We have a new “progressive” mayor, Brandon Johnson, and although one of his election promises was to keep our “magnet school” system in place, he’s preparing a resolution to end it.
“Magnet schools” are a form of student secondary-school tracking in which students can apply to go to any school, but the best schools, often specializing in subjects like science, are very selective. This is a form of “student tracking” in which students are grouped with others, in classes or in whole schools, of similar achievement.
The parents of high-achieving students are of course incensed at the proposal, and I initially opposed it as a misguided form of achieving “equity”. But after talking to a friend who was a long-time school principal and teacher in Boston, and whose school went from being a magnet school to a school any kid could attend, I’ve rethought my view.
This article from the Daily Mail (of all places) gives the details, and of course the paper is opposed. Click to read.
An excerpt:
Chicago’s progressive mayor has announced plans to axe the Windy City’s high-achieving selective-enrollment schools to boost ‘equity.’
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Board of Education has proposed shifting back toward neighborhood schools – away from the system where kids compete for selective programs.
But when he was campaigning to become Mayor, Johnson put out a statement saying that he would not get rid of Chicago‘s selective-enrollment schools.
According to the Chicago Tribune, woke Johnson specifically said: ‘A Johnson administration would not end selective enrollment at CPS schools.’
Now, he is seen to be back peddling [sic] – by allowing a vote to stop gifted children from lower income backgrounds from academically competing to get into high-performing schools.
Selective schools cause a ‘stratification and inequity in Chicago Public Schools,’ according to the board’s CEO.
Chicago has 11 selective-enrollment high schools — Northside College Prep, Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy, John Hancock College Prep, Jones College Prep, Lane Tech, Lindblom Math and Science Academy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School.
Walter Payton College Prep, South Shore International College Prep, Westinghouse College Prep and Whitney M. Young Magnet School are also on the list.
The schools are not just the best in Chicago – but rank among the top high schools in the entire country.
Walter Payton College Prep is ranked 10th best school in the US. Northside College Prep is 37th. Jones College Prep ranks 60th.
Now, a resolution is up for a vote by the school board on Thursday.
Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez has prepared a resolution for ‘a transition away from privatization and admissions/enrollment policies and approaches that further stratification and inequity in CPS and drive student enrollment away from neighborhood schools.’
It would lay out a five-year ‘transformation’ to effectively get rid of selective schools in Chicago – which have been heralded as the gems of the city’s education system.
At first I was instinctively opposed to this plan on the grounds that it was aimed at making all students perform equally, presumably by lowering the achievement of the high-achieving students, creating a kind of “equity” in which all students would perform at the same middling level, pulling down high-achieving students and preventing them from reaching their potential. (It would, of course, elevate the learning environment of low-achieving students.)
But then I had a long chat with a friend who for many years had been a teacher and then a principal in a Boston area “magnet” school that later transitioned to an “anybody can come” school. His own experience was that magnet schools were a bad idea, and that they should be eliminated in favor of neighborhood schools, as Johnson proposed.
Why? For two reasons. First, magnet schools reduce opportunity for many students, for they attract students whose parents who are highly motivated to get involved in schools to improve their quality. Those parents tend to be better off and educated themselves, and so provide an environment that makes their kids high achievers as well, and more likely to get into magnet schools or be put in a higher “track”. (Advanced placement [AP] classes in schools are also a form of tracking that my friend objects to. I myself refused to take AP classes in high school because I didn’t think I was smart enough.)
In other words, either tracking or using magnet schools gives kids an unfair advantage based on their parents and their environment. Highly motivated parents also intervene in schools more often to ensure that their kids are getting a high-quality education.
The second factor, according to my friend, is that when faced with a mixed class of students with different levels of motivation and achievement, many teachers respond by getting the students to learn in smaller groups, so that high-achieving students help low-achieving ones. This, he said, raises the level of everyone’s achievement. Of course, teachers have to be willing to do this, which itself is a matter of how the teachers are trained. But my friend said that he’s seen the “mixed-class” system work in two states, and remains convinced that tracking and magnet schools, by quashing opportunity and preventing students of different levels to learn collaboratively, creates, overall, worse outcomes.
Now this doesn’t mean that tracking shouldn’t be used in colleges; that is, we shouldn’t just have a lottery for all colleges so that it becomes no harder to get into Harvard that into Grunt State University. For one thing, many elite colleges are private and wouldn’t be part of such a system. Further, parental influence doesn’t work in college like it does in secondary schools. But we should remember that there are plenty of “non-elite” colleges where you can get just as good an education as in the Ivies. Having been to both Harvard and the College of William and Mary, and taught at both Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the University of Maryland, I’d prefer to send my kids—if I had any—to an education intensive William and Mary rather than a research-oriented school like Harvard. I’m convinced that the education I got in Virginia was better than the one I would have gotten at Harvard. After all, Williams College, which doesn’t have graduate students and concentrates heavily on teaching ability of its professors, is rated by Forbes as the best liberal arts college in America. It ranks #10 among all colleges and #8 among private colleges. (U.S. News and World Report also ranks it the best liberal arts college in the U.S.)
Further, getting rid of secondary-school tracking doesn’t mean you’d eliminate standardized tests or grades, either. After all, you need some way to assess how students are doing, and these measures also help colleges select their students.
I don’t have the experience of my teacher/principal friend, but his argument seemed pretty sound. True, it’s based on one person’s experience, but there are ways of testing whether tracking is not a good way to go (granted, those tests would be hard, and parents would oppose them).
The update: according to CBS News in Chicago, on Thursday the school board did vote to move away from magnet schools towards neighborhood schools:
The Chicago Board of Education took a key vote on Thursday that could alter the future of schools in the city.
The resolution moves away from school choice in favor of “elevating” neighborhood schools.
It is designed to guide engagement and development of the Chicago Public Schools’ five-year plan. CPS said it “outlines parameters that emphasize strengthening all neighborhood schools as a critical step toward supporting students and closing opportunity gaps.”
“This resolution declares a new chapter in CPS,” Chicago Board of Education President Jianan Shi said in a news release. “While the strategic plan will be developed in partnership with our entire CPS community, we are centering equity and students furthest from opportunity. As such, this moment requires a transformational plan that shifts away from a model that emphasizes school choice to one that elevates our neighborhood schools to ensure each and every student has access to a high-quality educational experience.”
