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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3732 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Private schools' main benefit is selection effects, but they select based mostly on income. You're paying out the nose just to be among other people who can and are willing to pay out the nose. This is a problem because while income is correlated with IQ it's not a particularly strong correlation, and you'll still end up with plenty of slow kids in class who drag the rest of the class down.

To be clear, what I'm looking for is a school system that sorts people based on intelligence and allows the quick kids to actually move ahead. I expect you'd pretty quickly have elementary school kids doing college-level tasks (to the extent "college-level" means anything) if they're allowed to set the pace rather than letting it be set by the slowest rich kid in the neighborhood. Given a group of kids 2 standard deviations above average (so 5% of all classrooms) you should probably be entirely done with high school before 9th grade using only half-days.

Private schools are definitely the best existing solution, besides maybe one-on-one private tutoring, but they're insufficient. They don't get the outcomes they should be getting. And the things I mentioned (challenging education, intelligent peers, sensible mental health policies) aren't the only benefits of living in a sane jurisdiction, just the most salient.

I think this used to be called "Gifted and Talented" programs when I was in elementary/middle school. I don't know if they still exist.

Even if they don't explicitly point this out, language immersion programs have a similar functional effect for ensuring your kid has higher-than-average-quality peers (and, if your kid is legitimately over-performing, it's a great distraction). They're also less likely to be targeted by progressives because it's not a sciences/excellence thing.

Yeah, I was in one and it was utterly insufficient. The peers, at least, were great, but the curriculum was still quite slow. Still better than nothing, but a long way from what's needed.

To be clear, what I'm looking for is a school system that sorts people based on intelligence and allows the quick kids to actually move ahead.

Isn’t this just selective public schools like those in some big cities like NYC where the student body is like 75% Asian?

If it is I'd like to learn more about them.

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

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