

I mean, I was a horrible little child. I would have benefitted from a lot more social suffering, but the key is that it should have been a different kind of social suffering so that I wouldn't have grown up in such a way that I am from some perspectives both pompous and unbearable.

I'd certainly believe that the perception existed. We've gone around on this before a couple of times, and I think there may be a real cultural US/UK difference here -- while there's a limit to how much whining anyone is justified in doing about it, being perceived as unusually intelligent is pretty likely to be a severe social negative in a lot of US schools. I'm getting the impression that that really isn't the case at all in your experience, and so you're not crediting all of the people saying how socially difficult it was for them being perceived as bright kids by their peers. Now, there's probably a better solution for that than isolating the bright kids so they don't get pecked to death, but it is a real problem for a lot of children, and for some of us who lived through it, it's hard not to be sentimentally attached to tracking as having removed us from unpleasant situations.

It occurs to me that what we're saying here is really "There are different kinds of gifted programs which, in different schools, have different results. Some work well, some don't."

Wait, LB, I am sentimentally attached to tracking. I'm sentimentally attached to the idea that I am just so very clever and perceptive. I sure didn't mind being in the gifted and talented classes. But they weren't good for me. (And I don't claim that every smart kid was as intolerable as I was, but I was smug, I know I was smug. And oblivious to things that didn't immediately interest me.)

In my teacher training, the sensitive left-liberal types were all rigorously against tracking and equally rigorously against the idea of the poor victimized bullied child who is all special. This seemed weird to me at the time, but as a broad generality I think it's fairly sensible.

Frowner -- Sorry, the 'you' in 177 was nattarGcM. Your experience sounds something like mine -- I'm attached to tracking as what let me stop being a complete pariah, but I don't necessarily think it's a good idea: more rigorous coursework all around and some attention to how to stop kids from ill-treating each other sounds more sensible. NattarGcM seems not to get a large part of what makes people attracted to isolating the bright kids at all, though, and I get the impression that it's because bright kids take less shit in the UK.

re: 177

I'm not saying that there wasn't a stigma attached to a lot of smart kids in my school, either. Just that the stigma was because of social awkwardness, or being perceived (often with fucking good reason) as snobbish or withdrawn, or (for some unfortunate sods) just being funny looking rather than the smartness itself.

It was always my impression that really smart kids who were otherwise like everyone else didn't suffer any particular bullying or discrimination other than that experienced by everyone else. And part of why the whining annoys me (and I am aware I can be a bit 'chippy' about it) is that 'being like everyone else' is, at least partly, something that's under a kid's own control.

The smart kids at my school who had a hard time, one one level, fuck 'em -- they were stuck up little shits a lot of the time who really did think they were better than other people. And one of the things that contributed to them being stuck up little shits was the fact that some people did tell them they were special or different .. and, well, that wasn't helping, was it?

Now, for some kids, it really is hard to integrate and not everyone can be socially adept and good at mixing with a spectrum of other kids so we want to allow for that in our school system and in the way we train our children and our teachers but -- and I know I am probably being unfair about this -- the level of 'smart self-pity' just winds me up.

Chad Orzel has on occasion stated his opinion that while at the time he thought he was being picked on for being so much smarter than everyone else that it intimidated them, he now realizes that he got picked on because he was socially inept, and he wishes that he could go back in time and point this out to his younger self. It had the uncomfortable ring of truth to me.

ttaM-pwned.

re: 182

Yes, exactly.

You know, I'm sure I deserved a fair amount of the treatment I got for being an irritating little freak, but that doesn't explain why I went from pariah to non-pariah when I moved to a selective high school (likewise with MIT students -- a whole lot of students enter MIT as completely socially non-functional freshmen, and emerge pretty normal four years later, because they've finally been able to interact with people without the stigma of being unusual.)

I'm not disagreeing with you about policy -- a fair part of what happened to me in grade school was the result of being waved in front of my classmates as the most adorably brilliant thing ever, which understandably made them hostile, and teachers who could have refrained from doing that would have made my life much easier. But being socially isolated as a result of being perceived as unusually intelligent isn't always or exclusively within the control of the victim.

But being socially isolated as a result of being perceived as unusually intelligent isn't always or exclusively within the control of the victim.

Of course you're right.

But I'd maintain that's under the control of the 'victim'* more often than a lot of people would be comfortable admitting.

* or at least not the inevitable result of their being 'smart' ...