Do you agree with the mayor and the school board? Weigh in below.
I have been opposed to magnet schools for decades. The proper way is to improve all the schools in a district.
Like that’s worked out.
In America, it’s hard to “improve all the schools in a district” because public (neighborhood) schools are funded by property taxes. So the poorer the neighborhood, the poorer the school. I wouldn’t be surprised if magnet schools, private schools and other elite schools are the answer to property-tax funded school systems. I agree with you that the proper way is to improve all the schools in a district, but for that to work in America, there will have to be a fundamental shift in how we fund all schools equally.
If we did it right, I don’t think there would be a need for magnet/elite schools in the first place.
What makes the difference between a “good” school and a “failing” school is not the funding (the funding levels, the teachers, etc, are likely to be good enough), it’s the intake of kids.
One cannot “improve all the schools in a district” in the sense that one cannot have all kids be above average.
I guess you have to live in Lake Wobegon for all the kids to be above average… 😉
Joking aside, there is a correlation between the success of students and the amount of $ spent on each student.
Really? I’ve looked into this several times in response to the topic coming up at WEIT and what I always find is that, in states that equalize funding so that poor districts with little property tax revenue get topped up (or more), students in the poorest districts get more money (not less) spent on them (per student) than students in wealthier districts. But student success is still lowest in the poorest districts. The correlation between achievement and spending is negative. Which makes sense: the state education departments want to bring up the performance of failing schools, so they spend more money in those districts. Whether or not it works is irrelevant to the calculation. They can’t do anything else but spend more money, so that’s what they do.
Now, I stand ready to be schooled on this. It’s possible that these figures don’t have enough granularity. “The Chicago School District” includes wealthy parts of Chicago and poor parts and parts in between. So if we are comparing funding at the district level we might be just comparing the Chicago per-student average to that in, say, Aurora or Peoria or Kankakee or East St. Louis, school districts in other parts of the State of Illinois.
Possibly, if you looked at Chicago neighbourhoods, you might well find that South Side schools get less funding per student than a wealthier neighbourhood does, …or possibly you might find that the Chicago district replicates what the state does: gives more county-wide property tax to the poor struggling schools. Of course I don’t know. But I think if you are going to quote how much $ is spent on each student, you have to know what per-student funding means. It’s only an average, and like all averages it depends on what the unit of analysis is. The average height in our household of just my wife and me is 5’4″. The average height in my son’s household is about the same. He and his wife are both tall but they have two small children. Without the granularity, you’d miss that.
So for sake of discussion I am going to take the skeptical view that there is no correlation between student success and the $ spent in his individual school (not “on” him.) But I stand to be disputed if you can quote school-level funding. I think it’s a crucially important question in figuring out whether schools in poor neighbourhoods with failing students are “underfunded”.
Correlation versus causation. It’s not that more funding causes more success. The causal pathways are:
better-educated parents
-> higher-paying jobs
-> higher-value homes
-> pay more in property tax
-> more $ per student
and
better-educated parents
-> value education more
-> more student success
No amount of money can improve inner-city schools.
I made my remark because of google and not any “real” research. When I googled “does more money for schools help students” pretty much every article that came up says: “yes”
I’ll have to delve deeper, it seems.
I think there are always large differences in ability or interest among any random group of kids blindly stuck in the same class together. As a professor, I find it impossible to do justice to the slower members of the class and simultaneously keep the advanced kids excited and challenged, if both have to sit through the same lesson. This ends up ruining it for both groups. Slower kids, with a little extra help, can easily become advanced kids. But one can’t give that extra help in a mixed class, because it would bore or marginalize the kids who already know the material. It is tremendously helpful to have classes where each student has a similar amount of background knowledge. After some really hard teaching experiences, I am imposing more exacting prerequisites for the courses I will teach in the future.
The main, and almost only factor that doesn’t allow improvement of all schools in a district is the presence of students unable or, worse, unwilling to learn. They disrupt the class, preventing others from learning as well.
Because they cannot be kicked out of all schools, I think the reasonable approach is to segregate students at high school level into schools that really teach and others that mostly do not.
Your first paragraph is correct.
The second paragraph is not really workable: Politically. And more: No teacher would want to work in the warehouse environment; but states require actual teachers to instruct the students. At the high school level, most teachers won’t want to work in the warehouse for reasons of personal safety.
I think that segregation of schools happens spontaneously, because different school districts absorb the different neighborhood cultures, and everyone knows which schools are better.
In my country, children after 7th grade apply to high schools based on their scores on a national exam. Those with high scores can go to “elite” schools, and those with low scores go where they can. Not all schools with low achievers are safety hazard, however. I think that we must think more of elimination of violence and bullying than of academic success. There will always be many kids with modest abilities, but I don’t see why disruptors and bullies should be tolerated.
I agree with you.
Some of the worst violence in my (retired teacher in an urban US district) wife’s district was at the highest-achieving high school, which was very mixed. Obviously the violence was not from the high achievers.
There’s something about the “urban” culture. It denigrates scholastic achievement (yes, they still use as epithets: “being white” and “oreo”, despite the vehement denials from the woke left).
One must separate the disrupters and bullies from the serious (and merely attending) students so the school can do its work. But now, there is a big movement to prevent this. This is another (more extreme) example of what Jerry’s friend wants: Mixing all the kids together.
Well, we could always dismantle mandatory public education beyond Grade 5, which a friend of mine referred to as “the beginning of the bad.” Then the teachers wouldn’t have to teach in warehouses because there wouldn’t be any students. Go back to the philosophy of public education as advocated in Ontario by social reformer Egerton Ryerson. (Well, you can’t: he’s been cancelled and he didn’t even own slaves.) We suspect that public education to 16 or 26 is mostly to keep as-yet unemployable and unmarriageable young men out of the workforce and off the streets. If public education doesn’t accomplish the latter and the alienated young men have no intention of entering the workforce in any event, what good is it doing?
