IMSA sounds like a great school, and I've always been a bit jealous of the alumnus I've met from there. But I don't know how much we can learn from this model. If you take 650 of the brightest and most motivated students and put them in one place, you're going to get incredible results regardless of the teaching methods. The real challenge is achieiving comparable gains with average or below-average students.
That's an interesting question. Is it even worth the effort to try to achieve academic gains in below-average students? What's the typical improvement we should expect there? For that matter, do special schools like IMSA achieve any gains in their students, or do they merely select and observe them?
I'd flip that question around: can we afford not to?
The consequences of a failing education system are underemployment, unemployment, antisocial behavior, civil unrest, and criminal activity. Even worse, the impact is felt across generations, as children born to parents the system has failed get less enrichment at home than children born to well-educated parents. Case in point, the US's massive educational achievement gap and world-leading incarceration rate.
The word meritocracy was coined [1] to describe a system where resources are lavished on those who have proven their worth. Like the originator of the term, I severely doubt our ability to actually measure intellect/merit/achievement decoupled from unearned advantage and luck.
I'd argue that we should be doing a lot less for the gifted. They'll turn out fine with guidance and resources. If we actually invested the time and resources into the most at risk, we might actually be able to get them up to speed, rather than socially promoting them and kicking them from school to school. Furthermore, I'd posit that an education should be considered a human right, and a bar by which we measure our achievement as a country.
I 100% agree with you. I taught high school in Baltimore's public schools. Some of my brightest kids were some of my worst performing, most challenging students to deal with. I honestly believe some of them underperformed because they could perceive what a sham the system was.
But in my original comment, I was using "gifted" in the more traditional sense of "high performing" or "high testing", which doesn't necessarily correspond with brilliance. A big criticism I have of the gifted track is that it misses out on a lot of students who are capable of doing accelerated work.
That's sort of what I'm getting at. Perhaps the answer is to sort the students out into many more strata, instead of just the two we have, which are currently gifted programs and everybody else, including the basket cases. One of the biggest advantages of a selective school is no time is spent on classroom discipline. But we only have that for 1% of the students, while the other 4% of the top 5% are sitting around in the same class as the bottom 5% kids.
The schools systems I have experience with do have gifted/normal/remdial tracks, and then various levels of special ed services. I agree that it's not enough. And especially so because there was never anything "remedial" about the remedial track. It was basically synonymous for permanently behind.
I taught math in Baltimore, and on the pretest I gave my students at the beginning of 9th grade, my students tested anywhere from 2nd grade to 9th grade in terms of current math skills, all bundled together in one room. On the low end of that scale, many students had been socially promoted to keep them with their age group.
What really gets me is that across the city, there are plenty of students who get delayed a year in their education, for a variety of reasons. Now we should be attacking those underlying issues, but that aside, it seems to me like we could much more proactive about getting those students truly focused remedial services, to either get them back on track or to at least maintain parallel pacing with their peers so that they get to the same endpoint, even if it's a year later.
We're rather fixated as a nation on the K-12 concept, rigidly linked with age, and with all subjects progressing in lockstep. I think we'd have much better outcomes with a more flexible system that recognize that a person's academic development doesn't scale so cleanly. I think even in a more flexible framework, we've got more than enough students to still take advantage of the economies of scale of systematic education.
They do have schools for at risk kids. Military schools for instance.
While I don't disagree we should do more for at risk kids, not allowing the brightest kids the best possible opportunity in an environment free from "at risk kids" hurts us all in loss of societies potential productivity.
