This kind of narrow thinking is what has caused schools in SF to suck for everyone. Because Lowell doesn't exist in a vacuum and the arguments that privileged people have a leg up doesn't really make a difference - it is similar logic to burning libraries because some folks can't read.
So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? The parents have three options: send your kid to school where they learn nothing (maybe get a tutor and self-learn?), send them to a private high school which costs north of $50k/year in SF (some are more like $65k... and that is IF you can get in!), or you move somewhere else. But there has been a country-wide effort to dumb down public schools combined with softer discipline (thanks to lawsuit fears), so you might simply end up at a private school anyway.
Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
As a graduate of the high school in question, I support the idea of selectivity everywhere, not just as a "magnet school" or "honors track".
There is a major downside to selectivity as it's done right now, which is that you end up with a competitive pressure cooker in that program since the student body will mostly consist of kids with highly driven parents who demand top-of-class academic results, every assignment perfect. It makes kids anxious-to-suicidal depending on how much pressure they experience, but it doesn't make them uniformly better at the material; depending on the subject and the student, either they're way ahead or they are really struggling, and if they are already doing some work to think about the material, "study harder, do more homework" doesn't really increase that rate, it just makes them more performative and "grade-grubbing". And this doesn't change when you look at secondary education either; there are many "tough" and "competitive" colleges, but they don't turn out graduates that are of equivalently greater skill.
But that does not mean that dumbing down is a good idea! Selectivity within each school, and making greater use of online learning to offer advanced, fine-grained tracking, gets to the good part of selectivity, which is that learning becomes more focused on individual student needs. "Staying with the class" is in many ways the worst part of school and absolutely shouldn't be the thing to emphasize, whether we're talking about high-flying academics or troubled delinquents and special ed students.
>So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Vast swaths of the country get by without having any choices in high schools. The idea that need a selection of different schools with different levels of prestige and focuses is such an urban entitlement.
Not having better options doesn’t mean they don’t exist. For some parents, their children are their greatest investment, and they won’t accept a lesser educational environment even if superior options aren’t available in some geographies.
If I need heart surgery, I’d rather be in NYC (Mount Sinai specifically) then BFE fly over country, and if I have the means I’m on the next flight. Same with education. Hard to find fault imho with those who want more than the lowest common denominator for their children.
Good for those parents, but I don't think it's the job of society to optimize for the preferences of a small set of very involved parents. If anything we should optimize against them: bringing the gaps in school choice low enough that most parents won't prefer one over another anyway.
I also think there's a value to be had in having the over-acheivers and under-acheivers together in the same social setting of school, if not in the same classes.
The school still exists, it's just that it's being forced to change how students are selected for entry. The same debate is happening in NYC with Stuyvesant. No one is talking about getting rid of the high-prestige schools. Only who is in them.
> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not akin to burning libraries.
> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not the same as dumbing it down (whatever that is supposed to mean). In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans.
> Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
The admission criteria of a highschool do not necessarily reward merit. They are more likely to reward having been tutored on how to write highschool admission essays.
Many European countries have public high schools with admission tests that cover math, general knowledge and language. Some are more competitive than others.
In some countries, the differentiation starts even much earlier than that, with 8 year long "gymnasiums".
In Germany, when you finish primary school, your teachers give an advice on which school you can attend: Gymnasium, Realschule or Hamptschule, depending on how good they think you are.
First of all you don’t have to attend the school your teachers advised, you can still attend a Gymnasium if your teachers said you should go to a Hamptschule. So it’s significantly different from the selection criteria of that American high school.
Then this selection process is known to be biased against children of foreigners. Somebody said that without strict competition in high school admissions we wouldn’t have playstations and covid vaccines, so it’s useful to know that the founder and CEO of BioNTech (who is a Turk-German) was advised to go to a Hamptschule by his primary school teachers. So he wouldn’t have been able to attend university.
Said that, having a brother that works as a teacher in a Gymnasium, I insist that these kids are not learning anything esoteric or peculiarly complicated. If the average kid in an upper middle class neighbourhood returns an assignment with less than one typo per row, he would be remembered for years.
> In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans.
I had to do an admissions test, plus average grade from primary school (50-50 scoring ratio, if I remember correctly).
They score everyone, and put them on a list. The top gets in. The rest, good luck, try somewhere else.
So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? The parents have three options: send your kid to school where they learn nothing (maybe get a tutor and self-learn?), send them to a private high school which costs north of $50k/year in SF (some are more like $65k... and that is IF you can get in!), or you move somewhere else. But there has been a country-wide effort to dumb down public schools combined with softer discipline (thanks to lawsuit fears), so you might simply end up at a private school anyway.
Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.