Let us know when they hand out the magic wands.
iPhone
Why not strengthen local schools WHILE keeping your stellar selective enrollments ? Erasing them (and magnets) where kids from all over the city voluntarily integrate, interact and learn in a diverse environment does not promote equity. It will entrench both economic and racial segregation which, back in my high school days, magnets were designed to combat. Horrible plan Mayor Johnson
In my own personal experience, I’ve seen the benefits of both sides of this argument. I myself went to a small public high school in Connecticut – my graduating class had 83 students. That was back in the day when tracking was universal, and while we had “college” and “business” tracks, in truth we were pretty much all mixed together. I was an academic “star”, graduating second in the class (phys. Ed kept me out of first), but to have any kind of social life, I had to interact with everyone, and I know that that benefitted me (and I hope it did my classmates as well).
Fast forward to this century, and my two sons went to magnet schools in Tampa, one in visual and performing arts and the other International Baccalaureate. Yes, we were those privileged, financially comfortable parents that you friend alludes to, but my sons sure benefitted from their educational opportunities. Both schools were located in low income neighborhoods, and half of the enrollment was from those neighborhoods, so the magnet school kids had the opportunity to interact with a more diverse population (in one case it sort of worked; in the other it definitely didn’t).
So I don’t know where I fall on this question. One thing I will say is that if Chicago does indeed go to all neighborhood high schools, the darned well better find was to ensure that all schools, regardless of the community they serve, have the teachers, resources and opportunities necessary to promote student success.
” …magnet schools reduce opportunity for many students…”
I don’t follow.
Magnet schools seem to me to only offer more opportunity, not less. They reward merit and competency for all students regardless of their station in life. That magnet schools attract students whose parents take their schooling seriously is a feature, not a bug it seems to me, and it is a feature that is crucial to maintain. How else to foster both parental and student merit if merit is not rewarded on all levels?
I agree. I don’t understand why, instead of rewarding families where parents actively contribute to their child’s education, we should seek to punish them.
Exactly!
I used to be ashamed that I did my undergrad at a former teacher’s college, now a public university that enrolls 2x more students than the College of William and Mary. Now I see it as the most sane university I’ve been connected to, though it may be infected with woke mind virus now, like the Ivies.
Long before college, I was put in some kind of tracking program for “gifted” kids in grade school. They called it the “accelerated program.” I never had classes with students who underperformed. We all knew which teachers taught the “average” and “challenged” kids. Year after year from grades 1-5, I was with the same kids. Then I skipped 6th grade. I believe all of this served me well. My early education would not have been as stimulating if it were dumbed down with peers-helping-peers BS. While I value how teaching others increases one’s own knowledge, I’m glad I wasn’t put in that spot. Instead, my time was channeled into achievement and reaching for the stars.
My grade school was public and in a poor area. I’m certain I would not have had the jump start I did had all “gifted” kids from higher income families had parents that got them into magnet schools. My parents were unlikely to have had the skills to lobby that well, though mother might have tried. So, I understand how getting rid of magnet schools might be beneficial for poor kids with higher IQs whose parents lack skills. But there still ought to be a way to track higher-achieving kids within public schools. And again, I strongly dislike having the gifted kids’ time spent on tutoring their peers when they could be pushed to excel beyond their grade level. Leave peer teaching for high school and college or, better yet, to kids who want extra income, early side jobs. Don’t mandate it. I’ve always resented group coursework even at universities. To me, groups are the laziest way to teach. I always got stuck with a disproportionate amount of work in groups, carrying the less conscientious along for the ride. And of course mixed peer groups is all the rave for DEI. Make everyone’s fate the same!
For whatever these rambles are worth.
+1
I went to a selective New York High School, but I want to comment on the experience of a friend who started high school in a neighborhood school in Manhattan. The student body was very anti-intellectual and she found that atmosphere very hard to handle. After a year her parents moved her to a private school. That certainly reflects privilege—but what I want to emphasize is that the atmosphere of a selective public high school can be very supportive of kids who want to make the most of their educational opportunities, while the atmosphere of public neighborhood high schools can be very difficult for kids who stick out by actually wanting to learn and explore, unless they are lucky enough to have a bunch of friends who share their interests.
Exhibit 1: Bronx High School of Science
With nine Nobel Prize-winning alumni, seven in physics, one in chemistry, and one in economics, it has produced the most Nobel laureates in science of any secondary school in the world. Bronx Science alumni have also won two Turing Awards, sometimes unofficially referred to as the Nobel Prize in computer science; six National Medals of Science, the nation’s highest scientific honor; and eight Pulitzer Prizes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronx_High_School_of_Science
Millennia ago, I did my first year of high school at Bronx Science, where the course material and teaching were interesting and challenging—but half the students seemed boringly in preparation for medical school. Then, my family moved to the suburb of Mount Vernon, and I went to the local high school. There, course material and teaching were not bad, but not outstanding either, and half the students seemed to be juvenile delinquents. I would have been better off if all my high schooling had been at Bronx Science.
On another aspect of this question: doesn’t emphasizing “neighborhood” schools overlook the fact that neighborhoods themselves tend toward distinct economic and racial characteristics? Some magnet schools set up in the 1960s/70s were designed to overcome this separation, by providing a better opportunity for high-achieving kids from all neighborhoods.
What that means is not that the schools are actually the best, it means that they get the best intake of kids. The “high performing” schools are not better at teaching, they just have a highly selective intake.
Though the bigger effect by far in making the kids high achievers is that their high-achieving parents pass on genes for being high achievers.
The school choice and the environment created by the parents have some effect, but it is way smaller than commonly supposed.
A generation of educational and social science researchers have been ruined by the dogmatic assumption of zero heritability for intelligence and educational achievement. If test scores are correlated with parental income, they jump to the conclusion that the effect is purely causal.
In fact, evidence from twin studies tells us that in wealthy countries most of the variation in these traits is attributable to genetics, rather than to shared environmental factors like socioeconomic status.
+1.
Thx. We need to stop pretending that lies are virtuous truths.
The goal is to give students the best education we can. We should not punish the motivated to sooth the feelings of the unmotivated. Therefore. magnets, or schools for high achievers, should not be sacrificed.
First, magnet schools reduce opportunity… for they attract students whose parents who are highly motivated to get involved in schools to improve their quality. Those parents tend to be better off and educated themselves, and so provide an environment that makes their kids high achievers as well, and more likely to get into magnet schools or be put in a higher “track”.