There's a bit of a chicken egg issue too. Sometimes you become a stuck up little git as armor. Opposite direction as LB, I went from happy socially successful kid to pariah once I moved from a public school in a rich area where the kids were generally taught to respect and value education to a public school in a poor area where they weren't. The stuck up little gitness came after a lot of personal and sexual taunting, as a defense mechanism.

Well, it's not smartness per se that causes bad social consequences; it's the complex of attitudes around smartness, mostly. But then, if you're "smarter" (really, if you read more books or even watch an unusual array of TV shows)--or have an unusual upbringing--you often do things differently without realizing it and then get treated like a freak. That's another thing--I am the odd child of really odd parents, and even if I had been able to do serious meta-thinking about "How can I be normal?" when I was little, I don't know that I would have had the self-control to manage it. A good parallel might be "sissy" boys or butch girls--even the most likeable effeminate boy in my class, who was really fairly popular, had to put up with a lot of fag-baiting from people.

I do think that setting some children aside as special smart ones is a bad idea. When I was in first, second and third grade, we had curriculum enrichment stuff for everyone, and (seriously) I was a weird and pompous little kid, but I wasn't picked on too much. While I'm sure there were other factors at play, I also remember that grades just weren't as important and I didn't think of myself as "smart" compared to others.

It's funny--and if this comes off as self-pitying, I apologize--but I've always blamed myself for what happened to me, even when I've really hated and been uncomfortable with people I perceived as "normal" perpetrators. And even now, it's really difficult to think to myself "Look, they were just kids, but you were just a kid too". I tend to fall right over into saying "Yes, those little bullies were right to bully, and if anything they should have bullied you more effectively so that you'd be normal and fit in."

The discussion has moved well on, but I just wanted to clarify that I wasn't speaking to (at a guess) any set of people represented here, with the possible exception of cMM (Not a shot: just going by some of the things you've said about your background). Right now, the discussion seems to be about sorting people who already fall into some type of "middle class." I don't really care one way or the other, and am happy to believe that those people can take care of themselves, need gifted programs, should have sex with teachers, whatever. I'll throw in with LB and/or Apo on general blind faith.

What worries me is what seems like unbelievable failures in some fairly well-defined communities. It seems like we've just written those people off; I'd like it if we at least tried to unwrite at least some of those people off. I'm not looking for geniuses--I want my best shot at moving some of those people up the ladder, and establishing a fairly specific pathway for others to follow.

That is all.

185: I imagine it's just being around people who's means of social interaction are similar enough to make interaction actually feasible, which lets you build up social skills, so you can interact with more people, etc etc. Little arm-floaty-things vs. being thrown in the diving well.

189: That's a good idea. It's almost like we shouldn't leave any children behind.

re: 189

Not taken as a shot, at all.

re: 188

See, by rights, I ought to feel like you. I grew up the long-haired vegan child of hippy parents living in a very working-class/tough area of central Scotland, was smart, liked books, dressed wierd, was poor (even by the standards of where I grew up).

But I don't.

I think how much we look back in anger varies according to our current mood. When we're down, it can seem everything bad started then and has hardly ever let up; when we're up, it seems like a comedy.

What worries me is what seems like unbelievable failures in some fairly well-defined communities. It seems like we've just written those people off; I'd like it if we at least tried to unwrite at least some of those people off. I'm not looking for geniuses--I want my best shot at moving some of those people up the ladder, and establishing a fairly specific pathway for others to follow.

This is absolutely reasonable -- I'm only disagreeing with you about tactics. I don't think there's any way to identify who's got potential before school age, which means that the only practical (as well as the only just) thing to do is to make sure that everyone gets a decent enough foundation that they have the ability to get themselves the rest of a good education, and to somehow get the social message across that a good education will pay off.

192: But you don't, and...and therefore Frowner is a self-pitying little twit who had it easy and ought to get over herself? But we had different experiences for tiny reasons we probably can't quantify? But we had different experiences for some large, obvious reason that's not Frowner-is-annoying?

I think a lot of this stuff has to do with the school system, too. Mine was in an area which was very white and professional but seeing increasing numbers of both brain-drain professionals from India and Mexican immigrants, so there was this tight anxiety about class and status. It was also extremely conservative in an "I've got mine" way.

I think guys can get forgiven an awful lot if they're reasonably useful at sports -- you don't have to be great, but if you're good enough to be an insider athletically, you probably won't get treated as a pariah. That might explain the difference, or cultural differences between the US and Scotland, or possibly you and I were simply loathsome children.