Privilege is not a problem. In most cases, it is earned. No one should apologize for wanting the best opportunity for their children. A parent’s responsibility is to their child, not the system.
Hear, hear!
So how does one teach cumulative subjects like maths and physics in mixed ability classes? Thinking that this is in the best interests of all pupils is the blank slate mentality. Pinker addressed this.
Another anecdote: My daughter was a high achieving student (National Merit Scholar, etc.). One year in middle school the students were put in small groups to help the lower achieving students. My daughter ended up doing all the work in her group and was mostly bored by the assignments. My reading of the research on this issue is out of date, but I recall the results were pretty mixed. I am afraid that the bright students will be losers if Chicago changes its policy.
This.
When higher-achieving and lower-achieving students are placed into small groups, the higher-achieving students do all the work and the lower-achieving students coast.
Did your daughter (does any student in such a situation) take a stab at trying to motivate her unmotivated, anti-intellectual group members? I reasonably assume that she soon found that that was to no avail.
I contemplate a(n unrealistic) solution. One might document several requests to non-responsive group members, keeping the teacher periodically and sufficiently informed. One might document several warnings to fellow group members that they are in danger of causing all group members to fail, while at the same time secretly doing all the work oneself in order to compensate (which one would necessarily have to do in any event, or so it seems, in order to get an excellent grade) and having it ready to submit. If the noble, scholarly group member(s) fails to respond, at submission time the motivated scholar could include a cover letter with supporting exhibits (as if a court filing) documenting the non-action of the group member(s), and stating that the student will not tolerate her/his hard work being the lest attributable to the other group member(s). Parental involvement is crucial here.
If the teacher/school/school system puts pressure on the student to so attribute, then it’s time to go to the local paper and perhaps file a lawsuit for harrassment or whatever against the school system. Of course, one or more of those group members might be lazy, louts and bullies, who would harrass/threaten the students into doing their bidding.
It would be rediculous to have to go to that extreme. The path of least resistance would be to go to another more intellectually-friendly school where most if not all students pull their group work weight. Surely not a few readers here have been involved in group efforts, in whatatever domain of life, where they did the (vast) majority of the work. Remember the story, “The Little Red Hen”?
My kids went to magnet schools by another name: French immersion for non-Francophones. Resources are not different from other schools, draw from the same pool of teachers and principals, and open to anyone who wants to enroll. Nothing exclusionary about this. Like the examples noted by others French immersion tends to attract families with kids who can manage the extra cognitive demands, and parents who are more invested in their kids’ school work (this biased sample probably accounts for the higher academic achievements of kids in French immersion, not the quality of the education). Plus they learn French!
For truly exclusionary or supremacist schools check out the Mandarin-immersion schools where ~all enrolled students speak Mandarin at home.
Our society needs to optimize the education of its best students at least as much as its weakest. In my opinion tracking, magnet schools, and other ways of exposing good students to other good students is essential that.
The “mixed class” proponents deserve to suffer the ENDLESS boredom that I did. The whole “raising everyone’s achievement” is nonsense.
I always HATED group assignments. Other kids wanted to be in my group because then they would get a GOOD GRADE!! From my perspective, now I not only had to do my own work, I had to drag along the deadbeats (the “less motivated”) too. Is it any wonder I ended up being self-employed?
The whole fallacy can be summed up by an experience of a classmate of mine who is still, after all these decades, a good friend. In her American History II class of HS seniors, a student didn’t know where Spain was. The teacher stopped the class to help said student look on a globe to find Spain. My friend was livid, thinking to herself, “Why are you wasting my time with this? I know where Spain is.”
We had “advanced” classes in my high school, but they were not AP – no college credit for them. I took several – English, French, math. They were marginally better, I suppose, but still not a challenge, and not interesting, with perhaps the exception being math. Maybe that was because I was on the math team for my high school.
History was not offered at any advanced level, again, the theory being that we should “learn to appreciate” a range of people, so we were all thrown together. Advanced science classes never worked out for me schedule-wise.
History and science are two of my main interests today, despite the best effort of my public school education to produce a mindless drone.
L
The HS senior who didn’t know where Spain was has many counterparts today: the ones chanting “from the river to the sea” without knowing which river, which sea, and where they are. Our chanting students may be the predictable outcome of current fashions in Progressive, anti-meritocratic educational theory. The next step, after abolishing advanced classes, selective-enrollment schools, and all varieties of tracking, will be the imposition of mandated handicaps, as predicted in Vonnegut’s sci-fi story.
For various reasons related to scheduling and limited resources, I was put in an untracked (pre-algebra) math class in eighth grade after two years of algebra. It was a total waste of time, and I didn’t learn a single thing all year.
There is no way that holding me back and requiring me to repeat material I had already mastered in elementary school increased my achievement relative to teaching me new material.
+1
“Why are you wasting my time with this? I know where Spain is.”
Totally agree. This is pathological levels of empathy on the part of the teacher and the school system. If your friend had said that out loud, the answer from the teacher would have been equal parts condescension and outrage.
Thank you for this.
The pursuit of virtue at the expense of excellence is a failing enterprise.
Ask Michelle Obama what she thinks and you will find that she is completely opposed to it as stated in her book.
This is a bad+ idea. It inhibits excellence. Kids attend school -on the whole- to get an education and -hopefully- excel. Not so they can help “everyone else get ahead”; although, certainly, that’s a worthy objective. Eliminating magnet schools is a form of “misguided affirmative action”. Schools, universities, education and tests are competitive; and they should be competitive without being intimidating and demoralizing. The outcome of any competition is “winning” and “losing” (or not coming in 1st). Does this mean that we should dismiss those who are handicapped? Of course not, but normalizing mediocrity and pretending that everyone is equally skilled/talented (if given the same opportunities) is a bizarre form of DEI – it’s a lie. Should everyone be given -or have- the same opportunities? Of course. Is this possible? No, I don’t think so, but we must -certainly- try, however, not by holding back talented kids and/or kids who work harder.
First reason cited -in the blog- as a “positive” favoring eliminating magnet schools. Quote:
1) “Why? For two reasons. First, magnet schools reduce opportunity for many students, for they attract students whose parents who are highly motivated to get involved in schools to improve their quality. Those parents tend to be better off and educated themselves, and so provide an environment that makes their kids high achievers as well, and more likely to get into magnet schools or be put in a higher “track”. (Advanced placement [AP] classes in schools are also a form of tracking that my friend objects to. I myself refused to take AP classes in high school because I didn’t think I was smart enough.)”
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Here is some data from NYC:
==================
“The latest test data from NYC public schools shows that Asian students from low-income and well-to-do neighborhoods have the least disparity in academic achievements than do other racial groups.”
https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/asian-students-excel-because-of-hard-work-not-rich-parents/
There’s -at least- some data/analysis demonstrating that culture is a more powerful factor than economic advantage in influencing educational outcomes. If so, punishing kids who excel either because they work harder and/or are talented is harmful and works to dismantle meritocracy.
Second reason cited -in the blog- as a “positive” favoring eliminating magnet schools. Quote:
2)
“The second factor, according to my friend, is that when faced with a mixed class of students with different levels of motivation and achievement, many teachers respond by getting the students to learn in smaller groups, so that high-achieving students help low-achieving ones. This, he said, raises the level of everyone’s achievement. Of course, teachers have to be willing to do this, which itself is a matter of how the teachers are trained. But my friend said that he’s seen the “mixed-class” system work in two states, and remains convinced that tracking and magnet schools, by quashing opportunity and preventing students of different levels to learn collaboratively, creates, overall, worse outcomes.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Do we have data to substantiate this claim? In general, I favor this approach with some trepidation, maintaining that outcomes based on this approach will be highly contextual. I worry that kids who are singularly focussed on excelling and working hard (and we need them – desperately) may be distracted and frustrated by this approach. Yes, the best way of learning is by teaching, but isn’t it the teacher’s job to ensure her pupils are competent in the subject matter?
Parents will pull kids out of school and home-school them, if “good/magnet” schools are dismantled. Who can blame them?
“Home schooling’s rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/2023/homeschooling-growth-data-by-district/
Lifting all boats is a worthy goal, but, I don’t think damning excellence is the way to do it.
PS: I’ll be happy to be “proved” wrong.
I disagree strongly.
The intended policy is not only rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, it is rearranging the chairs and taking the flotation devices from the lifeboats to use them as decorations on the deck.
The magnet schools are one of the few strengths of the Chicago school system. They are also a magnet to bring families to the city, and bring donations to the school system. Yes, we should strengthen ALL schools — but I do not see the increases in funding that would be needed to do so. The policy will just destroy what is good, and add very little to the rest of the system.
It is true that the current system favors families that put a high value of education. I find it elitist to equate that with “rich parents”.
Note that in communist countries that tried to equalize educational opportunities still head elite schools for the best students, and it arguably stimulated scientific excellence even in an oppressive system.
Vehemently agree.
As someone who’s nieces & nephew went through CPS for HS (Jones), I can say that CPS is becoming more & more captured by ideology. (Some tried to drive out a principal at Jones.) So while your principal friend I’m sure has the best intentions, it seems clear to me that “de-magnetizing” is simply another portion of the campaign, not actually about best outcomes.
I taught, and retried from, a magnet school for science and technology. What appeals most to many students is the atmosphere: being around ‘nerds’ like themselves, avoiding the bullying and intimidation at their neighborhood school just for being smart and scholastically ambitious. Most said they could not have achieved their level of university and career preparedness without the ‘free to be me’ opportunity of the magnet school. In the end, we must do what works best for all students, as best we can.
“Avoiding the bullying and intimidation at their neighborhood school just for being smart and scholastically ambitious” – this is well said and very important!
+1
+ a large number
+1
I live in a rural, poor school district where the only schooling options are public or private religious schools. Of course, my kids go to public school and I’ve seen the consequences of this “mixed class” approach on my highly motivated children. Following the reopening of schools after COVID, it just so happened that my kids each left online school to enter a new school (middle or high school, respectively). Having no academic record at these new schools and with the administrators making no effort to find out what kind of students they are, my kids were not placed in honors level courses (a failure on my part, as a parent). An entire year was wasted in classes filled with disinterested students progressing at a snail’s pace. My kids got to teach the other kids in those small groups our host’s friend praises. This wasn’t some progressive collective of learning, this was lazy teachers pawning their work off on my kids. It is unfair to the most motivated students to expect them to not only tolerate boredom and misbehavior by disinterested students but also to be forced to help their tormentors get better grades. The following year my kids were placed in honors courses and they are thriving because they are finally surrounded by people like themselves who take learning seriously. I fail to see how that could be a bad thing.
Thank you for sharing this experience.
Glad your kids are in honors courses/classes. I hope they excel.
The nation needs excellence.
Educational and political fads come and go. After the report “A Nation at Risk” came out in the 1980’s, educational reformers and their political allies accelerated their search for ways to the improve public education systems and student outcomes, using objective measurements. Charter schools and magnet schools were part of that reform movement. They were intended to give motivated public school students opportunities they didn’t or couldn’t receive in public schools, including opportunities to learn with a cadre of students similarly motivated. In my state, the legislature added a program that allows juniors and seniors to take tuition-free community college classes and earn a high school diploma and associate of arts degree at the same time. All part of ed reform. K-12 teachers and administrators were not strong supporters of any of these efforts. Many teachers saw it as just another ed fad imposed by outsiders that led to more work but few if any benefits. On the issue of student choice, teachers usually prefer teaching more advanced students and like having those students become unofficial teachers’ aides when they’ve finished their own work so they hated having motivated students pursue other options.
Now ed reform based on objective measurements of skills and knowledge is being replaced with DEI which is based on academy determined identity groups and shifting power from groups deemed historically privileged to groups deemed historically oppressed. Now, in progressive areas anyway, the elements of the reform movement must be dismantled, including any student or parental choice in the public school system.
The pendulum has swung again. Chicago is choosing perceived educational equity over objectively measured excellence in student achievement. Immigrant kids, motivated achievers, and STEM and the arts oriented students are probably the biggest losers unless their parents can afford to send them to private schools.
I don’t think ‘equity’, or even fairness should be the priorities. It’s way more beneficial for societies to have lots of highly motivated parents who help their children to be high achievers. The U.S. wouldn’t be the most powerful country in the world without its high achievers – China would.