Well, I guess we may just have to embrace the monstrous. That was sort of hip and trendy in cultural studies back in the late nineties at least.

guys can get forgiven an awful lot if they're reasonably useful at sports

Very true. Also, as I've said before, if you can successfully pull off being the class clown (as opposed to just being the annoying shit who's trying too hard and failing to be funny), it's like a get-out-of-bullying-free card. That was the route I chose.

Re: 192, I'd be a lot more comfortable with blaming myself for my years of wretched unpopularity if it had been the norms of tough, working-class kids that I'd failed to live up to. Instead, it was a bunch of prissy little rich white girls who I'm sure I'd still hate today, and when I switched to a larger, poorer, rowdier, more generally working-class middle school (with tracking, I should add), most of my social pariah-hood sorted itself out, and the bits that didn't really were due to my own failings, I think. Not that I wasn't, doubtless, an insufferable child in any number of ways, I'm sure.

194 is completely right. I am a die-hard supporter of educational tracking, and I can't even imagine how my life would have turned out without the accelerated middle school or the magnet high school I attended. But even I will admit that my middle-to-lower-class public elementary school did me no harm.

Accelerated programs really don't show their benefits, and a lot of kids don't show their promise, until at least middle school in my (limited) experience. Yet by the time kids got to my high school, you could see the ones who had already been failed by terrible local schools in the very early years. A solid elementary and middle school education across the entire system is as vital for harnessing the population's smarty-pants as the actual magnet schools.

re: 195

I can't articulate the exact reasons.* I'm sure some of it is cultural differences, some of it is personality, some of it is actual concrete stuff that we can do something about.

I wasn't having a go at you, specifically, honest.

And we were probably ALL insufferable in some ways.

* although i've tried ...

A solid elementary and middle school education across the entire system is as vital for harnessing the population's smarty-pants as the actual magnet schools

And our local school, which has a high proportion of esl and reduced or free lunch kids, was excellent through about 5th grade. And we helped make it and keep it that way. We were not always driving and picking up kids; our kids could stay for an activity, or just play, and then mosey on home. This seems to be rare, certainly in cities, anymore.

But middle school posed its own problems, apparently beyond the local capacity to fix— we kept trying. At my son's magnet middle school, we found that many of the other parents were veterans of their local school councils just like us, who had given up reluctantly.

202: It's especially difficult to keep a smarter, middle-to-lower class kid in a bad school around Chicago, since there's such extensive bussing. I was amazed at how many of my high school friends who had grown up in Chicago were being bussed to other neighborhoods by the third or fourth grade.

I would have had a lot to say in this convo, having dropped out of high school as a freshman to get a correspondence degree with some community-college dual credit, except that I'm such a freak due to parental factors that isolating the school-induced factors would be problematic. So, I refrain.

This is funny. Laura from 11D links to Galt's post quoting me, and guesses which school my kids are in. She then goes on to say, essentially, that while the school isn't horrific, she wouldn't want her kids there and her "bleeding heart liberal friends fled from that neighborhood when their kids turned five".

What's funny is that while she's got the wrong school, I know it kind of because Sally's best friend goes there, and while it's in Washington Heights, I was thinking of that specific school as "Well, I guess it might be misleading to call 187 an inner city school." The parents of the friend weaseled a bit to get their kid in there (while they've moved to its catchment area now, when they signed her up for kindergarten they did it by claiming to live at what was actually a business address) and I thought they were being fussily overprotective.

Who knows, maybe I just have comparatively low standards.

They're what, seven and four? At this age, as long as the school teaches them to read, share, and not eat the paste, anything else is pretty much a bonus.

And they're reading and doing math very nicely, developing considered opinions about geology (Sally asked why a piece of pottery was shiny, and I told her that it was painted with stuff that melted into glass when it was baked in a kiln, so the shininess was glass. She came back with, "Oh, like an igneous rock." I didn't teach her that.) and are either (at 7) fluent but accented or (at 5) capable of interacting at some level in Spanish. I'm pretty happy.

The bilingualicity is really awesome.

It really is. I should say that I don't have a firm opinion that 187 is a better school than mine, but it's certainly richer and I expect it has better test scores as having fewer ESL learners.

205: No; I think Laura from 11D is a bit entitled about her sense of entitlement.