If some number of students would no longer submit high scoring tests in a certain school – by going anywhere else – that school’s literacy rate would decrease.
It would make sense then – to keep a school’s literacy rate high, keep the students that score high in that school.
Yes, school boards and teachers easily forget that the school exists to benefit the students and not the other way round.
This may be an “n” of 1 here, but my youngest child at 14 who was gifted did qualify for a Chicago magnet which took him over an hour to get to and he found the school too large and alienating, failed, and ended up being successfully homeschooled though it was lonely (we parents were working but we had him take The Great Classes and the City awarded his HS degree and yes we got him regularly hanging out with friends) so the magnet didn’t help. My younger kid, also gifted, who did very poorly academically in 6th-8th, did NOT qualify for a magnet and could walk in 15 minutes to his local school, which was much less competitive (and so cozier) than his brother’s. Here he met three inspiring teachers who got him in love with flute playing, mathematics, and software, often asking him to help out with faulty school computers just to increase feelings of self-efficacy. That child made friends with a more diverse student body, given many students were from low SES families, which was an education into empathy, compassion, humility, and encouraging others. He graduated with flying colors, a student who was barely passing 8th grade. Thus the magnet failed one, while the neighborhood succeeded with the other. Also, this meant educated parents like me and their mom could help enhance the school in small ways, support stressed parents, and take part in our local community.
My son’s French immersion high school program was embedded in a regular high school in a low-income neighbourhood. The kids themselves called the school and the neighbourhood ghetto (lots of drugs, fights in the parking lot). The education in compassion etc. you cited was key for him too. These things can be combined in the same school (magnet + low SES) – the magnet approach is often most beneficial for kids from indigenous families or with low incomes (or at least that’s how it seemed to me).
What also matters greatly is attracting talented teachers. James Baldwin, for example, flourished in the schools of mid-twentieth century New York which attracted some superb teachers. Countee Cullen was one of his teachers, but lots of talented young people, including children of immigrants, didn’t have available to them careers as doctors and lawyers and civil servants and took jobs as teachers. The unavailability of high-paying jobs like lawyers (including unavailability to Jews and to women) meant they went into teaching. That helped maintain good schools at many levels in cities that later saw their schools deteriorate.
I’m strongly in favour of magnet schools. As a high school student I was routinely taken out of my own classes in order to ‘help’ struggling classmates. I did what I could to help them and felt good about doing so, but I deeply resented being used as a substitute teacher rather than as a student. I wanted to learn everything I could, science, math, languages. But the school district was not funded to provide resources for either the strugglers or the kids like me. College was a wonderful refuge from that.
A serious issue which no one has raised but which some of the comments here reveal is that when students are told to help students, the burden often falls most heavily ON THE GIRLS. It was always my responsibility to help the weaker classmates, my responsibility to do the ‘group’ assignments. The bright boys were not pulled down in the same way. They were encouraged to work on their own at their level.
Wow, I had never never heard of taking someone entirely out of their own classes to help teach other ones. At best, they realized that you already knew everything they had to teach. Where were you that only girls and not boys had to work in groups? In all classes where I encountered this everyone, boy or girl, got stuck in it.
My son complained about free loaders in group assignments in high school and now already in his first semester at university.
I hated group projects for the same reason.
“Chicago Public Schools students struggle on state reading and math exams.”
https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2022/10/27/23426560/illinois-student-test-scores-reading-math-acheivement-cps-public-schools
In 2022, barely 17% of CPS third graders tested at or above state standards in English, and barely 19% did so in math. The respective results in eighth grade were 22% and 15%. Nearly 44% of third graders in English scored at the lowest level of 5 (Levels 4 and 5 being at or above grade level). And for eighth grade, 39% were in the lowest level of math. Performance overall declined compared to prepandemic, but the overwhelming majority of students were below grade level then, too. How many parents here would voluntarily leave their children in such a setting if they had opportunities elsewhere? How many decades would you wait for the schools to improve?
It’s worth keeping in mind factors other than education—factors like crime, widespread social dysfunction, gangs, drugs, etc. There are neighborhoods throughout Chicago that send more people to prison than to college. There are schools throughout Chicago where many of the students have parents who are in prison or otherwise absent; parents who are violent criminals, prostitutes, drug addicts; older siblings who are all the above. We aren’t discussing the difference between a child attending a school in Chicago’s wealthy North Shore suburbs or attending one in a middle-class suburb. We aren’t talking about the difference between prepping a child for the Ivy League or “Grunt U.” I would be curious to see what percentage of the magnet school population comes from the troubled parts of the city and know precisely how many students would be returned from a school-day refuge back to a social hell.
I’m not following your argument that the existence of high achieving magnet schools are reducing opportunities for some students. Obviously, students with high achieving parents are likely to have advantages over students that don’t. But how does holding them back and mixing them into the general population of students improve the opportunities available to less privileged students?
Your teacher friend is making a huge leap of faith to think that they can build an education system around leveraging the abilities of the high achievers to elevate the low achievers. If your friend was also an advocate for self-directed learning, I’d be more inclined to hear his views.
Are all public research universities Grunt State U? Wanting to understand the reference.
As would I. There is a reason I put the phrase in scare quotes above.
Let’s try this: Grunt State University refers to any public institution of higher education other than the well-known state flagships. Admissions might be selective or nonselective. They oftentimes harbor faculty, particularly in the humanities, who as students attended far more prestigious institutions. They are a frequent destination for R1 graduates due to the willful overproduction of PhDs.
Since we don’t like to disparage people here, we want to be clear that “grunt” does not refer to the verbal facility of the faculty and students—at least not all of them—nor to any suggestion of such people being somehow lesser evolved. (That kind of grunt can be found in the Army.) It mainly is about the grunt work that the pitiable professors must bear with: their 4/3 teaching loads, low salaries, and unpaid summers during which they do their research.
True, many such universities are much more successful than are the prestigious schools in both 1) admitting and graduating minority applicants, and 2) raising students from the bottom twenty percentile of income to the top twenty. And, yes, the more grunt there is in the school, the stronger their immune systems generally are to the pathologies plaguing our “elite” schools. But, overall, they lack panache. Few have a subway near, or a world-class museum, or a café worth the dining. Most of their students even lack passports. Really! Simply astounding.
P.S. I’m having fun. I truly doubt that our kind-hearted host meant the broad disparagement that the term suggests.
I hope the broad disparagement was not intended, however I lack your certainty.
+1
well said.
I grew up in a socialist country where A students like me were ordered to help their struggling peers. Unlike most in this position, I didn’t suffer from the assignment because explaining what I have learned was my favorite work even then (I work as a university teacher now). However, my classmates didn’t benefit. They simply hadn’t the ability to keep pace with the class, even with extra help; I suspect that one of them had ADHD. And being paired with me of course meant labeling them as inferior.
I think what would really benefit struggling students is placing them in smaller classes. This will allow good kids to develop their modest abilities in full, and will limit the damage done by the troublemakers.
“I grew up in a socialist country where A students like me were ordered to help their struggling peers.”
What was the justification for that?
In essence the same as PCC’s friend gave, how good this was supposed to be for everyone. In fact, in a socialist community where individuals are regarded as cogs, this argument doesn’t sound as outlandish as in a free society.
In fact, I somewhat agree that the abilities of citizens are a capital of the nation. That’s why subsidizing education benefits everyone, not only those who receive e.g. scholarships. But to benefit everyone, this capital must be developed, not wasted.
Appreciate that reply.
+ a large number
Many such schools admit with a lottery – or residence can factor in – where the student lives.
I might have missed those details for this specific case – but thought it would be worth noting.
Having high performing students help low performers in mixed classes is good for the teacher and for the low performers, but much less so for the high performers. Sure, teaching is a great way of learning, but capping the ability of adept students to learn even more is great unfairness in the name of “equity.”
Whether or not there are magnet schools, tracking is essential to allow all students to reach their potential.
In Germany, the school system is very much tracked. It is also responsibility of the states and some states have softened the tracking by splitting students later and keeping tracks together in the same school, while other states have a stricter tracking, with students being sorted into 3(-ish) tracks at age 10 and go to completely separate schools. One can change between tracks, but in my experience the vast majority stays where they were slotted in.
In rankings of academic achievement, those states with stricter tracking consistently rank above those with softer tracking. This is also very obvious at university, where students from all states mix and those from a strict tracking states often perform much better in the early classes.
In regards to group work:
Group assignments can work. In my experience, learning success heavily depends on the motivation of the least motivated students of the group. If all do their best, they are great. That is the exception though, in my experience. The more typical outcome – echoed here in the comments – is the unmotivated looking for a free ride.
Final point:
Educated parents educating their children outside of school might be an “unfair advantage” from the perspective of the average child, but I loathe thinking through the logic of removing such an advantage.
“When I die I want my group project members to be my pallbearers and lower me into my grave so they can let me down one more time.”
Never heard that before. Awesome!
Nonsense – it significantly holds back the better students. Not only that, it breeds resentment at being asked to to do teacher’s job. I hated all group tasks for those reasons.
I’m not even sure it helps the slower ones either – they don’t have to learn anything, but just let the better group members do all the work.
One could cynically answer, that learning to let others do the work is a valuable life lesson.
Though I don’t think group assignments work well in high school, I wouldn’t discount them fully. If everyone wants to learn to the best of their ability, I think that they work well. That’s a huge IF, though…
“learning to let others do the work is a valuable life lesson”
Sure, if your ambition is to be a slag. Good luck with that.
I also hated group projects for that reason. The people who worked and wanted to excel hauled the dead weights along for a free ride. We really didn’t have an option if we wanted a good grade — which we did.
So did our son in high school and now at university as well. He spoke of this often in high school and already in his first semester at university.
This post is frustrating because I can’t rail against the author for being mega woke!!
I was tracked in the top class of the top public school in an East Coast city, and as a result I was surrounded by people who were really good at math. We had very advanced classes in the sciences and a serious, undistracted atmosphere. I learned way more around them than I would have with average students. That would have been a waste of time. As a result of this, I’m constitutionally unable to be in favor of homogenization.
Incidentally, before that I was in the top *private* school in a different city, and they though sports was more important than math, so for scheduling reasons they put me in a weak math class. Insane. It was bad for my well-being, and certainly contributed to my quitting that school.
After that I went to a small college with good teaching, just like Jerry suggests.
“Advanced placement [AP] classes in schools are also a form of tracking that my friend objects to.”
This savors of more forcing costs for secondary education onto the individual student and family, which has been the pattern since I went to a public university (state flagship university).
AP classes are an opportunity for a student to earn college credit in high school (along with taking courses at their performance level that they will find interesting). How much is 12 months worth to a 21 year old starting out: When they are earning their first “real” salary instead of paying more out of pocket for university?
Our son earned enough AP credits to avoid an entire semester of classes at university. This is a huge economic advantage to him and us. As a middle-class family, we pretty much have to pay every cent involved in getting him a university degree (he had a great GPA at a very highly ranked high school; but the need factor nixxed everything for us).
As any teacher can tell you: The most important factor in student success is parental involvement.
Your friend seems to recognize this and seems to want to counteract it. Good luck with that. Motivated parents will find a way, including leaving the school district.
What substitute is there for involved parents?
Everything I see proposed is surrogate parenting. (E.g. the movie Finding Superman.*)
Many good-hearted people will say things like, well, that’s the best the parents can do. Well, OK, but then don’t turn around and blame the school for this failing. Let’s be honest and call it what it is: Surrogate parenting.
In today’s woke environment, this is another example of forbidden speech: One must not say that parents are responsible.
Urban schools are now expected to parent the students: Often providing 3 meals per day, all the school supplies, and in some cases in-home tutoring (yes, some of my (retired) wife’s colleagues were asked to go to students homes and tutor them — on their own time). She and her colleagues often sent home food in their students’ backpacks. They often did the students laundry for them (the school had a large stock of clothing and laundry facility).
* The daughter of one colleague of mine wanted to be that super-teacher. She went to an urban district in Florida and taught black high school students. She put in 12-14 hour days, including going to students’ homes (in dangerous neighborhoods) to tutor them. She got to meet President Obama because she was shown as an example of this sort of super-teaching.
She quit after 2 years. (He would not discuss the specific reasons; I suspect it was traumatic.) “Super-teacher” is not a scalable model. You may find a few idealistic teachers that are willing to sacrifice their lives for other peoples’ children. But no one would want to do this, for the most part. It doesn’t matter what you pay them, they lose their lives. Almost all people want to spend their life’s time and energy with their own families, not other peoples’ families. Teachers put in long enough days as it is.
* In what world would expecting any kind of worker to be “superman” be a workable model?
Best comment I’ve read this month at least.
While I’m hugely sympathetic to your comment, to jump on my hobby horse again:
Surely that should be “… is innate aptitude”, aka genes? The teacher notices that, where parents are motivated and involved, the kids are motivated and do well (and so concludes that parental involvement is key), but really this is because the same genes are acting in the parents and the kid.
We know this from twin studies, for example:
“Academic achievement consistently shows some shared environmental influence, presumably due to the effect of schools, although the effect is surprisingly modest in its magnitude (about 15% for English and 10% for Mathematics) given that this result is based on siblings growing up in the same family and being taught in the same school …”
(“Shared environment” is defined as all environmental factors that siblings growing up together would share, which includes parental influence. In contrast to that 10% effect in maths for “shared environment”, the effect of genes would be about 60 to 70%.)
There are students with wealthy, highly-educated, accomplished parents who also struggle because their parents do not “show up” for school (conferences, making sure they do their homework, letting them stay up late, etc.)
Plenty of bright kids also struggle because of, in my opinion, operator error by the parents. The kids are in charge at home and get whatever they want. When the teachers expect behavior and work, the kids melt down. (One of my (retired teacher, urban US school) wife’s worst behavior students was a white, upper middle class, girl, who was very bright.)
Certainly genes are a factor. But even kids with middling genetic heritage can succeed with parental support (and boundaries and expectations at school).
Former teacher. Went through busing in hs. Aside from sports I had no interaction with blacks in academic classes. Taught jr hs for around 20.years in California public schools. Last district heavily Hispanic and white. Mostly poor to working class. Used group quite a bit. Why? They were canned lessons emphasizing team work in fairly heterogenous student proficiency. Kids favored this over typical direct teaching. Results: spotty. At the worst all students bided their time coloring in posters while chatting about anything but topic. Better was some high achievers doing most of the work for the others. Even better, the high achievers help facilitate teaching the info and delegating authority to low achievers. Last possibility worked 10 percent of time. 50 percent of the time it was lowest outcome. It looked good to students and administrators, but assessments showed how much time had been wasted. The Einstein do not pull the struggling up out of the muck. If anything, the struggling become distracted and ruin it for everyone with constant misbehavior.
The real problem is we assume one size fits all. First of all, everyone is not interested in going to college or higher education. Hell, a good majority of students would rather get a job or just get the diploma, if that equates to getting a job. The reality is that most people are average, the Bell Curve says so. Forcing people into going to college or pressuring them to be something they don’t want to be, is only making matters worse. Schools should prepare people accordingly to their desires and abilities, and diplomas given accordingly, if need be; there are plenty of people who don’t have a diploma, are hard workers making it just fine in life. Schools should offer diplomas that are general ed., honors ed. college ed, international baccalaureate, etc. What I fine amazing is that when I went to high school, a lot of people learn skills in high school, never went to college and did better than a lot of people who did. We could still do that if we stop trying to send everyone off to college. With all the jobs America can’t fill without the training, high schools should be able to do through vocational certifications. If the system is overhauled to do just that, we can eliminate the homeless problem across all the groups of Americans suffering from it. The way I see it, we are so hell-bent on trying to make everybody college educated, we are losing fellow human beings to drugs, homelessness, suicide, and any thing that causes people to fall by the wayside. People wake from your institutionalized/brainwashed way of thinking and think practical! Trying to make everybody college material/educated is not a reality.
While I agree with the idea that high schools should have options for vocational training, I’m not sure that very many schools are, “hell-bent on trying to make everybody college educated”. Some may be; but the struggling urban schools that are the subject of this thread are unlikely to be.
(Over 80% of graduates from my son’s high school go on to college, with a very high percentage completing bachelor’s degrees at university.)
About 37% of Americans now complete college degrees. That leaves 63% that need to find a different path. Vocational training in trades is an excellent idea. As are apprenticeships (as in Europe).
People can do well without education (or a diploma); but it’s harder. The surest path out of poverty is education.
“The way I see it, we are so hell-bent on trying to make everybody college educated, we are losing fellow human beings to drugs, homelessness, suicide, and any thing that causes people to fall by the wayside.”
I do not see the connection between preparing high school students for college and: drug abuse, homelessness, and suicide. Perhaps you can cite some studies on that.
Sorry.
This is greatly cheating not only bright White & Asian students but very bright students of all races & ethnic groups of the opportunity to develop their intellects & talents in high level schools with other high achievers. And for what, to make lower achieving Blacks feel better by hurting their academic betters? This is hugely unjust, vindictive and plain evil.
What happens to the selective enrollment schools that are already in higher income areas such as Payton which is in the Gold Coast of Chicago? Payton will probably still be in the Top 10 HS in the US based on the the location. A lot of people can’t afford to live in that area and I can see the same happening to other schools. As an alumni of the CPS system, I was able to travel to a different HS and experience different cultures but if I stayed on the Southside I would have went to a predominantly black HS which is fine but it wouldn’t prepare me for interactions with other cultures after HS.
The problem isn’t funding as it is student behavior and culture. I’ve worked at many of these schools, where teachers have walked out in uninions due to the lack of disipline of students and lack of support from admin.
As things stand now, students understand that teachers have no real authority and that their parents will take no action.
The schools that have improved have been “Turn Around Schools” that have been run a bit might military schools. Where students are held accountable for their actions while provided the resources to improve.
The teaching method the author speaks of is the Kaplan method and can be implemented into any school. It is, I believe a superior method and can be implented into any school. Cost is not an issue.
Magnet schools and incentive schools provide a way for students from low-income neighborshoods to get into a good school and a better enviornment. Closing them is not going to improve other schools because it’s not about money, but the environment, culture and student accountablility.
If this is Mayor Brandon’s position, I will not be voting for him in the next election.